Antipode最新文献

This contribution combines literature on logistics with literature on the articulation between racism and the securitisation of migration. Studying security infrastructures in Mexico in conjunction with the Mesoamerican Project, a massive transnational infrastructure plan, I show how security and trade infrastructures become intertwined in what governments have called a “secure trade corridor” between Colombia and the United States. In this securitised project of accelerating trade across the Americas, the promise of infrastructure itself is one of enabling flows and controlling the mobility of racialised others. The article describes how security infrastructures redirect and potentially revictimise migrants, contain contestation, and, ultimately, enable capital flows for corporations that provide technology at Mexico's northern and southern borders. Fantasies of containment materialise in wires, border posts, military posts, and even graves. Trade infrastructures also serve as “filters” for migration. Joining logistics and security studies allows us to observe how these different infrastructures simultaneously perform multiple functions.

I answer a call by Nicholas De Genova and Ananya Roy asking scholars to investigate the historical roots of practices of illegalisation (that is, the use of law to render people illegal) and how these practices serve to re/institute a relationality between race and poverty. Using the case of regulations surrounding vagrancy in imperial Japan's metropole and its colony of Taiwan, I call attention to how illegalisation has historically been entwined with the racialised concept of the vagrant, spread globally through European anti-vagrancy laws. I argue that this vagrancy concept was inserted into emergent border control and welfare regulations at the turn of the 20^th century as a mechanism for systematically excluding racialised persons from state protection. Also, I elucidate how im/migration and social assistance schemes were historically co-produced as legal architectures designed to provide greater socio-economic security and status to the so-called imperial races.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates the largest detention system in the world, holding over 35,000 people in October 2023. The vast majority of this capacity is outsourced to corrections firms, particularly the two largest, CoreCivic and GEO Group. This article analyses how private corrections firms finance US immigrant detention capacity as a specialised asset class of government real estate. To understand the emergence of “carceral real estate”, I bring political geographies of migration into conversation with economic geographies of real estate. In doing so, I argue that creating “carceral real estate” enables the abstraction and valuation of migrant life as rent and, in turn, presumes a continuously flowing, fungible migrant population. In this context, migrants valued as underpaid labour in the wider economy are re-valued for their unproductivity in detention. And yet this idealised geography of human and economic flows never fully materialises, but is instead rife with volatility, disruption, and political contestation. The article closes by discussing implications for abolition geographies.

We build on the critical environmental justice (CEJ) framework by exploring mutual aid as a means of practising and realising transformative environmental justice that allows activists to build environmentally resilient and just communities beyond the state. We draw on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black Radical Tradition, and other critical approaches to demonstrate how mutual aid offers a meaningful point of conjunction for uniting ideological approaches to environmental justice that are often understood as being at odds with one another. To demonstrate this in action, we provide brief examples on the proliferation and longevity of mutual aid in times of disaster, including the 1927 Mississippi floods, Hurricane Katrina, the Nashville tornados, and the Texas power outages. Through these accounts, we seek to demonstrate how environmental justice organisations can and have advanced collective liberation using mutual aid as a critical orientation rooted in community based care and empowerment.

South Africa's Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) is among the world's largest pension funds, public or private. The pension fund's sizeable coffers reflect reforms to its structure undertaken as a safeguard for apartheid bureaucrats. Today, the fund is entangled in South Africa's financial markets. Through an analysis of the GEPF's investment in real estate, it is shown how investments by a government employees’ pension fund intertwine with real estate financialisation in South Africa. Representative of the latent state infrastructure that is not often the site of interrogation in scholarship nor activism, the case of the GEPF can help expand our understanding of the relationship between the state and financialisation.

This essay explores the role of feral pigs in assembling the Texas frontier. Quick to reproduce, highly adaptive, and destroyers of agricultural fields, feral pigs have emerged over the past decade as one of the principal challenges facing agriculture and land management systems in Texas. Yet, more than simply a pest, feral pigs have and continue to be active agents in forging new landscapes, ecologies, and settler-colonial relations. We trace the history of the present pig “crisis” by exploring three paradigms for thinking pigs and the politics of ferality on the Texas frontier. These paradigms frame pigs as: “settler beasts” (companion species to settler expansion); “melting-pot beasts” (feral pigs as representing diverse genetic remnants of settler expansion); and “invader beasts” (feral pigs framed as a threat). Our argument is that these paradigms index diverse material and discursive ways that feral pigs have and continue to assemble Texas's frontier landscape.

A highly heterogenous group of actors develops, owns, manages, and purchases tourism property around the globe. In this paper, we discuss the rise of “tourism-led rentier capitalism”—which is a particular fraction of capital—and its variegated dimensions. Although tourism property investors do not operate as a monolithic bloc or a socio-economic class, they share similar interests and collectively reshape tourism destinations by extracting tourism rent, a form of monopoly and differential rent, which can be derived from natural and public goods or sign values and imaginations of places that imbue meaning and value into locational attributes. As such, they contribute to unevenly developed and variegated geographies of property investment which are nonetheless driven by common, underlying mechanisms and spatial practices. The conversion of tourism destinations into financialised accumulation frontiers is one broader outcome of tourism-led rentier capitalism. The extraction of tourism rent is another.

Examining how gender and sexuality norms are expressed through nationalist ideology, this article argues that homonationalist hegemony is being reinforced through media representations of nationalist social movements attacking LGBTQ people, events, and symbols. The argument builds on a critical discourse analysis of 320 newspaper articles published between 2016 and 2020. The discourses in the material manifest how the neo-Nazi groups the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) and Nordic Youth (NY), as well as the nationalist party Sweden Democrats (SD), have respectively been represented as threats to Swedish national unity in media due to their anti-LGBTQ attacks or statements. The analysis concludes that nationalism is reproduced through struggles over its symbolic expressions, especially through changing articulations of who belongs to the nation and who constitutes its “Others”. The symbolism of gendered and sexual norms is crucial to these struggles, as the evolvements of homonationalist discourse highlights the struggle to define national unity.

This paper lays the ground for a novel discussion on the encounter between José Martí and Antonio Gramsci. It argues that Martí and Gramsci can be profitably and innovatively read together when interrogating the profound “spatial articulations” that animate their political vision. The discussion principally focuses on Martí's concept of Our America and Gramsci's Southern Question. Methodologically, the article deploys a “diachronic tactic” that mobilises a broad body of literature that emerged long after Martí's and Gramsci's lives, particularly considering contributions within Radical Geography and Postcolonial Studies.