#elizabeth deloughrey

[fatehbaz]

Originally I had attached these tags about British imperial forestry to a post about United States treatment of forests, Indigenous peoples, and land administration from 1900-ish to 1935-ish, during a transition period when clear-cutting logging was threatening profit so the US turned to a German- and British-influenced "sustained yield" forestry paradigm:

And in response, someone added:

In the midst of the first Empire Forestry Conference of scientists, academics, and administrators in 1920, the chairman of the Forestry Commission of Britain, Lord Lovat, said that forests were "grown for use and not for mere ornament ... Forests are national assets only so far as they supply the raw material for industrial development."

Rajan (in Modernizing Nature) directly quotes professor of forestry at Oxford, R.S. Troup, who had been influential in the Indian forest service; at the same forestry conference in 1920, Troup promoted sustained yield like this: "Conservation was a 'wise and necessary measure' but it was 'only a stage towards the problem of how best to utilise the forest resources of the empire'. The ultimate ideal was economic management [...], which regarded forests as capital assets, fixed annual yields in such a manner as to exploit 'to the full interest on this capital [...]' and aimed for equal annual yields so as to sustain the market and provide regular supplies of timber to industry."

One of the big - and easily accessible/readable - summaries of the shift to sustained yield and rise of US and British administrators embracing "economic management" of forests:

Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Economic Development, 1800-1950. S. Ravi Rajan. 2006.

Concise look at the trajectory from East India Company and Royal Navy timber reserves; to British foresters training in Germany and/or in German traditions (including sustained yield) before joining as officers in the powerful British-Indian land administration bureaucracy; to US scientists being trained by those British administrators; to 1920s/1930s Empire Forestry Conferences promoting industry while identifying forests as essential to power.

---

This has also been covered by:

Vinita Damodaran, Richard Grove, Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Jonathan Saha, Gregory Barton, Rohan D'Souza.

More summaries of the situation (shorter length, accessible):

"Imperial Environmentalism or Environmental Imperialism? European Forestry, Colonial Forests and the Agenda of Forest Management in the British Empire, 1800-1900". S. Ravi Rajan, In: Nature and Orient: Essays on Environmental History of South and South East Asia, 1998.

"'Dominion over palm and pine': the British Empire forestry conferences, 1920-1947". J.M. Powell, Journal of Historical Geography, Volume 33, Issue 4, October 2007.

Elsewhere, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley described it like this: 'These forest reserves [...] did not necessarily represent "an atavistic interest in preserving the 'natural' [...]" but rather "a more manipulative and power-conscious interest in constructing new landscapes [...]."' While Sharae Deckard adds: '[T]he subversive potential of the "green" critique [...] was defused by the extent to which growing environmental sensibilities enabled imperialism to function more efficiently by appropriating botanical knowledge and indigenous conservation methods [...].'

---

And the book:

Commonwealth Forestry and Environmental History: Empire, Forests and Colonial Environments in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and New Zealand.

Edited by Damodaran and D'Souza, with work from conferences hosted by Grove, in 19 chapters including:

"Worlds Apart? The Scottish Forestry Tradition and the Development of Forestry in India" (K. Jan Ootheok); "Redeeming Wood by Destroying the Forest: Shola, Plantations and Colonial Conservancy on the Nilgiris in the Nineteenth Century" (Deborah Sutton); "Nature's Tea Bounty: Plant Colonialism and 'Garden' Capitalism in the British Empire" (Jayeeta Sharma); "Industrialized Rainforests: The Ecological Transformation of the Sri Lankan Highlands, 1815-1900"; "Forestry and Social Engineering in the Miombo Woodlands of South-Eastern Tanganyika" (Thaddeus Sunseri)

---

Rajan also points out (again in Modernizing Nature):

"[An] extremely important aspect to the repackaging [of forestry science and management] [...] [and] a critical principle that stands out here is that of sustained yield, or sustainability (Nachhaltigekeit). This concept was fundamental [...]. By the turn of the [twentieth] century a large pan-colonial [British-United States] scientific community was in existence, trained in the German and French tradition of forestry [...]. Following the revolt of 1857, the government of [British] India sought to pursue active interventionist policies [...]. Experts were deployed as 'scientific soldiers' [...]. Dietrich Brandis [...], considered the founder of Indian forestry [...] married Rachel Marshman, who was [...] also the sister of the wife of General Havelock, a close friend of Lord Dalhouse, the then governor-general of India. On Havelock's recommendation, Brandis was put in charge of the forests of [...] Burma [...] and was subsequently appointed inspector-general of forests of India. [...] He also trained prospective foresters of the forest department of the USA, including Gifford Pinchot. [...] Chancellor Bismarck gave the visiting British Prime Minister Gladstone an oak sapling [...]. Prussia prided itself on helping devise [...] modern forest management. [...] [T]he Forestry Commision [...], [or] [t]he Imperial Visionaries, as they became known, believed that an increase in primary production in the tropical dependent empire would result in the growth of the British economy. [...] They deemed their own job to be serving the imperial economy."

---

And also:

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. GA Barton, 2002.

"Colonialism and Green Science: History of Colonial Scientific Forestry in South India, 1820-1920". VM Ravikumar Vejendala, Indian Journal of History of Science, 47:2, pages 241-259, 2012.

"Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Unearthing the Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History." Vinitia Damodaran and Richard Grove, in Nature's End: History and the Environment, 2009.

"The Reconfiguration of Scientific Career Networks in the Late Colonial Period: The Case of Food and Agriculture Organization and the British Colonial Forestry Service" by Jennifer Gold, and "A Network Approach to the Origins of Forestry Education in India, 1855-1885" by Brett M. Bennett. Both chapters are form Science and Empire, 2011.

Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism. Joseph Morgan Hidge, in Series in Ecology and History, 2007.

Nature and Nation: Forests and Development in Peninsular Malaysia. Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, 2005. And also: "Peninsular Malaysia in the context of natural history and colonial science." Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, 2009.

"Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Part 1". Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Lee Peluso, Environment and History 12, no. 1, pages 31-64, February 2006.

[enchi-elm]

Location FAQ: The Lighthouse

[for ambience: listen to a soundscape of a coastal shore here]

What is the Lighthouse?

Apfelessig (AE): So it’s the title of our story but it is also a physical location, as well as a metaphorical concept, within the Frontier.

ASheepsLife (SL): In many ways I suppose it is the heart of the story--its centre, in terms of both its concept and its conception. From the inspirational impact of Halsey’s song, to the Lighthouse’s absent presence throughout the story, to the way it fought us truly understanding it up until the very end, I suppose. [laughs]

How would you describe the Lighthouse? Without giving anything away?

AE: I think... Well, I've always been drawn to lighthouses. There's something hopeful but oddly fatalistic about them. That's how I feel about maritime things in general, actually. There is something about wild water that follows its own rhythm and its own reason. And the image of a lighthouse feels so solitary--there's something beautiful about a lone lighthouse keeping watch and providing silent support to people a long way away who are at the mercy of something fierce and terrible.

You're not answering the question.

AE: [laughs] I am not! I could wax poetic about lighthouses forever. But of course, you're talking about the Lighthouse in the story. It’s the centre of our mystery. I think what's special about the Lighthouse is that it's a very utilitarian thing that has a lot of myth associated with it. Lighthouses have been part of the gothic maritime imagination for centuries. We make up stories about them, the people who keep them, and the people who see them from the water. We care about lighthouses, we use them as markers to guide us home--not just in real life, but in stories too. And I think the version of the Lighthouse that we've made speaks to that, too. It's like the archetype of a Lighthouse. Although I feel a lot less confident throwing around a word like "archetype" than I expect you are, Sheep. I'm never sure of its exact definition.

SL: Maybe it is, in some ways. I think we’re certainly playing on the archetype of a lighthouse as a focal point of (cultural) imagination. I can’t really go into detail to avoid running afoul of the “without giving anything away” part, but the story does throw light (heh) on the ways we construct our rigidly gendered world - particularly in a (historical) western, US-American context - in a way one might not immediately expect from a story around a mythological lighthouse. [laughs] I think part of the draw, for me at least, also comes from the notion of using light as a signal, a means of communication. Elizabeth DeLoughrey writes that “light is profoundly relational. In fact, light can only be apprehended in relation to the objects it illuminates” [1]. As Apfel says, there is something inherently lonely about a lighthouse; the message it’s sending is a warning to keep away. It harbours this contradiction between the connecting and the isolating which I find fascinating.

[1] “Radiation Ecologies and the Wars of Light.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 55 (3), 2009: 470.

Why is the story called The Lighthouse?

AE: For most of its life--basically until two weeks before publication--this thing has been "The Lighthouse AU", since so much of the idea came from Halsey's song "The Lighthouse". That song was the main inspiration. Both of us listening to it–I knew it first, then sent it to Sheep–was like the start of a firework display of ideas. The lighthouse keeper’s role came directly from the tone and feel of the song. It just felt wrong to call it anything else, after that. Although I found one mention of Sheep calling it the TSU, the Turn Supernatural Universe, in our early days.

SL: I wouldn’t want to change it. But I do like the TSU, because it implies a whole unexplored world peopled by characters that haven’t found their way into The Lighthouse. (Is this the place to teaser a possible phoenix!Sarah Livingston?  I’m going to spare everyone a rant, but if you ask me, she is one of the instances where a character really was done dirty by the show. So possibly watch this space for harpy!Sarah.)

____________________________________________

Read the story on AO3 here. // Read the DVD Commentary on AO3 here.

____________________________________________

Search the tag #The Lighthouse AU on @enchi-elm’s and @meretriciouslyloquacious’s blogs for the complete experience as it goes on.

Stay up to date on Apfel’s Blog // Stay up to date on Sheep’s Blog

[pairedaeza]

Diasporic discourses often position masculine subjects as normative travelers who rely upon a feminized sea in order to imaginatively regenerate across time and space. This is why, in the language of diaspora and globalization, masculinized trajectories of nomadic subjects and capital attain their motility by invoking feminized flows, fluidity, and circulation, while the feminine (as an organizing concept) and women (as subjects) are profoundly localized.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, from Routes and Roots

[noumenalroom-deactivated20221021]

“The body of every human on the planet now contains strontium90, a man-made by-product of nuclear detonations and forensic scientists use the traces of militarized radioactive carbon in our teeth to date human remains (as before or after the 1954 Bravo shot).”

“The Myth of Isolates: Ecosystem Ecologies in the Nuclear Pacific", Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Cultural Geographies Vol. 20, 2013, p.179

[ireadathing]

Christina Sharpe - In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

“Wake: the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in water; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow” (3)

“(Opportunity: from the Latin Ob-, meaning “toward,” and portu(m), meaning “port” : What is opportunity in the wake, and how is opportunity always framed?)” (3)

Saidiya Hartman - “The autobiographical example is like a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them” “Like Hartman I include the personal here, “to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction.” (8)

“This is what we know about those Africans thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in Middle Passage; they are with us still, in the time of the wake, known as residence time.” (19)

“Just as wake work troubles mourning, so too do the wake and wake work trouble the ways most museums and memorials take up trauma and memory. That is, if museums and memorials materialize a kind of reparation (repair) and enact their own pedagogies as they position visitors to have a particular experience or set of experiences about an event that is seen to be past, how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still” (20)

“That set of work by Black artists, poets, writers and thinkers is positioned against a set of quotidian catastrophic events and their reporting that together comprise what I am calling the orthography of the wake. The latter is a dysgraphia of disaster, and these disasters arrive by way of the rapid deliberate, repetitive, and wide circulation on television and social media of Black social, material, and psychic death. This orthography makes domination in/visible and not/visceral. This orthography is an instance of what I am calling the Weather; it registers and produces the conventions of antiblackness in the present and into the future.” (21)

“The logics of the slave ship and the hold instantiated Obama’s reiteration of that terrible calculus of the inability to “save every black life”: an awful arithmetic, a violence of abstraction. We are positioned in the knowledge that we are living in the afterlives of slavery, sitting in the room with history, in a lived and undeclared state of emergency. The ground of compromise, the firmament, the access to freedom and democracy, littered with Black bodies. With the optic of the door of no return on our retina ,we might envision, imagine, something else--something like what Joy James (2013) calls “a liberated zone” even though under siege. Across time and space the languages and apparatus of the hold and its violence multiply; so, too, the languages of beholding... How are we beholden to and beholders of each other in ways that change across time and place and space and yet remain? Beholden in the wake, as, at the very least, if we are lucky, an opportunity (back to the door) in our Black bodies to try to look, try to see.” (100-101)

“So here we are in the weather, here in the singularity. Here there is disaster and possibility. And while “we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.” (134)

Dionne Brand - “If you’re lucky you spend the rest of your life fighting them, if you’re not, you spend your life unquestioningly absorbing” (149)

To read:

Kamau Brathwaite

M. NourbeSe Philip

Dionne Brand

Elizabeth DeLoughrey

Claire Harris

CLR James

Fred Moten

Kimberly Juanita Brown - Regarding the Pain of the Other

Edwidge Danticat

Lewis Hyde - The Gift

Joy Jackson

Michel-Rolph Trouillot - Silencing the Past

https://forensic-architecture.org/

https://www.slavevoyages.org/

https://www.moma.org/artists/1422

To watch:

Daughters of the Dust

Timbuktu

[mfries7-blog]

Blog Post #2: The Process

After walking out of class on Tuesday, I felt like I had a better grasp on what I wanted to research than I had walking in. I was introduced to new terms and was given the opportunity to really think about how both of the research topics I walked into class with can be transformed into a question that I can work with to provide a solution to a problem. I have ultimately decided to utilize the theories of postcolonial ecologies presented by Elizabeth DeLoughrey coupled with other postcolonial theory to analyze how the increased commercialization of natural spaces is negatively affecting the natural environment and native cultures. With a jumping off point being Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, my specific analysis will be primarily focused on the regions surrounding the Seven Summits, with the greatest emphasis placed on Mount Everest and Sherpa culture.

During class on Tuesday, I was able to start asking myself questions about this topic, analyze how I could take my interests that formed in my Postcolonial Literature seminar and tie those together with my interests in environmental degradation and fascination with world cultures. I started my research trying to gain a better understanding of the theories of postcolonial ecologies, or a critical study of spaces combining postcolonial theory with ecocriticism that works to analyze colonization and imperialism at the root, the very land and spaces that peoples occupy. I would like to gain access to this book, but have not yet had the opportunity to get it, so my understanding of this concept is still very basic. But in combining this minimal information with other concepts I have learned in previous courses, I am beginning to see how this idea could be applicable to my overall study.

I also wanted to being to dig deeper into Sherpa and mountaineering culture, something that yielded immediate results as to the effects of Western influence from the first article I opened. It was a piece published in National Geographic entitled “Sherpas: The Invisible Men of Everest” that showed the world the latent culture that makes Everest expeditions possible, but are never recognized for their work, news of their efforts being overshadowed by the feats of Westerners summiting the mountain. “The Sherpas themselves had striven to live up to the ideals Westerners projected onto them—augmenting the qualities they often did possess but also wanting to be the kind of people they were imagined to be.” This was said by Vincanne Adams from the University of California, San Francisco. It’s a quote that epitomizes the very issue that I hope to tackle with my research, the alteration of a cultural climate that is perpetuated by the need to continually conquer a space, the mountain. It’s an issue that spans the entire globe, which is why I hope to incorporate research about the other six Summits into my analysis.  

My research for this week was extremely basic, just minimal digging into certain topics to gain a better understanding of the research climate already in existence as I begin to dive deeper. My goal is to greatly expand my knowledge on these topics in the coming weeks, specifically on postcolonial ecologies so I can gain a better grasp on how that idea can be implemented into and provide a strong foundation for my research.

[knargavin]

Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey on the steam engine—both technology + allegory

I would argue that the steam engine is less of a data point than a geologic for transatlantic modernity .. Therefore, the steam engine is not just a technology; its appearance in this Anthropocene origin story is an allegory for Enlightenment tropes such as rationality, secularism, urbanization, individualism, property, freedom, rights, masculinity, and wage labor.

From Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2019)

[fatehbaz]

About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About geographic imaginaries. About how Empire appeals to and encourages children to participate in these scripts.

Was checking out this recent thing, from scavengedluxury's beloved series of posts looking at the archive of the Budapest Municipal Photography Company.

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940."

And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe?

(The use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives probably already well-known to many, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through nemfrog's posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

"Africa is for your consumption and pleasure! A special game celebrating German achievement, brought to you by the N*stle Company!"

1930s-era German national aspirations in Africa. A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids!

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time British.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism and imperative-of-empire in British scientific and pop-sci literature, especially involving South and Southeast Asia. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I was recently looking at, specifically about European (especially German) geographic imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

[fatehbaz]

when the Empire's researchers realized that the cause of the ecological devastation was the Empire:

much to consider.

on the motives and origins of some forms of imperial "environmentalism".

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Since the material resources of colonies were vital to the metropolitan centers of empire, some of the earliest conservation practices were established outside of Europe [but established for the purpose of protecting the natural resources desired by metropolitan Europe]. [...] [T]ropical island colonies were crucial laboratories of empire, as garden incubators for the transplantation of peoples [slaves, laborers] and plants [cash crops] and for generating the European revival of Edenic discourse. Eighteenth-century environmentalism derived from colonial island contexts in which limited space and an ideological model of utopia contributed to new models of conservation [...]. [T]ropical island colonies were at the vanguard of establishing forest reserves and environmental legislation [...]. These forest reserves, like those established in New England and South Africa, did not necessarily represent "an atavistic interest in preserving the 'natural' [...]" but rather a "more manipulative and power-conscious interest in constructing a new landscape by planting trees [in monoculture or otherwise modified plantations] [...]."

Text by: Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. "Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth". Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by DeLoughrey and Handley. 2011. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity and context.]

---

British colonial forestry was arguably one of the most extensive imperial frameworks of scientific natural resource management anywhere [...]. [T]he roots of conservation [...] lay in the role played by scientific communities in the colonial periphery [...]. In India, [...] in 1805 [...] the court of directors of the East India Company sent a dispatch enquiring [...] [about] the Royal Navy [and its potential use of wood from Malabar's forests] [...]. This enquiry led to the appointment of a forest committee which reported that extensive deforestation had taken place and recommended the protection of the Malabar forests on grounds that they were valuable property. [...] [T]o step up the extraction of teak to augment the strength of the Royal Navy [...] [b]etween 1806 and 1823, the forests of Malabar were protected by means of this monopoly [...]. The history of British colonial forestry, however, took a decisive turn in the post-1860 period [...]. Following the revolt of 1857, the government of India sought to pursue active interventionist policies [...]. Experts were deployed as 'scientific soldiers' and new agencies established. [...] The paradigm [...] was articulated explicitly in the first conference [Empire Forestry Conference] by R.S. Troup, a former Indian forest service officer and then the professor of forestry at Oxford. Troup began by sketching a linear model of the development of human relationship with forests, arguing that the human-forest interaction in civilized societies usually went through three distinct phases - destruction, conservation, and economic management. Conservation was a ‘wise and necessary measure’ but it was ‘only a stage towards the problem of how best to utilise the forest resources of the empire’. The ultimate ideal was economic management, [...] to exploit 'to the full [...]' and provide regular supplies [...] to industry.

Text by: Ravi Rajan. "Modernizing Nature: Tropical Forestry and the Contested Legacy of British Colonial Eco-Development, 1800-2000". Oxford Historical Monographs series, Oxford University Press. January 2006.

---

It is no accident that the earliest writers to comment specifically on rapid environmental change in the context of empires were scientists who were themselves often actors in the process of colonially stimulated environmental change. [...] [N]atural philosophers [...] in Bermuda, [...] in Barbados and [...] on St Helena [all British colonies] were all already well aware of characteristically high rates of soil erosion and deforestation in the colonial tropics [...]. On St Helena and Bermuda this early conservationism led, by 1715, to the gazetting of the first colonial forest reserves and forest protection laws. On French colonial Mauritius [...], Poivre and Philibert Commerson framed pioneering forest conservation [...] in the 1760s. In India William Roxburgh [and] Edward Balfour [...] ([...] Scottish medical scientists) wrote alarmist narratives relating [to] deforestation [...]. East India Company scientists [...] [including] Roxburgh [...] went on to further observe the incidence of global drought events [...]. The writings of Edward Balfour and Hugh Cleghorn in the late 1840s in particular illustrate the extent of the permeation of a global environmental consciousness [...]. [T]he 1860s [were] a period [...] which embodies a convergence of thinking about ecological change on a world scale [...]. It was in the particular circumstances of environmental change at the colonial periphery that what we would now term "environmentalism" first made itself felt [...]. Victorian texts such as [...] Ribbentrop's Forestry in the British Empire, Brown's Hydrology of South Africa, Cleghorn's Forests and Gardens of South India [...] were [...] vital to the onset of environmentalism [...]. This fear grew steadily in the wake of colonial expansion [...] particularly [...] after the great Indian famines of 1876 [...].

Text by: Richard Grove and Vinita Damodaran. "Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History, 1676-2000: Part I". Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 41, No. 41. 14 October 2006

---

The “planetary consciousness” produced by this systemizing of nature [in eighteenth-century European science] […] increased the mobility of paradise discourse [...]. As European colonial expansion accelerated, the homogenizing transformation of people, economy and nature which it catalyzed also gave rise to a myth of lost paradise, which served as a register […] for obliterated cultures, peoples, and environments [devastated by that same European colonization], and as a measure of the rapid ecological changes, frequently deforestation and desiccation, generated by colonizing capital. On one hand, this myth served to suppress dissent by submerging it in melancholy, but on the other, it promoted the emergence of an imperialist environmental critique which would motivate the later establishment of colonial botanical gardens, potential Edens in which nature could be re-made. However, the subversive potential of the “green” critique voiced through the myth of endangered paradise was defused by the extent to which growing environmental sensibilities enabled imperialism to function more efficiently by appropriating botanical knowledge and indigenous conservation methods, thus continuing to serve the purposes of European capital.

Text by: Sharae Deckard. Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden. 2010.

[fatehbaz]

imperialism and science reading list

edited: by popular demand, now with much longer list of books

Of course Katherine McKittrick and Kathryn Yusoff.

People like Achille Mbembe, Pratik Chakrabarti, Rohan Deb Roy, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, and Elizabeth Povinelli have written some “classics” and they track the history/historiography of US/European scientific institutions and their origins in extraction, plantations, race/slavery, etc.

Two articles I’d recommend as a summary/primer:

Zaheer Baber. “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge.” Journal of Contemporary Asia. May 2016.

Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 2020.

Then probably:

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. “Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times.” Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.

Sharae Deckard. “Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden.” 2010. (Chornological overview of development of knowledge/institutions in relationship with race, slavery, profit as European empires encountered new lands and peoples.)

Gregg Mitman. “Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia’s Plantation Economy.” Environmental History. 2017, (Interesting case study. US corporations were building fruit plantations in Latin America and rubber plantations in West Africa during the 1920s. Medical doctors, researchers, and academics made a strong alliance these corporations to advance their careers and solidify their institutions. By 1914, the director of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine was also simultaneously the director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals of the United Fruit Company, which infamously and brutally occupied Central America. This same Harvard doctor was also a shareholder in rubber plantations, and had a close personal relationship with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which occupied West Africa.)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties.”  2008. (Case study of how British wealth and industrial development built on botany. Examines Joseph Banks; Kew Gardens; breadfruit; British fear of labor revolts; and the simultaneous colonizing of the Caribbean and the South Pacific.)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey. “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth.” 2014. (Indigenous knowledge systems; “nuclear colonialism”; US empire in the Pacific; space/satellites; the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)

Fahim Amir. “Cloudy Swords.” e-flux Journal #115, February 2021. (”Pest control”; termites; mosquitoes; fear of malaria and other diseases during German colonization of Africa and US occupations of Panama and the wider Caribbean; origins of some US institutions and the evolution of these institutions into colonial, nationalist, and then NGO forms over twentieth century.)

Some of the earlier generalist classic books that explicitly looked at science as a weapon of empires:

Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World; Delbourgo’s and Dew’s Science and Empire in the Atlantic World; the anthology Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World; Canzares-Esquerra’s Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World.

One of the quintessential case studies of science in the service of empire is the British pursuit of quinine and the inoculation of their soldiers and colonial administrators to safeguard against malaria in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia at the height of their power. But there are so many other exemplary cases: Britain trying to domesticate and transplant breadfruit from the South Pacific to the Caribbean to feed laborers to prevent slave uprisings during the age of the Haitian Revolution. British colonial administrators smuggling knowledge of tea cultivation out of China in order to set up tea plantations in Assam. Eugenics, race science, biological essentialism, etc. in the early twentieth century. With my interests, my little corner of exposure/experience has to do mostly with conceptions of space/place; interspecies/multispecies relationships; borderlands and frontiers; Caribbean; Latin America; islands. So, a lot of these recs are focused there. But someone else would have better recs, especially depending on your interests. For example, Chakrabarti writes about history of medicine/healthcare. Paravisini-Gebert about extinction and Caribbean relationship to animals/landscape. Deb Roy focuses on insects and colonial administration in South Asia. Some scholars focus on the historiography and chronological trajectory of “modernity” or “botany” or “universities/academia,”, while some focus on Early Modern Spain or Victorian Britain or twentieth-century United States by region. With so much to cover, that’s why I’d recommend the articles above, since they’re kinda like overviews.Generally I read more from articles, essays, and anthologies, rather than full-length books.

Some other nice articles:

(On my blog, I’ve got excerpts from all of these articles/essays, if you want to search for or read them.)

Katherine McKittrick. “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea.” Antipode. First published September 2021.

Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.

Antonio Lafuente and Nuria Valverde. “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics.” A chapter in: Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. 2004.

Kathleen Susan Murphy. “A Slaving Surgeon’s Collection: The Pursuit of Natural History through the British Slave Trade to Spanish America.” 2019. And also: “The Slave Trade and Natural Science.” In: Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History. 2016.

Timothy J. Yamamura. “Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell.” 2017.

Elizabeth Bentley. “Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870-1935).” 2021.

Pratik Chakrabarti. “Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past.” Past & Present 242:1. 2019.

Jonathan Saha. “Colonizing elephants: animal agency, undead capital and imperial science in British Burma.” BJHS Themes. British Society for the History of Science. 2017.

Zoe Chadwick. “Perilous plants, botanical monsters, and (reverse) imperialism in fin-de-siecle literature.” The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates. 2017.

Dante Furioso: “Sanitary Imperialism.” Jeremy Lee Wolin: “The Finest Immigration Station in the World.” Serubiri Moses. “A Useful Landscape.” Andrew Herscher and Ana Maria Leon. “At the Border of Decolonization.” All from e-flux.

William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” 2019.

Rohan Deb Roy. “White ants, empire, and entomo-politics in South Asia.” The Historical Journal. 2 October 2019. ��

Rohan Deb Roy. “Introduction: Nonhuman Empires.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (1). May 2015.

Lawrence H. Kessler. “Entomology and Empire: Settler Colonial Science  and the Campaign for Hawaiian Annexation.” Arcadia (Spring 2017).

Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner. “Monster as Medium: Experiments in Perception in Early Modern Science and Film.” e-flux. March 2021.

Lesley Green. “The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene.” e-flux Journal Issue #65. May 2015.

Martin Mahony. “The Enemy is Nature: Military Machines and Technological Bricolage in Britain’s ‘Great Agricultural Experiment.’“ Environment and Society Portal, Arcadia. Spring 2021. 

Anna Boswell. “Anamorphic Ecology, or the Return of the Possum.” 2018. And; “Climates of Change: A Tuatara’s-Eye View.”2020. And: “Settler Sanctuaries and the Stoat-Free State." 2017.

Katherine Arnold. “Hydnora Africana: The ‘Hieroglyphic Key’ to Plant Parasitism.” Journal of the History of Ideas - JHI Blog - Dispatches from the Archives. 21 July 2021.

Helen F. Wilson. “Contact zones: Multispecies scholarship through Imperial Eyes.” Environment and Planning. July 2019.

Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson. “Silences of Grass: Retrieving the Role of Pasture Plants in the Development of New Zealand and the British Empire.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. August 2007.

Kirsten Greer. “Zoogeography and imperial defence: Tracing the contours of the Neactic region in  the temperate North Atlantic, 1838-1880s.” Geoforum Volume 65. October 2015. And: “Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth-Century British Mediterranean.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 2013,

Marco Chivalan Carrillo and Silvia Posocco. “Against Extraction in Guatemala: Multispecies Strategies in Vampiric Times.” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. April 2020.

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

Paulo Tavares. “The Geological Imperative: On the Political Ecology of the Amazon’s Deep History.” Architecture in the Anthropocene. Edited by Etienne Turpin. 2013.

Kathryn Yusoff. “Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time.” Social Text. 2019. And: “The Anthropocene and Geographies of Geopower.” Handbook on the Geographies of Power. 2018. And: “Climates of sight: Mistaken visbilities, mirages and ‘seeing beyond’ in Antarctica.” In: High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science. 2008. And:“Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene.” 2017. And: “An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz: Geopower, Inhumanism and the Biopolitical.” 2017.

Mara Dicenta. “The Beavercene: Eradication and Settler-Colonialism in Tierra del Fuego.” Arcadia. Spring 2020.

And then here are some books:

Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (Cameron B. Strang); Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Londa Schiebinger, 2004);

Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (Helen Tilley, 2011); Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Jonathan Saha); Fluid Geographies: Water, Science and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico (K. Maria D. Lane, 2024);  Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (Edited by del Pilar Blanco and Page, 2020)

Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire (Kirsten A. Greer); The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Hawthorne and Lewis, 2022); Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (Britt Rusert, 2017)

The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge (Arndt Brendecke, 2016); In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1960 (Alice Conklin, 2013); Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands (Andrew Stuhl)

Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895 (Paul Winther); Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Sadiah Qureshi, 2011); Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851 (Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart)

Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Aro Velmet, 2022); Medicine and Empire, 1600-1960 (Pratik Chakrabarti, 2014); Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884-1905 (Matthew Unangst, 2022);

The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa (Bernhard Gissibl, 2019); Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (Edited by Adriana Craciun and Mary Terrall, 2019)

The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Chirstopher A. Loperena, 2022); Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Allison Bigelow, 2020); The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (Rebecca J.H. Woods); American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (Megan Raby, 2017); Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism (Claudia Fonseca Alfaro, 2023); Unnsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Jessica Namakkal, 2021)

Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (James Sweet, 2011); A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (Anya Zilberstein, 2016); Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines (Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, 2019); Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea, 1800-1970 (Edited by Anderson, Rozwadowski, et al, 2016)

Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai’i and Oceania (Maile Arvin); Overcoming Niagara: Canals, Commerce, and Tourism in the Niagara-Great Lakes Borderland Region, 1792-1837 (Janet Dorothy Larkin, 2018); A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic (Michael A. Verney, 2022)

Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Daniela Cleichmar, 2012); Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India (Arnab Dey, 2022); Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Edited by Crawford and Gabriel, 2019)

Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Hi’ilei Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, 2022); In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokkohama (Eric Tagliacozzo); Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Urmi Engineer Willoughby, 2017); Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region (Edited by Hirsch, et al, 2022); Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855-1910 (Sarah E.M. Grossman, 2018)

Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (Ruth Rogaski); Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Lenny A. Urena Valerio); Against the Map: The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Adam Sills, 2021)

Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Alan Mikhail, 2017); Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Jim Endersby); Proving Grounds: Militarized Landscapes, Weapons Testing, and the Environmental Impact of U.S. Bases (Edited by Edwin Martini, 2015)

Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Multiple authors, 2007); Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Peter Redfield); Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Andrew Togert, 2015); Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism (Hannah Holleman, 2016); Postnormal Conservation: Botanic Gardens and the Reordering of Biodiversity Governance (Katja Grotzner Neves, 2019)

Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Anna K. Sagal, 2022); The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harriet Ritvo); Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 (Michitake Aso); A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Kathryn Yusoff, 2018); Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Jessica Barnes, 2023); No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic (Keith Pluymers); Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1768-1941 (Lynn Hollen Lees, 2017); Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia (Douglas C. Harris, 2001); Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep Time (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy)

Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Joyce Chaplin, 2001); Mapping the Amazon: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Jessica Namakkal, 2021)

American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865 (Jeremy Zallen); Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Erik Linstrum, 2016); Lakes and Empires in Macedonian History: Contesting the Water (James Pettifer and Mirancda Vickers, 2021); Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Pratik Chakrabarti); Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (David Fedman)

Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Julie Cruikshank); The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem (Kristin A. Wintersteen, 2021); The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Ralph O’Connor); An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876 (Benjamin Kingsbury, 2018); Geographies of City Science: Urban Life and Origin Debates in Late Victorian Dublin (Tanya O’Sullivan, 2019)

American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (John Krige, 2006); Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Ann Laura Stoler, 2002); Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (Faisal H. Husain, 2021)

The Sanitation of Brazil: Nation, State, and Public Health, 1889-1930 (Gilberto Hochman, 2016); The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (James Hevia); Japan’s Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology (Annika A. Culver, 2022)

Moral Ecology of a Forest: The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation (Jose E. Martinez, 2021); Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (Jessica Bissette Perea, 2021); Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (Mashid Mayar); Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Andrew Zimmerman, 2001)

The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (Multiple authors, 2016); The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Katherine Johnston, 2022); Seeking the American Tropics: South Florida’s Early Naturalists (James A. Kushlan, 2020)

The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam (Laurence Monnais); Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands (Linda J. Seligmann, 2023) ; Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, intersections and hierarchies in a multispecies world (Edited by Kathryn Gillespie and Rosemary-Claire Collard, 2017); Spawning Modern Fish: Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon (Heather Ann Swanson, 2022); Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (Mark Bassin, 2000); The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century (Erin Drew, 2022)

Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures (Anita Mannur, 2022); On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, 1830-1890 (Philip Gooding, 2022); All Things Harmless, Useful, and Ornamental: Environmental Transformation Through Species Acclimitization, from Colonial Australia to the World (Pete Minard, 2019)

Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Setller Colonialism (Jarrod Hore, 2022); Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market (Meng Zhang, 2021); The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (David A. Chang);

Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal (Christine Keiner); Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (Mauro Jose Caraccioli); Two Years below the Horn: Operation Tabarin, Field Science, and Antarctic Sovereignty, 1944-1946 (Andrew Taylor, 2017); Mapping Water in Dominica: Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism (Mark W. Hauser, 2021)

To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (Jason Smith, 2018); Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (Ian Matthew Miller, 2020); Breeds of Empire: The ‘Invention’ of the Horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa 1500-1950 (Sandra Swart and Greg Bankoff, 2007)

Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya (Lachlan Fleetwood, 2022); Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (John Ryan Fisher, 2017); Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (Timothy P. Barnard, 2019)

An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation (Micha Rahder, 2020); Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Debjani Bhattacharyya, 2018);  Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 (Kristen Hussey, 2021)

Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (Jeannie N. Shinozuka); Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Ann Elias, 2019); Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire (Angela Thompsell, 2015)

[fatehbaz]

Perspective in the Pacific. The “Apollonian eye” and aerial perspective of the empire overseeing “the giant laboratory” in the ocean. Propaganda, photography, erasure, objectification, excessive visibility, and Hollywood-military film in the twentieth century colonization of the Pacific.

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Western colonizers had long configured tropical islands into the contained spaces of a laboratory, which is to say a suppression of island history and Indigenous presence. [...] Part of this process of communicating the significance of the newly acquired Pacific territories to the average continental American was through film, particularly the use of an aerial view that demonstrated how the island could be ‘managed, manipulated, and controlled.’ The conversion of populated islands into ahistorical laboratories of radiological experiment is particularly visible in AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] films of the 1950s, newsreels that were released to American audiences that utilized aerial surveillance as vital to the scientific and military control of the Marshall Island atolls. [...] [T]he aerial view of an island reinscribes the concept of boundedness, since ‘centrality is emphasized and the enclosure of land within surrounding shores is the controlling [of] meaning.’ [...]

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In claiming Micronesia and expanding the American exclusive economic zone, Truman tripled the territorial size of the United States. [...] With the advent of the far more powerful hydrogen weapons, the AEC in 1954 cordoned off an enormous area of the Pacific, banning the passage of ships or planes for 400,000 square miles. [...] The production of the isolated island requires the erasure of the technologies that enable mobility. [...] Thus, the tropical island is configured as distant and isolated even as it becomes accessible - through print, photography, or film - to the reader/viewer. With the [...] [expansion] of air travel in the mid-20th century, the vision of islands shifted from a ‘deck-eye’ view of an arrivant ship to an aerial view. The US military films of Micronesia excessively employ an aerial view that renders the atolls into a panopticon, thus domesticating (and destroying) new territories for the consumption of the American public.

For instance, in the film Operation Greenhouse (1951), the AEC employs an aerial view to juxtapose the modernity of American science - the master lab at Los Alamos - against the purportedly ahistorical and depopulated Marshall Islands, which are viewed with detachment from a military plane. As such, modernity is seen to be exported from the US to ‘distant and primitive’ yet vitally important ‘test islands . . . a giant lab in the middle of an ocean.’

To quote from this Hollywood-produced film:

One of the proving grounds is an outdoor laboratory: Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific. This Trust Territory of the United States has been used before as a testing ground for Operation Sandstone (1948). But three years have passed, three years to bring new and improved atomic weapons to this secluded equatorial land . . . Since Enewetak is a distant and primitive area, men have to leave their stateside laboratories and homes for a period of months. [Image of an American man with suitcase entering his car and waving goodbye to son and dog]. Now the proving grounds come alive like a university campus when students return from a summer holiday . . . [aerial view of islands from military plane] these are the dormitories of ‘Enewetak university’ . . . individual test islands, seemingly like so many science buildings on college grounds.

In its persistent references to flight and aerial images [...], this film harnesses what Denis Cosgrove has termed the ‘Apollonian eye’, a gaze that is ‘synoptic and omniscient, intellectually detached as it surveys a colonial island laboratory and presents it as an extension of the long reach of the arm of the US [...].

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Rethinking the ways in which science used the isolated island concept to produce some of the most apocalyptic technologies on earth challenges both the assumption of the primitive ahistorical island and what constitutes the laboratory itself. Teaiwa’s groundbreaking work on the historical and semantic production of the radiation-prone bikini helps us understand the function of ‘objectification through excessive visibility [...].’ Thus in the Atomic Energy Commission’s aerial surveillance films, images of the Marshall Islanders have been removed, their housing and cemeteries plowed down. Even the foilage has been bulldozed ‘for elbow room’ as one AEC film declares, fashioning a laboratory and also a tropical playground for soldiers to play volleyball and sunbathe.

Marshall Islanders rarely appear in these films, except a brief appearance of displaced Bikinians where the narrator declares, ‘the islanders are a nomadic group, and are well pleased that the Yanks are going to add a little variety to their lives.’ Generally speaking, the human subjects who appear in these films are American scientists at work with instruments [...].

[In contrast,] Native Pacific Studies has long emphasized a horizontal view produced from the centrally located voyaging canoe, in which the islands, ocean and stars are seen to move towards the voyager. Vicente Diaz’s theorization of the ‘moving island’ foregrounds the dynamism of animate space [...].

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Text above by: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey. “The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific.” Cultural Geographies, Volume 20, Number 2, Special Issue: Islanding cultural geographies (April 2013), pages 167-184. First published 31 October 2012. At doi dot org slash 10.1177/1474474012463664 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[fatehbaz]

do you have any book recommendations about geography/ecology?

hello. hmm, sure. thanks for trusting me enough to ask; don’t trust me too much, though. i'm always learning and criticizing my past/previous perspectives, but there are still some "classic" books that i'd recommend. something i say often, though: i actually spend much more time reading essays and journal articles, rather than full-length books (especially since so much of the best decolonial viewpoints, Indigenous and non-Western perspectives, and newer/fresher geographical thought and "critical geography" takes are being actively revised/discussed in these newer forums without having to appease popular or profit-oriented press/publishing companies).

the subjects that i read about: human relationships with other-than-human creatures; extinction; environmental history of empires, imperialism, colonization; traditional ecological knowledge; resistance, fugitivity, and carceral geography; eerie, weird, and uncanny ecology; regional geography, specific microhabitats, endemic species; Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene; ruins, ruination, haunting, trauma, and emotional geography; reptiles/amphibians; temperate rainforest and deserts; Pleistocene fauna and Paleolithic/ancient anthropogenic environmental change; islands, the sea, Oceanic worldviews, archipelagic thinking, solidarity across islands/regions; frontiers, borderlands, hinterlands, sacrifice zones, wastelanding, social abandonment, and extraction zones; Indigenous geography/ontology; decolonization

generally, i don't distinguish much of a difference between the subjects of geography/ecology -- or human and other-than-human environments -- since lifeforms and places and (cosmo)politics are all so entangled. anyway, here are some books involving a bit more geography and human ecology (the last time i was asked for recommendations, i focused a bit more on ecology and other-than-human environments, which i'll also re-post below these newer recs):

and then, i'll say again that essays and journal articles are often a great source for some of my favorite authors (though of course none of them are perfect; they can be problematique in their own ways): Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert; Elizabeth DeLoughrey; Paulo Tavares; Anna Boswell; Achille Mbembe; Hugo Reinert; Tim Edensor; Anna Tsing; Frantz Fanon; Robin Wall Kimmerer; Kyle Whyte; Kathryn Yusoff; Iyko Day; Audra Simpson; Ann Laura Stoler; Pedro Neves Marques

so here are the books i've previously recommended:

hope some of these are interesting.

[fatehbaz]

do you have favorite sources for the short form works you read? journals/blogs/podcasts/etc you subscribe to?

Sure you know, since I've said this many times before, but I prefer short-form articles, essays, etc. to full-length books. More condensed information, often without superfluous "setting the stage" and introductory/re-hashed material, without the incentive to appease publishers or popular expectations. Easier to access, quicker to read and discuss with others. I'd prefer to read from activists and scholars outside of or ostracized from traditional academia, including outside of the US/Europe. (I don’t revere academia and the best “ontologies” or most “cutting-edge” theories in geography/space/place have already been considered and articulated by Indigenous thinkers and the Black diaspora for generations.) I look to so-called "critical geography" or "radical geography" journals, and the personal sites/blogs of activists and abolitionist groups.

Subjects I focus on: environmental history of empires and colonization; traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous geography and ways of knowing; Anthropocene, Capitalocene, legacy of plantation systems; extinction and introduced species; resistance, fugitivity, and carceral geography; refugees; the making and enforcement of borders, boundaries, frontiers, hinterlands; ruins, ruination, haunting, trauma, social death; Pleistocene fauna and Paleolithic/ancient anthropogenic environmental change; islands, tidalectics, archipelagic thinking; wastelanding and sacrifice zones; region-specific geography, especially the sea, Oceania, the Pacific, Caribbean, Latin America, and Turtle Island; human relationships with other-than-human creatures, multispecies world-building. (Long-form or full-length books I've previously recommended about these subjects.)

Journals:

My favorites:

Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography /// Geoforum /// AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples /// ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies /// The Global South

Human Geography: A New Journal of Radical Geography /// Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography /// Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism /// Island Studies Journal /// Environment and Planning D: Society and Space /// International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies

And also:

Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association /// borderlands /// Capitalism, Nature, Socialism /// Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies /// Settler Colonial Studies /// Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies /// Landscape History: Journal of the Society for Landscape Studies /// Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History /// Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters

Children’s Geography /// Environmental Humanities /// Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal /// Mobilities /// African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal /// Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language and Culture /// Emotion, Space and Society

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Some favorite scholars:

Postcolonial Caribbean environments: Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert; Eduoard Glissant; Aime Cesaire

Tidalectics, archipelagic thinking, the Pacific; international solidarity: Elizabeth DeLoughrey; Epeli Hau’ofa

Environmental debris left behind by imperialism; haunting; “social death”: Avery Gordon; Tim Edensor; Hugo Reinert; Ann Laura Stoler

Necropolitics/biopolitics: Arundhati Roy; Frantz Fanon; Neel Ahuja; Achille Mbembe

Carceral thinking; abolition; fugitivity: Harney and Moten; Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Alison Mountz

Wastelanding, hinterlands, at0mic waste: Traci Brynne Voyles; Phil Neel

Postcolobnial landscapes: Kathryn Yusoff; Iyko Day; Anna Boswell; Anna Tsing

Indigenous futurisms and ways of knowing; Turtle Island: Audra Simpson; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; Robin Wall Kimmerer; Kyle Whyte

Anti-colonial Latin America: Macarena Gomez-Barris; Paulo Tavares; Pedro Neves Marques

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General sources:

-- Interdisciplinary “radical/critical geography” sources, which might include informal blogs, personal sites of individual activists/scholars, and actual formal academic journals

-- Several smaller interdisciplinary region-specific academic journals (like, focused specifically on Latin America, the Caribbean, Indigenous issues, etc.);

-- The blogs of a couple of university presses/publishers, which include interviews with scholars and short summaries of new research (for example, the University of Arizona Press blog)

-- And, once I’ve discovered authors/scholars into the same interests, their personal sites, which is especially good for avoiding the privileged veneer of academia and instead reading the work of activists, refugees, Indigenous thinkers, agitators, prisoners, theorists, scholars from outside of academia.

Also, since so-called “critical geography” and “postcolonial / anti-colonial studies” have both exploded in attention in recent years, there are many anthology books published which collect short-form articles/essays from multiple different scholars. Specifically, some of the Routledge anthologies (Environmental Humanities, Environment and World Literature, etc.) routinely publish good collections of many different scholars. Same with some of the Palgrave handbook series. Search “Routledge” or “Palgrave handbook” alongside terms like: postcolonial, environmental, etc.

Geography stuff, because contemporary academic critical geography sees itself as so interdisciplinary that it won’t make distinctions between history, human ecology, political ecology, landscapes, “natural” ecology, etc. Everything situated in a wider context. So you get a fuller or more complete picture of “the issue” because they’re not hyper-focused only on, say, environmental science without considering local political history or whatever. All of it is mingled. Can discuss Indigenous ecological knowledge, histories of colonization/dispossession, ongoing neoliberal dispossession, and environmental science all in the same article. And then generally look for anything described as “critical geography,” basically considered its own field.

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Websites:

Arcadia (Environment and Society Portal); Edge Effects. Also, e-flux. Hard to describe e-flux, but they do a monthly journal on “architecture” broadly but radicalism (especially Black radicalism), postcolonialism, borders/immigration, and Anthropocene stuff more specifically, as well as hosting art shows and multimedia projects; high-quality writing but avoids the gatekeeping of academia, hosts writing of abolitionists/activists, etc. I check their website every day.

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Universities which host pretty good critical/radical geography communities/departments often have a blog (run by faculty or school press or whatever) where they promote new articles, new books, interviews with scholars, and accessible summaries of new research/publications. Specifically, some of my favorite publishing/features/stories come from the university presses of University of Washington (which focuses on PNW history) and University of Arizona (which focuses on borders/boundaries, frontiers, wastelands/deserts, and Latin America). Some of the better critical/radical geography and/or environmental humanities universities:

University of Victoria (BC) /// UW Madison /// UC Santa Cruz /// University of Washington /// University of Chicago /// University of Arizona (Tucson)

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Some of the better journals, with descriptions quoted from their online editorial board descriptions:

-- Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography: “Authors are encouraged to critique and  challenge settled orthodoxies [...]. Papers should put new research or  critical  analyses to work to contribute to strengthening a Left politics broadly  defined. This includes, but is not limited to, attention to how politics  of class, gender, race, colonialism, sexuality, ability are a core part  of radical theory and politics. Antipode’s Editorial  Collective welcomes submissions from all places, including the global  South and/or from those traditionally marginalised in the academy  (historically under-represented groups, regions, countries and  institutions).”

-- AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples: “... is an internationally peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal. We aim to present scholarly research on Indigenous worldviews and experiences of decolonization from Indigenous perspectives from around the world. [...] AlterNative was launched by Nga Pae o te Maramatanga, New Zealand’s Maori Centre of Research Excellence, to provide an innovative new forum for Indigenous scholars to set their own agendas, content and arguments and establish a unique new standard of excellence in Indigenous scholarship.”

-- Geoforum: “Geoforum is a leading international, inter-disciplinary journal publishing innovative research and commentary in human geography and related fields. It is global in outlook and integrative in approach. The broad focus of Geoforum is the organisation of economic, political, social and environmental systems through space and over time. Areas of study range from the analysis of the global political economy, through political ecology, national systems of regulation and governance, to urban and regional development, feminist, economic and urban geographies and environmental justice and resources management.”

-- The Global South: “The Global South is an interdisciplinary journal that focuses on how world literatures and cultures respond to globalization. Particularly of interest is how authors, writers, and critics respond to issues of the environment, poverty, immigration, gender, race, hybridity, cultural formation and transformation, colonialism and postcolonialism, transatlantic encounters, homes, diasporas, and resistance and counter discourse.”

-- ACME - An International Journal for Critical Geographies: “Our  underlying purpose is to make radical work accessible for free.  We set no subscription fee, we do not publish for profit, and no ACME   Editors receive any compensation for their labour. We note this not in   self-righteousness, but as a way to foreground the practice of   collective work and mutual aid. The journal's purpose is to provide a   forum for the publication of  critical work about space and place in the social sciences — including  anarchist, anti-racist, autonomist, decolonial, environmentalist,  feminist, Marxist, non-representational, postcolonial,  poststructuralist, queer, situationist, and socialist perspectives.  Analyses that are critical are understood to be part of the praxis of  social and political change aimed at challenging, dismantling, and  transforming prevalent relations, systems, and structures of  colonialism, exploitation, oppression, imperialism, national aggression,  environmental destruction, and neoliberalism.”

If I were to recommend just a few journals: Antipode; ACME; Geoforum; e-flux

[fatehbaz]

Ever since 310 BC, when Greek philosopher Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor in the Peripatetic School, set sealed bottles afloat to prove his theory that the waters of the Atlantic Ocean flowed into the Mediterranean Sea, drift bottles have been used to chart ocean currents. As conveyors of messages to strangers on faraway coasts, they have long been part of the allure of the sea, whose currents -- predictably for the likes of Theophrastus and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, yet unfathomably for so many -- were central to the exchange of peoples, goods, and biota that so deeply marked the history of the Caribbean archipelago. The currents swirling around the Caribbean region “in Van Gogh-esque grandeur” [...] give the archipelago a distinct current-driven identity, proposing archipelagic connections through winds and water flows that uniquely embrace the islands, “framing” them as a group. These stunningly beautiful Van Gogh-esque swirls -- visual renditions of a painterly sea -- now sadly bear swarms of unwanted (and most decidedly nonalluring) drift bottles in the form of floating plastic debris that reaches the coasts of the Caribbean islands from far-flung places in the world, offering a plastic “frame” that once again embraces the islands as an archipelagic unit.

The very currents that led Columbus and his vessels to the Caribbean Basin, making it the cradle of pan-American colonialism and planting the seeds for the significant environmental revolution that followed in their wake, now bring to the Caribbean shores a plethora of pollutants, from solid waste (mostly plastic waste) to sewage, hydrocarbons, and agricultural runoff.

These pollutants, as Alice Te Punga Somerville has argued about the Great Pacific Patch, embody, as waste, a complex set of natural and cultural processes bound with colonialism and empire: “proximity, movement, disposability, invisibility, history, excess, destruction, reconfiguration, giant multimodal currents, and their life-changing effects on marine as well as human life” [...]. The result is that, according to the 2004 GIWA Regional Assessment of the Caribbean Islands, “pollution of aquatic ecosystems [...] is the most severe and recurrent transboundary environmental concern in the region” [...]. Ramon E. Soto-Crespo, writing about Jean Rhys and the Sargasso Sea -- the portion of the North Atlantic region where ocean currents form a gyre that now contains a high concentration of nonbiodegradable plastic waste -- describes it as “a living archipelago of unanchored trash forms” [...]. Rhys herself, writing about waste in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) -- before developments in chemical technology allowed for mass production of plastic in the 1940s and 1950s -- proposed a “grotesque bilge theory of subjectivity” rooted in a preplastics understanding of the inevitability of ocean pollution [...].

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Among the most eloquent voices inviting action against the seemingly insurmountable problem of accumulating plastic debris in the Caribbean have been those of regional and international artists whose waste-focused projects have brought attention to plastic accumulation [...]. Through waste-based installations and waterscapes -- which represent the antithesis of what Krista Thompson has called “the Caribbean picturesque” [...] -- these projects intervene in the reimagining of “landscape” as it has been understood in the European/colonial/tourism imaginary [...]. Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued that “islands and their inhabitants are paradoxically positioned as ‘contained’ and ‘isolated’ yet this belies the consistent visitation by colonials, shipwreck, antrh0pology, and tourism” [...] -- and, we must add now, plastic debris. [...]

[These art] projects [...] address plastic debris not as an isolated “tropical island” concern but as evidence of the archipelago’s engagement in networks of global distribution and consumption that bring the “unnatural” to archetypal tropical landscapes.

In an installation deeply engaged with the suppressed history of slavery in Martinique, like Jean-Francois Bocle’s Tout doit disparaitre/Everything Must Go (2014), the use of cobalt plastic shopping bags as artistic material links environmental pollution to the pernicious and lasting impact of the institution of slavery [...] and colonial history of racism, thus inserting human exploitation into the critical dis/course on imperial debris.

Another group of artists working with plastic debris, like Cuba’s Tomas Sanchez, is particularly concerned with bringing attention to the visual and ecological pollution stemming from the failure to adequately dispose of solid waste in small island nations [...]. Sanchez, known primarily for the idealized forest landscapes through which he captures [...] the tropical sublime, has also produced hyperrealistic paintings of seascapes marred with accumulations of domestic garbage mixed with plastic flotsam. These photorealistic waterscapes juxtapose “pure” Edenic landscapes with [...] the debris of consumerist accumulation [...].

Mexico’s Alejandro Duran has focused instead on plastic debris as an international problem whose solution requires deep systemic changes in how we approach our understanding of the earth as a shared ecology. [...] His Washed Up series consists of photographs of ephemeral installations constructed from plastic trash collected by the artist from the shores of what should be an archetypal tropical Edenic landscape, the UNESCO World Heritage site at Sian Ka’an in Yucatan, Mexico. [...]

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For Capellan, the proliferation of plastic debris on the beaches of Santo Domingo speaks as eloquently [...] about environmental pollution [...] as about the environmental vulnerability of a population that has been doubly displaced; he described the flip-flops that make up Mar Caribe as encompassing the stories of those who used to wear them -- “farmers without land who migrated to the city where everything has been taken from them and sealed off by barbed wire” and who live now at the mercy of a river and a sea [...]. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey has written about Capellan’s Mar invadido, “Turning to Caribbean allegories of waste, we can interpret Capellan’s installations in terms of creating not a colonial archive but, rather, a site of witnessing, rendering the ‘secret’ of wasted lives visible to the more privileged classes who benefit from the labor and the sacrifices made by the undifferentiated poor” (2019, 121). Capellan, like Sanchez in his rising sea in Espejismo, addressed the growing impacts of climate change in the Caribbean region in his awareness of the tidal nature of the increasing vulnerability of the Dominican poor and its connections to rising sea levels. [...]

Duran’s work -- with its focus on plastic bottles blown to the Caribbean from far-flung geographies by wind and sea currents [...] -- has brought us quite far from Theophrastus’s original drift bottles. [...] For Duran, as for the other artists [...], the Caribbean archipelago is defined through the currents of wind and ocean that flow through it, currents that brought us [...] European conquerors and the horrors of the Middle Passage and now countless pieces of plastic debris that remind us of our connection to a global capitalism that began with the global enterprise that was our discovery by Spanish sailors. In the scourge of plastic -- as tide-wrack on our beaches, pollution in our ecosystems, and a threat to our marine fauna -- we have a daily reminder that our archipelago and its history have been bound by ocean currents, framed by the swirling [...] flows [...].

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Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. “The Debris of Caribbean History: Literature, Art, and Archipelagic Plastic.” A chapter in Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations. Edited by Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel and Michelle Stephens. 2020.

[fatehbaz]

“Not the earthquake’s fault”: Scholars of the Caribbean on imperialism’s influence on ecology, environmental degradation, and haunting/lasting effects in the 20th and 21st centuries with a focus on Haiti:

Marie-Jose Nzengou-Tayo. “Kamau Brathwaite and the Haitian Boat People: Dream Haiti, or, The Nightmare of the Caribbean Intellectual.” In: Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite. 2006.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. “Extinctions: Chronicles of Vanishing Fauna in the Colonial and Postcolonial Caribbean.” The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. 2014.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures.” Literatures of the Environment. 2011.

Edouard Glissant. Caribbean Disc0urse: Selected Essays. English translation: 1992.

Suzanne Cesaire. “The Great Camouflage.” In: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945). English translation: 2009.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renee K. Gosson, George B. Handley. “Introduction” from Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. 2005.

Marcus P. Nevius. “New histories of marronage in the Anglo-Atlantic world and early North America.” March 2020.

Rivje Jaffe. “Global Environmental Ideoscapes, Blighted Cityscapes: City, Island and Environment in Jamaica and Curacao.” Etnofoor. 2006.

Derek Walcott. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” 1992.

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Other work about landscape and imperialism in Haiti during the 20th and 21st centuries:

Keir Forgie. “US Imperialism and Disaster Capital!sm in Haiti.” In: The New Imperialism, Volume 4. 2014.

Mary Renda. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. 2001.

Justin Podur. Haiti’s New Dictatorship: The Coup, the Earthquake and the UN Occupation. 2012.

Monique Allewaert, Sophie Sapp Moore, Gregg Mitman, Pablo F. Gomez. “Plantation Legacies.” Edge Effects. 2019.

Jeffrey W. Sommers. “The US Power Elite and the Political Economy of Haiti’s Occupation: Investment, Race, and World Order.” The Journal of Haitian Studies Vol. 21 No. 2. 2015.

Raphael Dalleo. American Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism. 2016.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Brian G. McAdoo. “Not the earthquake’s fault.” Nature Geoscience. 2011.

[fatehbaz]

Orientalist “time lag” and naturalizing an East-West hemispheric divide. Racism against East Asia in science fiction. British imperial establishment of Greenwich meridian and International Date Line. Percival Lowell’s extraterrestrial life. “Yellow Peril”, world wars, and Victorian/Edwardian literature. The fiction of “homogenous, empty time”. Colonial “space-time homogenization”.

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[A]lthough Lowell’s writings on the “Far East” brought him acclaim, and although his astronomical speculations on the existence of Pluto proved accurate, his arguments for the existence of advanced life on Mars were eventually proven invalid [...]. [T]he circulation of Lowell’s claims as part of the “print capitalist” markets of the world had a major impact on the “emergence of science fiction” [...]. Of course, one important genealogy that follows Lowell is what critic Takayuki Tatsumi has termed the “pre-wellsian, post-wellsian shift” in science-fictional representation, namely the [...] conceptualizations of “world war” that followed in the wake of Well’s War of the Worlds (1897). This includes the perilous associations of Asians with “aliens” endemic to the Yellow Peril tradition of writing [...].

While the fictionalized nature of Orientalist representation is well acknowledged, [...] [there is] another kind of fiction, [...] one which Lowell’s techno-Orientalism also foregrounds [...]: namely, the decisive impact of the hemispheric constructs derived from global longitude, the fiction of capitalist temporality. [...]

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Lowell [...] can also be read as one of the early [writers] of the East-West hemispheric divide created by the emergence of the hundred and eightieth meridian, across which the Trans-Pacific traveler must warp when crossing the ocean. Lowell’s writing suggests the way in which modern notions of Western and Eastern (or Oriental) hemispheres are rooted in [...] homogenized capitalist space-time in the world. 

As analyzed by Elizabeth Deloughrey, “Longitude, particularly the zero-degree meridian at Greenwich, is a political construct, created to protect colonial trade and based on the difference in time between a British ship’s departure and arrival point” [...]. While historically derived from the history of maritime trade, British colonialism, and practices of transatlantic slavery, the Greenwich meridian was universalized at the International Greenwich Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., in 1884, two years before Lowell’s first publication on his journeys to the Far East.

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While Lowell’s writing on Asia and Mars may seem worlds apart, I find they are best read within a continuum of science-fictional thinking [...]. [I]n staging the East-West encounter, Lowell’s (techno-)Orientalism promoted the Far East as a mirror by which the West can regard itself in new ways, and thus as a unique object of consumption [...] by presenting an inverted mirror for “our civilization” [...]. As Lowell explains, the Pacific meridian has a unique function within the world system as a border which mediates two discrepant temporalities. Unlike latitudinal measurements, which are based on the natural rotations of the equator, [...] although “purely and entirely an arbitrary convention” (Choson 1), the one hundred and eightieth meridian has a dramatic impact on the apprehensions of the transpacific Orientalist. As Lowell writes:

It (the meridian) sets, not the time of day merely, but the day itself. At the line two days meet. There, though time flows ceaselessly on, occurs that unnatural yet unavoidable jump of twenty-four hours; and no one is there to be startled by the fact -- no one to be perplexed in trying to reconcile the two incongruities, continuous time and discontinuous day. There is nothing but the ocean. [...]

Although designed to homogenize the experience of time, the westerly transpacific traveler, Lowell explains, actually loses a day “into the depths of the Pacific Ocean” (Choson 3). In other words, [...] the standardization of Greenwich as the Prime Meridian has a particular significance on the apprehension of space and time for the transpacific traveler, who warps across time when traversing the “International Date Line,” the antipode of the Greenwich meridian. Lowell describes how “we fall asleep one night in the new world to awake on the after-morrow’s morning in the old [...].”

However paradoxically, the Westerly journey into the Far East is -- like in science fiction -- a journey into the future. 

Those crossing the Pacific meridian, then, are subject to the defining temporal paradox of capitalist modernity (today commonly called “jet lag”). [...]. Arguably, the establishment of the Greenwich meridian also naturalized the perceived division between hemispheres, of the world divided into mirroring opposites. Thus, the International Date Line is “of exceeding importance to mankind” (Lowell, Choson 1) [...].

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In spite of Lowell’s professed fascination for Old Japan, we see that his brand of Orientalism is already a kind of techno-Orientalism -- that is, both the strand of economic alienation and the racialization that Sohn associates with the figuration of the “Alien/Asian”. 

Lowell’s writing reveals how the modern construction of the East-West divide is rooted in the global proliferation of clocks and the fiction of what Walter Benjamin called “homogenous, empty time”.

For this reason, we must read Far East Orientalism [...] as one of the most perceptible, and pernicious, forms of modernity’s dehumanizations. [...] [T\he fiction of the hemispheric division in the Pacific is itself rooted in the deeper myths of our time [...].

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Text by: Timothy J. Yamamura. “Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell.” In Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading at top of this post added by me.]