This essay is an expanded and revised version of the 2024 Antipode Lecture at the American Association of Geographers conference. It takes seriously how touristic genres transform discourses about place into lived materiality, especially in sites where touristic desire is intimately woven into necropolitical structures of occupation, militarism, and settler colonialism. Taking as its point of departure the edited collection Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i, it foregrounds the worldmaking power of narrative as a crucial instrument for deoccupation, demilitarization, and decolonialism. Focused on Hawai'i, a place both profoundly shaped by tourism and actively working against its erasures and distortions, this essay grapples with how decolonizing narratives manifest and make room for what Epeli Hau'ofa has described as the "vast," "expanding," "hospitable and generous" worlds of Pacific encounter that are already in emergence.
ABSTRACT The simultaneous creation of the first Economic Processing Zone in the Republic of China's Taiwan and the maquiladora in northern Mexico in the mid‐1960s were critical junctures in global capitalism's reorganization. Drawing on archival research and contemporary ethnographic fieldwork, this article traces the geographies and temporalities of social reproduction that powered these emergent export‐processing zones. Focused through the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone and Ciudad Juárez, we look to state and factory‐mediated spaces and practices that managed workers' reproductive needs while simultaneously binding them ever tighter to the global factory's orbit. As we show, these “space‐times of reproduction” were key to Mexico and Taiwan's transformation into key nodes in global production networks in the 1960s and 70s. In turn, this South–South historical relational comparison demonstrates how social reproduction emerged as central to the global factory's restructuring more broadly, strengthening the labor control that is now emblematic of contemporary supply chain capitalism.
ABSTRACT Despite efforts by critical scholars of development to centre race in their analysis, Development Studies remains entangled in its racist history and contemporary imperialism. New troubling forms of oppression and control within the discipline's approach to race have emerged, marking the post‐Black Lives Matter era as a point of transition between old and new erasures of race. We argue that although race is no longer ignored, the discursive and material boundaries within which it can be discussed have been erected through silencing, censorship, regulation and appropriation. Drawing on our failed attempt to publish a special issue on race, (anti‐)racism and development, we focus on the specificity of Palestine as indicative of new erasures. We explore the theoretical implications this has and uncover how Palestine illuminates and unsettles the boundaries between race and development. Through this, we attempt to build a case for development's reclamation as a liberatory project of radical repoliticisation.
ABSTRACT This article introduces settler toxicity: the symbolic charge that lodges itself in Indigenous cultural‐material worlds through their passage through settler institutions, producing real harm through institutional and epistemic vectors rather than particle matter. Drawing on participatory workshops with Palestinians engaging with objects from one depopulated village, it documents three components through which settler toxicity operates—polluted provenance, contamination by association and toxic epistemologies—and examines what communities do when restitution frameworks prove inadequate. Settler toxicity persists even under conditions designed to resist it: good intentions do not detoxify. Yet toxicity does not foreclose action. We document how belongings turn into instruments of solidarity and sovereign assertion. Restitution is not a dispute over possession but a struggle over Indigenous sovereignty, self‐determination and the right of return. Just restitutions require contaminated alliances: relations of co‐resistance that acknowledge settler scholars cannot stand outside the toxic structures they seek to contest.
ABSTRACT This paper conceptualises housing as an infrastructure of racialisation in smart cities. With smart urbanism becoming central to urban governance, housing is emerging as a new geography of technological interventions in India. I argue that these interventions are central to the reproduction of unequal power relations and difference in everyday life. The paper specifically analyses how caste‐based marginalities, as part of wider structures and processes of socio‐spatial racialisation, are reproduced through the mundane intertwining of ideological, techno‐material and embodied experiences of housing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi, I demonstrate how technological interventions in housing are imagined and used by dominant actors to maintain control over already marginalised lower‐caste communities. In doing so, the paper highlights how housing assumes the qualities of infrastructure for racialisation, in turn, bringing attention to how politics of differences and inequalities are central in the conception and operationalisation of smart urbanism.
