Antipode最新文献

Dominant narratives of Cairo's waste challenges frame the issue as a consequence of overpopulation and unsanitary behaviour, advocating for technocratic solutions led by global private firms and technological innovation. These narratives, however, obscure the commodification of waste and the colonial discourses that justify waste's valorisation. Together capital and colonialism transform labour and infrastructure continually producing a system that struggles to keep up with the city's waste. In this article, I critique these dominant framings by asking how and under what conditions was Cairo's waste commodified? Drawing on archival materials, oral histories, and interviews, I trace the evolution of sanitation and waste management in Cairo from the early 20^th century to the present. I document how, at the turn of the 20^th century, garbage and sewage served as material limits to the health and expansion of the city. I then demonstrate how colonial engineers, and later the postcolonial state, international development, and private capital sought to manage and extract value from Cairo's waste. I argue that the process of commodifying Cairo's waste coupled with the discursive stubbornness of colonial narratives of Western sanitation remain the obstacles in realising an effective and just system. Through this investigation, I urge for greater attention to the historical and contemporary geographies of waste's commodification and its relationship to colonialism in order to challenge dominant apolitical approaches to today's urban waste challenges.

Understanding eviction as a positioning of bodies and loss in a property relation, I argue a critical logistical reading may offer a means of describing the capacity to evict within the economic, racial, reproductive, and political configurations that drive the decisions and motives for eviction. With a focus on the Cape Town metropolitan area, I trace one route through the flows conceptualised in eviction practices in urban informal settlements in the Western Cape and their material organisation. I follow preparations from flow charts to demolition, through in-depth interviews with individuals responsible for the planning and physical conduct of forced evictions, security facility visits, and analysis of documents and news reports. Adding to existing dialogues on the failure of housing delivery in South Africa, I describe “eviction-logistics” as a mechanism for organising loss and an additional point of intervention for housing and land justice.

This article theorises ships as material carriers of transversal solidarity, based on the specific case of civil sea rescue vessels in the Mediterranean. My argument derives from eight months of fieldwork as an engaged activist-ethnographer amongst civil sea rescue actors in Europe. Bringing empirical findings in conversation with scholarship of maritime resistance, the article adopts a conceptual focus that centres the ship's materiality to expand our understanding of (transversal) solidarity in two ways. Firstly, I demonstrate how the ship's materiality facilitates transversal relations across different backgrounds (trans-positional), organisations (trans-organisational), and the borders of nation-states (trans-spatial). Secondly, the article argues that a conceptual focus on the vessel's materiality reveals a fourth, temporal dimension, that is how solidarity is maintained across time. In theorising the vessel as a carrier of (transversal) solidarity, the article advances our understanding of how solidarity may be materially sustained across categorical, spatial, and temporal boundaries.

In the decade since the so-called Arab Spring first drove debates around the relationship between images and militancy, hundreds of films have documented the uprisings and their aftermath. Yet little scholarship has considered the political consequences of films made in relation to the Arab Spring or situated new works in relation to earlier generations of militant cinema. This article will call attention to a new cinema subgenre I call the “character-driven resilience documentary”, that emerged as a prominent form amid the Arab Spring. I argue that the character-driven resilience documentary subtly but powerfully undermines the radical potential of the Arab uprisings. By tracing the evolution of militant Arab cinema in relation to global conjunctural moments, from its formal emergence in the 1960s through the 1990s video art era to the present, I show the political significance of this form and point to a new agenda for militant cinema.

When powerful technologies emerge, they bring with them questions of frame, view, and narration. Often, these technologies, like Artificial Intelligence (AI), appear to determine what happens on a world stage, even as they are embedded in arrangements of power that elevate particular places, subjects, and ways of seeing. This paper investigates four dominant ways of narrating AI developments in the current moment: labour futures, information integrity, human creativity, and over-reliance on regulation. Through these frames, particular histories and futures are privileged while others are silenced. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot's concept of the unthinkable in history and Milton Santos’ theories of the used territory alongside Shahidul Alam's concept of the majority world, this paper suggests alternatives to these ways of seeing that emerge from thinking about AI from a majority world perspective. These alternative frames are: technolabour precarity, public contestations and political histories, relationality, and shared problematics. They point towards an understanding of AI that concomitantly reflects the empirical experience of the majority of the people in the world, and points towards AI futures that can match those experiences.

Around the globe, peasants, migrants, companies, and governments, even the land itself, are doing things that agrarian studies scholars are not anticipating. The changes in the countryside seem increasingly dramatic, challenging Marxist vocabulary and analysis. What is desirable, we suggest, is to complement the classical agrarian question with equally fundamental questions that spring from the side of modernity that Marxism tends to eschew: the episteme of human subjectivity, recognition, and government. A fuller and more satisfactory explanation of agrarian change will arise from a bi-focal investigation of capitalism and liberalism, which together shape land struggles. Thus, in addition to questions of political economy—Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? And what do they do with it?—we must integrate fundamental questions of humanism, visibility, and government. In other words: Who are you? Who sees you? Who governs you? And how do they do it?

This paper locates acute and ongoing crises of coloniality and ecology within struggles over circulation that are anchored in infrastructure. If infrastructure organises movement—including its constraint in carceral forms—then it is also a linchpin for materialising distinct regimes of motion (Nail 2020a; Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism). A regime of motion may be inherently violent, underpinning reproduction for some by interrupting it for others. It may be assembled to sustain imperialism's “expanded reproduction”, curtailing or crushing the plethora of alternative forms to produce premature death. Yet, a focus on struggles over the organisation of motion and, specifically, the contestation of imperial infrastructure, allows the practical assembly of otherwise and alimentary forms to become apprehensible. Journeying through logistics systems that both craft and cut through colonial ecologies, this essay tracks haunted rails, moves across racial and national borders of land, labour, livestock, and the human, and into the intimate space of the singular microbiome. Holding seemingly disparate sites of crisis together, it attends to practices of survivance of those who refuse the violently sculpted borders of life and death. I ask, what infrastructural inheritances usher in this apocalyptic era and how might an immanent politics of care and collaboration—a palliative politics—orient us towards other paths?

As transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too-often-neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity. We highlight examples of community economies already contributing to more-than-human wellbeing, and we present emerging theoretical insights concerning temporality, the multi-sitedness of the enterprise, and diverse economic subjectivities. With that, we articulate our ongoing research agenda and advance conversations with postcapitalist scholarship and politics.

This article links the proposal to establish a deportation centre on the island of Lindholm off the coast of Zealand, Denmark, and its extensive media coverage, with the implementation and media portrayal of the “Ghetto Law” aimed at neighbourhoods of racialised Danish citizens. These cases connect migration and urban studies to examine how external and internal politics intersect through concepts of possessive whiteness, Othering, evictability, and racial banishment, especially regarding migrants and racialised citizens. The article argues that evictability, racial banishment, and whiteness imaginaries are rooted in racial dispossession, mobile containment, and immobilisation to control proximity to whiteness in terms of ownership and civil rights. It further contends that this dynamic reflects colonial hierarchies that create distinctions between, on the one hand, an imagined whiteness characterised by peaceful, secure homogeneity, civility, and prosperity, and, on the other hand, racialised individuals perceived as unreliable, unproductive, and threatening, associated with chaos and disorder.

This paper offers an alternative reading of decolonial geographies by examining how people make due in the context of colonial natures. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic research, we illustrate how everyday acts of reclaiming ancestral lands serve as practices of resistance that foment Enxet and Sanapaná resurgence in Paraguay's Chaco. We foreground the notion of “making due” as central to understanding the Xákmok Kásek community's decades-long struggle against land dispossession by settler ranching operations. We emphasise material decolonial praxis wherein Enxet and Sanapaná peoples appropriate colonial ranching infrastructures—such as cattle stockponds—to ensure community wellbeing amid colonial violence and the impacts of climate change. We advance a concept of “entangled ecologies” that emerges through the adaptive strategies community members use to thrive in landscapes radically altered by cattle ranching, deforestation, and private conservation initiatives. By weaving details of community-led land reoccupations, food sovereignty practices, and water infrastructures, the paper advances a relational geographic analysis attuned to Indigenous strategies for survival and flourishing in the entangled ecologies of the colonial present. The paper contributes to radical geography by demonstrating decolonial praxis that is materially and relationally enacted, rather than solely discursively theorised, within contexts shaped by enduring effects of coloniality.