(Post)Colonial Ports: Place and (Non)Place in the Ecotone

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Jill Didur (Concordia University, Canada) Nalini Mohabir (Concordia University, Canada)

(Post)Colonial Ports

Place and (Non)Place in the Ecotone

Jill Didur (Concordia University, Canada), Nalini Mohabir (Concordia University, Canada)

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English

Routledge
05 May 2025

Literary studies: post-colonial literature; Social & cultural history; Industrialisation & industrial history; Colonialism & imperialism; Cultural studies

Series: Routledge Studies in Modern History

This book examines the role of (post)colonial ports in creating and shaping the ecotonal, cultural, historical, material, environmental, socio-political, and economic contexts in formerly colonized regions, spanning the Caribbean, Africa, North America, Europe, and the Pacific.

The essays assess the role that literature, visual culture, architecture, archives, and ethnography can play in enriching our understanding of the complex histories of ports and port cities. They present the relation between ports and colonial infrastructure such as immigration checkpoints, detention centers, mines, plantations, shipping containers, canals, sewers, and rivers, and their impact on human and more-than-human environments. The volume approaches (post)colonial ports through the “ecotone,” a concept borrowed from geography and ecology to describe a transition zone where two biological communities meet and mix—such as a forest and a grassland—to bring attention to port (non)spaces as a hinge between their environments, communities, and colonial infrastructure. It foregrounds postcolonial and decolonial approaches to the ecotone to draw attention to the cultural, ecological, and geographical dynamics that inform the social fabric of contemporary ports and port cities in the wake of the empire.

This volume is aimed at scholars and postgraduates across disciplines such as literature, geography, fine arts, cultural studies, and history.

Edited by: Jill Didur (Concordia University Canada), Nalini Mohabir (Concordia University, Canada)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 660g
ISBN: 9781032427195
ISBN 10: 1032427191
Series: Routledge Studies in Modern History
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 05 May 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Introduction: Wading into ‘the Wake’ Section 1: Trans-Port 1. ‘Fantasy in the Hold’: The Logistics of Container Architecture, Transivity, and Queer Port Urbanisms 2. The Azulejo as Symbol of Colonial Power Structures: A Deconstruction Through Sugar and Art 3. Life and Death in the Port: Petromodernity and Fossil Capital in Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt 4. Lost in Transit: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison Section 2: Passages, Partings, Terminus 5. Placing and Dis/placing the Port: Towards a Critical Literary Geography of the Caribbean Port 6. Georgetown: Ecotonal Lessons of ‘Secret Histories’ 7. Going Against the Flow: Customs and Apartheid Censorship 8. Pèpè Ports: Haitian Women’s Labour and Resistant Mobility in Cap-Haïtien’s Second-hand Clothing Trade Section 3: Environmental Insecurities and Flows of Power 9. Where the Ozama Meets the Caribbean Sea: Dominican Art and Social Advocacy in the Ecotone 10. The Frontier and the Wasteland: 21st Century Gentrification Landscapes in Saint-Henri, Montreal 11. Watery Places and Relations: The Burial of a River and Modern Wasting Practices 12. Precious Water and Urban Practices in Ondjaki’s Transparent City

Jill Didur is a Professor in English at Concordia University, Montreal. She is co-editor of Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015) and author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (2006). Her research focuses on postcolonial approaches to understanding sustainability and the Anthropocene. Nalini Mohabir is an Associate Professor in Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University, Montreal. She teaches in the fields of feminist and postcolonial migration geographies. Her work has appeared in several journals including Small Axe, Habitat International, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, and Interventions.