A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
"Empire’s Labor" builds an explicitly spatial theory of empire: it foregrounds how empire-building has been grounded in the geographical management of bodies, populations, and circulations in the intimate spaces of everyday life.
Islamophobia in India works to enable violence, subjugate, and intimidate Muslims as a threat to the nation, in several different registers — Indian Muslims as suspect citizens; Kashmiri Muslims as emphatically problematic always already terrorist Muslims; Muslim refugees such as Rohingyas as “invasive pests”; and the collective neighboring Muslim nation-state of Pakistan as an existential enemy.
What makes the case in Northwest China unique is that the digital enclosure of Uyghur and Kazakh space also harnesses state power and private textile manufacturers to hold them in place in factories—producing a permanent underclass of ethno-racial minority industrial workers. Rather than banishing populations to human warehousing spaces such as peripheral ghettos or prisons, in this context terror capitalism works to explicitly “reeducate” the population as industrial workers and implement a forced labor regime.
We might think of Google as the East India Company of the twenty-first century, but where Google is both the corporation of frontier digital capitalism and the missionary endeavoring to convert the masses to digital literacy, activity and ideology.