Description: In The Invention of Order, Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement--who travels, who settles, and who is excluded--becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity.
Review Quotes: "A critically important book, The Invention of Order offers a spatial reading of the modern/colonial world system, revealing the constitutive relations between the categories of peoples and the organization and representation of space. With lively examples, Deere fills in the large gaps left by Foucault, Harvey, Bachelard and other theorists of spatiality. The idea that a people control the meaning of their land had to be overcome for colonialist and capitalist dispossession, and this fight is far from over."--Linda Martín Alcoff, author of, Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self
"The Invention of Order presents a novel analysis of modern colonial projects, adding to current scholarship on the temporal and spatial significance of colonial conquest. Don Thomas Deere's treatment of how this spatiality gives rise to and shapes colonial frames of reason, subject-formation, and the body is vital for any study of both the singularity of modern forms of colonial violence as well as the articulation of the radical nature of decolonial alternatives."--Kris F. Sealey, author of, Creolizing the Nation