Nikki Hessell’s “Romantic Poetry and Constructions of Indigeneity” understands the Romantic racialization of Indigenous peoples as means of denying these groups sovereignty. The trope of the Indian in representative European texts is, by this reading, complicit with the “desire to own, define, and administer everything.” By reading Romantic poetry for its recurring tropes, however, we can also locate the Romantic tradition in the work of those generally excluded from conversations about Romanticism. Thus Hessell reads Romanticism in the works of Indigenous poets Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe) and John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee). This is not merely a matter of expanding the Romantic canon; rather, by centering those whose presence in Romantic literature has generally been restricted to object of interest, Hessell shows that those who have been used as tropes are wielders of Romantic tropes in their own right.

Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning and deployment of the novel (and controversial) category of “natives” of a pueblo, widespread throughout the Spanish Atlantic world, to bolster the plaintiffs’ claims to freedom and other rights. The chapter explores both the Spanish and Indigenous traditions that informed the category of nativeness (naturaleza) used in the court briefs and examines their implications for a community of Afro descendant and other racially mixed subjects. The chapter compares the unconventional standing of El Cobre with that of the Indian pueblos of El Caney and Jiguaní in the island’s eastern region to explore the controversial claims to Indian ancestry.

Taking seriously other ways that languages can be understood is of significance for both practical and political reasons. If language revival or other applied projects need practical theories of language, they need to be drawn from concerned communities rather than imported from elsewhere. For many Indigenous people, language is deeply connected to land, or what is commonly known as Country in Australia, which can include not only earth, dwellings and place but also water, animals, wind and other beings. Language within these ways of thinking is not connected primarily to people but to land or Country. It is because these ways of thinking about language are so different from a consideration of language as structure, as object, as separate from people and the world, that many language revival projects have struggled. As long as Indigenous languages are thought of in terms of non-Indigenous ontologies, there will always be at best misunderstanding. On these grounds, Indigenous language activists have called for local control of language reclamation projects and the need to decolonize what is meant by language.

“The Black Body in Nature” considers writers who, in their critical and imaginative work, map the contours of an African American nature writing tradition. In this environmental canon, authors persistently attend to the violence associated with the outdoors, lurking in forests, woods, and other secluded areas.These geographies, while environmentally rich, can be threatening spaces, isolated and hostile.Yet, as the story of birder Christian Cooper attests, menacing areas needn’t always be sheltered, but are manifest in city streets, urban parks, and brightly lit neighborhoods. The African American environmental tradition is nuanced and, as such, the experience of danger and disenfranchisement is counterpointed by an equally strong and persistent affiliation with the natural world that offers, for some, a measure of relief from structural forms of oppression.Situated at the nexus of race and ecocritical thought, this chapter considers the complicated positionality of the Black body in nature through the lens of exile and belonging.

Men’s and women’s work fueled the increasingly sophisticated goods Aztecs produced and the large amounts of trade conducted and tribute paid by Aztecs. While much labor was performed at the household level, workshops grew in number. Craft production became more complex as population increased, political organization became more elaborate, and demand for goods increased. The increasing output of producers and growing number of commercial endeavors by merchants underwrote an increasingly rigid hierarchy. Women’s cooking and weaving fed and clothed ordinary families, Aztec armies, and royal palaces. The special province of women of all social levels, weaving created the most common and among the most valuable of tribute items, woven cloth. Other important forms of production included mining obsidian and making it into tools. Pottery production was crucial for cooking, eating, and carrying and using water among other uses. Both food producers and craftspeople, often one and the same, sold their wares in local markets. Economic descriptions often focus on long-distance trading by the pochteca and oztomeca (long-distance and spying merchants), but trading ranged from producer-sellers, selling goods in local marketplaces to the more illustrious pochteca and oztomeca. Those merchants traveled to distant regions to obtain luxury goods.

Recent discussions in Irish geopolitics have often been coded in spatial language, particularly in the recurring motif of soil. For instance, Ireland was the last country in Europe to grant citizenship on the basis of jus soli (“right of soil”) until the 2004 referendum made citizenship determined by the nationality of one’s parents (jus sanguinis or “right of blood”). Or to take a more recent example: one of the great dangers posed by Brexit is the possibility of creating a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This essay traces how the motif of soil has been central to conceptions of Irish national and racial identity, from The Nation’s famed motto, “To foster a public opinion and make it racy of the soil,” to Seamus Heaney’s infamous bog poems, which wrestle with themes of kinship, lineage, and soil. I argue that such spatial language must be read as more than just figurative and instead as revealing the material relationships between race, place, and geopolitics, which have been and will continue to be crucial to Ireland’s global identity.

Chapter 5 explores the relationship between plunder, property-making, and state power. Focusing on the struggle against the destruction of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, it argues that capital from its inception has operated by turning land into objects that can be owned, appropriated, and sold for profit: a process that, following Traci Brynne Voyles, I call wastelanding. By examining the role of state violence in extractivist projects, the chapter develops a critique of environmentalist initiatives premised on reforming, seizing, and ‘greening’ the state. Instead, it theorises land-based struggles against mega-dams, mines, plantations, oil fields, pipelines, and other extractive projects as part of a wider antipolitical project of refusal.

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, rapid demographic and economic growth among the settler colonial population of British America drew the attention of competing European empires to the potential wealth of the continent. By the 1750s, large-scale imperial warfare had broken out, a contest for control of these future riches. Over the next six decades, this conflict would evolve into a multi-sided civil war, drawing the continent’s indigenous peoples and settler colonists into the struggle. At the revolution’s beginning, circa 1754, the resources of North America lay mainly in the hands of indigenous people, distributed across hundreds of polities, while three European empires held footholds of varying size and strength, mainly on the continent’s edges. At its end, circa 1814, a single confederated nation, created out of wars fought to control America’s resources, and led by the children of empire, was positioned to take the whole for itself. The transformation included a new form of government and political economy which concentrated power in the hands of American citizens under a constitution designed to promote endless economic growth. The revolution’s outcome set a path for the continent’s future and projected an implicit vision of a new form of global empire.

Chapter 5 examines the EPRDF’s changing approach to agricultural development and the agrarian question. The EPRDF’s initial strategy was rooted in the TPLF’s focus on the peasant majority as its political base. The government sought to secure the acquiescence of the peasantry through the distribution of land, while agricultural inputs would raise agricultural productivity and generate a surplus that could finance industrial expansion, creating mass employment and alleviating pressure on rural land. The political crises of the early 2000s forced a re-evaluation of this agriculture-first approach, however. Faced with growing land shortages, the government sought to raise productivity at the cost of inequality and differentiation. The chapter examines, first, the government’s focus on high potential smallholders; and, second, the selective expropriation of peasant producers to make way for agricultural investments. While this strategy ultimately delivered rising agricultural productivity, a combination of population growth, displacement for investments and growing market forces eroded the main means of mass distribution and political control – access to land.

The EPRDF sought to delay urbanisation until it had delivered industrialisation as a means of preventing the political instability that it feared would accompany mass urban unemployment. However, faced with a growing urban population and urban political opposition in the early 2000s, the EPRDF brought urban areas to the centre of its development strategy. The ‘developmental state’ used control of finance and land to direct investment to industry, construction and infrastructure, much of which was located in urban centres. This chapter examines how the state’s efforts to accelerate structural transformation through urban development exacerbated the emerging distributive crisis resulting from the shortage of land and employment. Analysis focuses on case studies of Adama – one of the largest secondary cities – and the capital, Addis Ababa. State expropriation of peasants to make way for urban development exacerbated demographic factors that were already undermining land access. Urbanisation constituted a highly visible expression of the inequality of the ‘developmental state’, which, when overlaid on historically embedded ethnic divisions in Addis Ababa, proved an explosive combination.

The Conclusion recaps the book’s contributions and complements Chapter 5’s account of anti-imperial popular sovereignty by theorizing solidarity among the multiple positionalities covered in the book (Indigenous, settler, slave, forced refugee, diaspora settler, migrant settler, and other statuses). These statuses do not make the constitution of a people impossible but make the interrelations between these subjects the core of the “whole” we conceptualize. These interrelations include linkages with nature, which popular sovereignty leaves outside of its purview. An “ecological popular sovereignty” corrects this by recognizing the essential dependence of communities on nature, requiring relations of reciprocity and care toward nature. Joining anti-imperial and ecological as modifiers of popular sovereignty allows for its theorization without actively obscuring its material underpinnings. In particular, this way of theorizing popular sovereignty shifts the meaning of settler from an identity to a way of relating to other humans and to land, and provides parameters for evaluating political action for their (in)justice implications. This recasting presupposes a radical critique of private ownership of land, because capitalism’s right to charge humans for the right to occupy the earth sacrifices constructive relations with land and the attendant social relationalities.

This chapter joins empirical research with theoretical reflections in order to explore the formation of post-emancipation narratives and memories in Brazil’s slaveholding southeast. It is possible, in that region, to reintegrate the histories of freedom, control, and autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. In various archives and other historical sources, we can find inscribed – albeit in multivocal form – important intersections in the histories of land, labor, mobility, migration, control, and power. Even though planters sought to maintain freedpeople on the plantations where they had long worked as slaves, freedpeople’s pursuit of autonomy, in the form of control over the rhythms of work and access to land, eventually changed the geography of labor in those areas. In that sense, their experience was common to many societies across the Americas after abolition.

This chapter traces the turn in diasporic thought, particularly in the settler nations of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States, toward engagement with the settler colonial histories of dispossession that were a condition of possibility for our arrivals here. It develops brief close readings of literary texts by Black, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous writers as a way to show how the entanglement of Indigenous and diasporic struggles for justice and transformation might be inhabited and mobilized. At stake, this chapter argues, is the possibility of imagining other worlds than the modernities that were born in the conjunction of Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery, worlds shaped by better, more sustaining (and sustainable) practices for relating with human and nonhuman others, including the land itself.