Unsettling the Imperial Sciences

Latitudes of climates and constitutions, like the allied myth of continents and races, have a deep and persistent past within European and US imperial discourses both as language and ideology. Taxonomies that name, classify, and attribute natures to lands, waters, climates, plants, animals, and peoples discipline, interpellate, and exert dominion over them. Those sciences create subjects, and in their imposition of order and hierarchies, they constitute the imperial project. Conversely, reconstituting space by deconstructing the racialized, gendered, and sexualized attributions of islands and continents, the tropical and temperate zones can unsettle the imperial order and endanger the privileges and poverties they sustain. Toward that end, this essay suggests a remapping of our Earth according to tectonic geographies, in their plenitude inclusive of both lands and waters and their biotic communities and their ceaseless movements and engagements.