Colonial Geography Research Articles

What Returns, What Remains

Abstract: In February 2020, a group of Kanaka 'Ōiwi cultural practitioners arrived in Cambridge, England, to repatriate ancestral remains stolen from Hawai'i in the late nineteenth century. This essay explores the possession, return, and interpretation of these remains, specifically fourteen iwi po'o (human skulls) originating from the Pali, an important historic battle site in the Ko'olau mountain range of O'ahu. In telling the story of their possession and dispossession, I draw upon theories of haunting from Indigenous studies and Black studies in order to challenge the way that settler colonial structures work to limit and potentially foreclose Hawaiian relationships to spiritual presence and placemaking. Through the Native Hawaiian concept of ho'opahulu, which, in 'ōlelo Hawai'i (Hawaiian language), encompasses both spectrality and the exhaustion of land from overfarming, this essay highlights connections between land, spirit, and haunting that provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding spectral placemaking beyond colonial geographies. In doing so, I argue against possessive logics, showing how contemporary Hawaiian cultural geographies fundamentally refuse, upend, and replant relations that exceed the American state.

Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905 by Matthew Unangst (review)

Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905 by Matthew Unangst (review)

Matthew Unangst. Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905

Matthew Unangst. <i>Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905</i>

The island, the prison, and the colony: Sardinian carceral and colonial geographies

AbstractAcross research on incarceration and insularity, recent trajectories have challenged conventional understandings of islands and prisons as isolated, autonomous units. Instead, they have directed attention toward their capacity to establish relations, circuits and routes. Beyond the focus on mobility and exchanges, this literature criticised the association between insularity, incarceration and confinement as the outcome of specific colonial epistemologies. This article builds on these literatures to investigate the case of Sardinia, a large Mediterranean island that plays a key role in the Italian carceral regime by providing a destination for thousands of Italian convicts. Despite being an Italian and European region, Sardinia's past and present exhibit distinct colonial qualities, which are visible in the structure of its carceral estate. The case study exemplifies how islands can hardly be interpreted as isolated units, given that their histories and geographies have implications that extend far beyond their coasts. In the case of Sardinia, the island combines modern penitentiaries with dynamics reminiscent of previous periods in the history of punishment, specifically penal colonies and convict transportation. This case study illustrates the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach that is willing to question the conceptual categories adopted, particularly those of island, prison and colony.

Mission Creep: Enduring Race-Place Schemata of California’s Colonial Settlements

Abstract This article traces contemporary patterns of housing and homelessness to colonial geographies as race-place schemata: historic and ongoing relationships to territory that articulate and impose white supremacy while stimulating resistance to it. These phenomena are approached through the four fields of anthropology, placing a contemporary ethnography of gentrification/displacement in Oakland in conversation with the archeological record of colonization. The demographic tracking of human populations through census instruments and discourses of biological distancing suggest implications for biological anthropology, and socio-linguistic analysis is applied to colonial naming practice. Intended as an essay-length land acknowledgement and critical interrogation of contemporary white spatial entitlement, this research centers the capacity of territorial aesthetics and the geographic organization of the Spanish imperial project to produce continuing place-based dominance over colonized peoples through dispossession of their lands, containment of their populations, assimilation and erasure of their life ways, and surveillance over and defense against their resistance.

German colonial geography as a racial-Völkish reordering project beyond the East: National Socialism and the colonial writings of geographer Oskar Schmieder

There is very little research on German colonial geography in general, and the boom in this subdiscipline during the National Socialist period has not received any scholarly attention so far. Against that backdrop, this paper aims to contribute: a) to a finer-grained picture of colonial, racial-Völkish thinking – and its application – in German geography during the National Socialist period and b) to our understanding of the continuities and ruptures in German geographical scholarship after WWII. To that end, I focus on the biography of Oskar Schmieder (1891–1980). Two interrelated aspects of Schmieder's writings will guide the analysis: first, his conceptualization of race, Volk, and soil regarding (Germans in) South America and, secondly, the political colonial project that he pursued for Nazi Germany. Studying Oskar Schmieder shows that German geographers not only stood up for the re-establishment of a German colonial empire during the National Socialist period, but also fought for its Fascist orientation – which, at least for Schmieder, was to differ from the German colonial pre-1914 empire. Being primarily known as a representative of Länderkunde, Schmieder's institutionally and conceptually influential career after 1945 can be seen as a prime example of the continuities within the discipline in Germany.

Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905 by Matthew Unangst (review)

Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905 by Matthew Unangst (review)

Correspondence, scale and the Linguistic Survey of India's colonial geographies of language, 1896–1928

This paper examines the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), a monumental exercise supervised by George Grierson to survey and classify the languages of colonial India. It considers why the LSI developed into an atypical scheme that corresponded with a multiethnic and multinational network of officials and scholars to survey India's languages. It makes the case that the networked practice of surveying was reciprocated at different scales, from localised linguistic surveys in districts and princely states to gather information and specimens, to a loosely governed transnational exercise involving Indians and Europeans to edit, review and publish results. The paper argues that the LSI's scalar geographies were negotiated by Grierson and, more importantly, his assistant Gauri Kant Roy and demonstrates that scale, as an analytic or process, was not an abstraction or predetermined for those entangled in the LSI's survey of India's languages.

Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905.By Matthew Unangst. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 360 pages + 7 b/w images + 6 b/w maps. $85.00 hardcover or eBook; After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies.Edited by Sara Pugach, David Pizzo, and Adam Blackler. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, New York,

Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905.<i>By Matthew Unangst. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 360 pages + 7 b/w images + 6 b/w maps. $85.00 hardcover or eBook</i>; After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies.<i>Edited by Sara Pugach, David Pizzo, and Adam Blackler. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, New York,

Digital misrecognitions: the violence of visibility in postsocialist Kyrgyzstan

ABSTRACT In recent years, digital platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Instagram have emerged as powerful mediums for digital advocacy within the transgender community in Kyrgyzstan, even amidst the rise in ‘political homophobia’. Simultaneously, both state and ‘non-state’ actors have actively harnessed these digital platforms to craft narratives portraying the transgender community as a symbol of societal moral decline and external influence, often through the practice of digital ‘outing’. Using autoethnographic methods to examine the use of digital space as a medium for practices of injury and repair, this article offers a deeper analysis of the politics of trans visibility in (post)socialist/(post)colonial geographies. It examines the different implications and material consequences of visibility in physical and digital space for trans* folks in Kyrgyzstan.

Settling ‘Dagga’? Shifting Frontiers of Cannabis Knowledge and Governance in South Africa

After the South African War (1899–1902), state-makers’ efforts to control ‘dagga’ was controversial on several fronts. But ‘dagga’ also proved a moving target for official classification. Was it a species of Leonotis, common around the countryside? Was it ‘Indian hemp’, understood by some as a habit-forming drug that debilitated wage workers and caused insanity? This paper traces dagga as a multiple object and problematic of governance in South Africa during the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa and into the early decades of the Union period. A focus on three contested boundaries of top-down knowledge-making and policy – botanical taxonomies; colonial geographies; and political-economy – demonstrates dagga’s shifting ontologies across time and space. Together, these empirical snapshots combine as a case study, revealing how the legal reification of a substance as a ‘drug’ involved political processes that were local, dispersed and unresolved. We show how uncertainties and ambivalences about cannabis long remained productive for different brokers and gatekeepers who navigated the frontiers of competing interests. This history is important for understanding the changing politics of cannabis in South Africa, as it became legible for regulation as a ‘dangerous drug’ during the first half of the 20th century.

Postcolonial Pessimisms and Alternative Spatial Practices: Critical Interpretation of the concept of the Third Space through the Case of Fatahillah Square, Indonesia

Abstract Spatial practice is at the core of postcolonial geography's response to the geography of colonialism. However, the methodology of postcolonial spatial practice is linked to pessimisms within the postcolonial debate. This study aims to overcome pessimisms of postcolonialism by analysing a case of postcolonial spatial practice through literature review, expert interview, and field study. The case under investigation is Fatahillah Square in Jakarta, which has been transformed through postcolonial spatial practices from a space that symbolised the tragedy of colonialism into one of culture and art. Here, the characteristics of Homi K. Bhabha's “third space” are apparent, but this case may also be interpreted as an extension of the concept. Through the hybrid and emancipatory plurality of its spatial practice, it refutes the pessimisms of postcolonialism and calls for further postcolonial practice and analysis.

Slavery and incarceration in the frontier: the origin of convict leasing

ABSTRACT This article uses original archival research to revise the scholarly consensus on convict leasing to demonstrate that it first emerges on US soil in Kentucky’s eighteenth century frontier society (rather than in the Deep South in the wake of the 13th amendment) and that it began in a prison filled with incarcerated white people (rather than as a way to keep African Americans trapped in a condition analogous to slavery). Convict leasing was born on the frontier – in the hazy netherworld between slavery and freedom, between British colonial geographies and the territories settlers seized from indigenous peoples to establish a sovereign republic. I argue that convict leasing constituted a novel financial frontier that tethered slaveholding to new strategies for adjudicating debt to new lease arrangements for private firms. More specifically, I argue that convict leasing was inaugurated in the US in Kentucky because of its unique relationship to three related developments: the birth of the domestic slave trade, the debut of incarceration as a pervasive mode of punishment, and the plight of debtors in the aftermath of the American Revolution. This article demonstrates how Kentucky moved from being foremost understood as a geographic frontier – the expanding boundary of a new republic – to a financial frontier as the westward march of slave coffles prepared Kentucky to launch a hemp industry that was uniquely profitable. The desperate plight of debtors in the context of booming hemp profits made them especially vulnerable to Joel Scott’s innovative model for extracting profit from prison labor based on techniques African workers had developed for transforming a recalcitrant plant into an economic marvel. In this context, incarcerated white people were subjected to a labor regimen that had heretofore largely been restricted to enslaved black workers. This geographic frontier and financial frontier ushered in new legal frontiers, including the threshold marking a shift from colonial subjects to incarcerated citizens.

Spaces of fluidity: articulating ‘politics of presence’ through place-based activism in Iqrit (Israel)

This article engages with the material geographies of colonialism in Israel/Palestine by looking at the site-specific cultural activities in Iqrit (Israel), a Christian-Arab village depopulated during the 1948 war in the region. We investigate the importance of material infrastructure – and material, bodily encounters with the site – as a basis for the place-based activist memory-work, as well as exposing the ways in which such activities contribute to the advancement of ‘the politics of presence’, understood as a manifestation of a continuous resilience vis-à-vis the discriminatory policy of the state. Our argumentation focuses on the importance of physical presence in specific geographical areas, shedding light on how place-based activities may contravene the expressed state policy by increasing the fluidity of the territory, creating spaces of contestation in which the traditional understandings of state authority partly dissolve. It also explores how the material reconfigurations of the place, and emotional-bodily investment in it, contribute to the semantic instability of the site, turning the place-based memory-work into a future-oriented project with important political aspirations.

Mapping transnational lives: patterns of dislocation and reorientation in contemporary carto-graphic memoirs

ABSTRACT This article considers three recent graphic memoirs that focus on Italian transnational migration and its legacies: Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s The Inheritance, Joshua Santospirito’s Swallows (Part I), and Pia Valentini’s Ferriera. We adopt the term carto-graphic memoirs (Mitchell 2007; Norment 2012), to describe graphic novels that aim to literally and metaphorically map transnational lives, identities, and memories, through complex artistic processes of autobiographical (re)orientation, drawing, storytelling, and intellectual reflection. Dominant narratives of Italian migration redeem the struggle and shame of migration through individual success, upward mobility, and racial ‘whitening’. These three works challenge stereotypical representations of Italian migration, and Italian hyphenated identities, focusing instead on geographical, historical and autobiographical fragments that come together on the page to sketch provisional and fragile, yet emotionally and intellectually powerful patterns. Such patterns reveal histories and geographies of racism, class exploitation, violence, trauma, but also histories of physical, existential, cultural, linguistic and intellectual resistance, exchange, and creativity. Each of these memoirs locate Italian migrants and their descendants at the intersection of traumatic histories and geographies of nationalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and class exploitation. In doing so, they provide an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the relationship between transnational histories and individual lives.

Storied Geographies: Settler Extractivism and Sites of Indigenous Resurgence in Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild

This article offers a reading of Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild (2019) that focuses on the novel’s poetics of space, which contests settler colonial extractive geographies. Adopting a strong Métis- and women’s perspective, Dimaline’s narrative explores the contemporary Métis condition, which is marked by dispossession and displacement under settler colonialism, and the precarity connected with rampant resource extraction in Canada. In order to tackle the tensions between settler- and Indigenous conceptualizations of space, I provide a brief overview of settler Canadian land politics, and describe the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels applying the concepts of petrostate and petroculture. By incorporating a Rogarou figure, a lupine monster in Métis stories, Dimaline embeds her novel within the traditional stories of her people, demonstrating their potential to critique and contest settler colonial geographies marked by extraction. The analysis approaches Indigenous storytelling as a strategy that resists dispossession and tackles the representation of Métis bodies as sites of resurgence.

The social turn of Portuguese colonial geography

The social turn of Portuguese colonial geography

The social turn of Portuguese colonial geography

A presente nota de pesquisa sugere que se atente ao enquadramento epistémico e institucional da ocorrência da geografia humana nas antigas colónias portuguesas, em particular da Missão de Geografia da Guiné, dirigida por Orlando Ribeiro e considerada o momento inaugural desta linhagem, como ponto de partida para procurar agregar os relatos cindidos acerca da afirmação desse saber, por um lado, e sobre o seu contexto de emergência, por outro; para integrar as narrativas paralelas que se ocupam da geografia metropolitana e da geografia colonial; e para fazer convergir a história da geografia em geral com a história da investigação colonial, como um todo, e a história das ciências sociais em Portugal.

Local Oceans: New Perspectives on Colonial Geographies

Abstract: Addressing an audience at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo in 1993, the Oceanic anthropologist Epeli Hau‘ofa delivered a blistering rebuke of the “belittling” view of states and territories, one he contended was held not only by the West, but also by the Pacific’s own national and regional governments.1 Such a view, resulting in a posture of economic dependence rather than self-sufficiency, is “traceable to the early years of interactions with Europeans” and emerged intrinsically from globally oriented “macroeconomic” and “macropolitical” perspectives that perceived the islands to be small, distant, and fragmented— predisposed to incorporation into colonial geographies (148–49). Hau‘ofa suggested that in order to revise this perspective it was better to conceive of the region not as “islands in a far sea,” but rather as “a sea of islands” (152–53). Whereas “islands in a far sea” evoked “tiny, isolated dots,” Hau‘ofa called for “a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships” (153). The Oceanic sea of islands had never been far, nor small, nor fragmented; they were not tiny islands to be carved up and colonized, but imbued with locality as with culture.

Between Flood and Drought: Environmental Racism, Settler Waterscapes, and Indigenous Water Justice in South America’s Chaco

This article advances a novel approach to investigating geographies of settler colonialism and environmental justice through a critical physical geography (CPG) of water scarcity in the South American Chaco. Drawing from multimethod research conducted in collaboration with Enxet and Sanapaná communities in Paraguay, I evaluate how waterscape change produces social vulnerability with a focus on Indigenous access to safe drinking water. Stemming from a seemingly simple question—how have annual flood and drought events in the Chaco become malignant for Enxet and Sanapaná peoples—my analysis centers on current struggles for Indigenous rights amidst Paraguay’s booming ranching industry. I use an eclectic data set—from historical missionary accounts, seventy-two household questionnaires, mapping new waterscapes, and a political economy of cattle ranching—to show how settler waterscapes produce environmental racism by limiting Indigenous access to “good” water. I argue that the prevalence of water scarcity in Indigenous communities across the Bajo Chaco is not a natural result of biophysical geography but a socially produced outcome of how settler waterscapes rework hydrosocial relations along racial lines. CPG offers a way to bridge biophysical analysis with critical social theory to expand geographic understandings of settler colonialism and its effects on Indigenous environmental justice.