Medieval romance, from the perspective of critical race studies (CRS), justifies medieval imperial expansion. Medieval romances frame themselves as celebrating the culture of elite knights and ladies by imagining their borders as inhabited by dangerous people who must be defeated and eliminated, with the result that enemy territories are subsumed into the territories of the elite knight. From this viewpoint, medieval romance uses chivalry to define who is accepted within the boundaries and who is left out of that formation. By studying differing patters of dehumanization in medieval romance with a focus on Old French and Middle Welsh texts, the chapter shows some examples of the ways that the genre of romance makes race and of how the repercussions of making race further systems of oppression. The chapter’s aims, then, are to use CRS to show a possible form of analyzing race in medieval romance.

The Conclusion turns to the end of the seventeenth century, when Mexico and the Caribbean underwent a political realignment. In the Caribbean, ascendant European empires began to construct the monocultures that have come to dominate the study of Caribbean history. Meanwhile, in the mainland, renewed interest in New Spain’s northern frontier initiated a new series of cultural encounters and violent contests that signal the origin of borderlands history. While it is tempting to see in these two developments the disintegration of the Mexican-Caribbean world, I argue that the end of the seventeenth century was not an unmaking but a remaking. As Spanish power in the Caribbean declined, bonds between remaining Spanish island and mainland settlements strengthened. At the same time, Veracruz and the Caribbean both played an important role in the construction of Mexico’s northern border and the Caribbean’s new economic and political relationships. In this, the study points forward to the development of new material relationships that informed the social and cultural possibilities of people in Mexico’s Gulf Coast and the Caribbean Islands into the eighteenth century.

The Introduction explains the history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic and the evolution of the border between the two from the colonial period through the twentieth century. It focuses on the transformation of the border that began with the US occupation and culminated in the genocidal policy of Trujillo. The Introduction presents the ways in which Trujillo’s government confronted the contradictory problem posed by a population that the state recognized as Dominican citizens, but that the state rejected as ethnically and racially undesireable. It demonstrates that the perpetrators of the 1937 Haitian Massacre understood that they were unleashing violence against their own citizens, and not only immigrants and squatters. It considers the 1937 Haitian Massacre in light of its remarkable absence within the evolving field of genocide studies, as well as its comparative significance in relationship to other twentieth-century histories of anti-Black violence in the Americas.

This chapter starts off by discussing the roots of historical anthropology in ‘people’s history’ before the linguistic turn. It then traces the journey from the history workshop movements of the 1960s and 1970s to historical anthropology, focusing on European and Indian groups (the Subaltern Studies Group). It highlights the work of Ann Laura Stoler as an example of how historical anthropology led to new and exciting perspectives in historical writing with deep implications for the deconstruction of historical identities. Historical anthropologists brought with them a concern for the everyday, diversity, performance and resistance and they raised an awareness of the undeterminedness of the past. They also emphasised how collective identities were rooted in constructions of culture. Relating cultural values to practices, diverse theories of the everday examined different structures of power and the agency of ordinary people in resisting and re-appropriating these structures of power. Treating culture as fluid, plural and changing, it also contributed to the de-essentialisation of human identities. Emphasising mimetic processes and the interrelationship of diverse mimetically produced images, historical anthropology also contributed to the decentring of Western perspectives.

This constellation brings together two essays that address the questions ‘Where is Poland?’ and ‘What is Poland?’ Krzysztof Zajas argues that there is no such thing as one Polish culture, while showing how constructions of the ‘centre’, be it in the form of ‘Polishness’ or ‘cultural achievements’, not only homogenize but mask the work of Polonization and colonization in its attempts to subordinate Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian lands. Dorota Sajewska shows how after 1989 two narratives re-emerge simultaneously, the harmed Slavic subaltern and an interest in multicultural heritage paired with colonial influence in the borderlands. While she uses Stanislaw Wyspianski to constellate the local and transnational in order to position Poland within a global cultural archive, Sajewska’s primary focus is on racialized forms of violence and the sideways or peripheral glance at European history that allows new understandings of epistemological traditions in historiography and the decolonisation of knowledge production.

Since 2015, over five million Venezuelans have fled their country in an attempt to survive the near collapse of the country’s economy. A majority of these migrants have relocated to geographically proximate countries in Latin America, and as such, millions have been forced to transit through the Colombian–Venezuelan borderlands in order to arrive at their final destination. Extending from the Amazon to the Caribbean, this vast binational region plays host to a myriad of state and armed non-state actors who compete and collaborate for control of resources, people, and territory. Money plays an important role for Venezuelan migrants who transit through or settle in the borderlands. Their access to money, or lack thereof, dictates how and where they enter, transit through, and ultimately settle in Colombia or beyond. Even for those migrants lacking financial any meaningful resources, both Colombian and Venezuelan authorities and other armed non-state actors in the borderlands have found a variety of ways to regulate, victimize, and profit from their entry, settlement, and incorporation into local informal economies.

This chapter focuses on a single specific node that is of significance for the activities of many of the traders discussed in this book – the Chinese international trade city of Yiwu. It documents differences in the expectations that Chinese policymakers and commodity traders have of Yiwu’s status as an inter-Asian commercial node. City planners in Yiwu have sought to enhance Ythe city’s international renown as a centre for the global trade in ‘small commodities’. Thousands of international traders working in Yiwu – including those from Afghanistan who are the focus of this book – have played an active and visible role in the city’s commercial dynamics since the mid-1990s in particular. Far from seeing Yiwu solely as a commercial infrastructure hub, however, the traders emphasise their emotional and cultural attachments to the city. The traders also believe that the manifold contributions they have made to Yiwu’s development entitles them to a settled place in the city’s future. The chapter explores the ways in which tensions between these two different perspectives on Yiwu’s status as an inter-Asian commercial node play out in in the traders’ experiences of daily life in the city.

Sea of Cortez is part travelogue and part marine biology textbook that Steinbeck coauthored with his friend Ed Ricketts. This chapter examines Steinbeck’s interest in science, in species, and in the possibility of a shift in human consciousness offered by his encounter with Mexico. Placing Steinbeck’s book in the context of theories of the borderland and ideas of the Global South, together with his education in biology and “non-teleological thinking” gained from Ricketts, we uncover Steinbeck’s ecological vision that rejects progressive, goal-directed thinking. Sea of Cortez imagines an ideal of humanity, in harmony with its environment, found in moments of deep observation and passive description of other species. This descriptive method enables a complete understanding of other animals, an ecological sense of species interrelationship, and the possibility for new ways of being on the planet in the face of human extinction. The chapter ends by tracing Steinbeck’s understanding of Mexico’s indigenous population, which offers the potential of a holisitc, non-teleological existence, even as Steinbeck cannot fully transcend the barriers and prejudices of race.

The present state of the locations of contemporary Latina/o poetry is destabilizing. Latina/o literary legacy, tracing the lines from heritage nationalities to anti-US imperialist ancestors to civil rights–era forebears and into the twenty-first century, has always been rooted in place. Latina/o life in the United States, on the cusp of the third decade of this century, is one that accepts the fact that where we are from is more and more an internalized state of being. Bonafide Rojas’s Notes on the Return to the Island reflects a post-transnational diasporic Puerto Rican identity in which contact zones, not nationality, are sovereign. Hugo García Manríquez’s conceptualist book Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement offers radical experimentation in both aesthetics and geopolitics. Valerie Martínez’s Each and Her is rooted in the borderlands of Ciudad Juárez. Francisco Aragón’s “To Madrid” examines the touristic shame of a Latina/o visiting an ancestral place. Aracelis Girmay’s debut collection Teeth (2007) situates further aspects of the complexity of touristic experience into a range of locales. The work of Rodrigo Toscano and Edwin Torres embodies a latinxfuturism speculating on what it will mean to be Latina/o.