Interstitial and Abyssal geographies

Abyssal geography†

“…To reiterate, we are drawing out a distinctive abyssal analytic , which, we believe, reflects an important current juncture in critical thought. As in our last book, Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (Pugh & Chandler, 2021), 1 our concern is with how certain engagements with history, geography and culture become enabling for contemporary critical thought (see also Chandler & Pugh, 2022; Pugh, 2022; Pugh & Chandler, forthcoming).…”

“…The evacuation of the political sphere has had effects that have stretched well beyond the narrow confines of institutional politics, including the conceptual rejection of the modernist subject, the human, and the search for an alternative perspective in immanent understandings affirming the powers and excess of life and relation (Noys, 2012; Colebrook, 2014; 2021). While much critical work in the opening decades of the 2000s was driven by the promise of more constructive and affirmative relational approaches (Latour, 2004) and the turn to immanence, today there is a growing search for what may lie beyond the confines of the relational and ontological turns (Karera, 2019; Povinelli, 2021; Zalloua, 2021; Chandler & Pugh, 2022; Chipato & Chandler, 2022). We explore how, in this contemporary conjuncture, ‘abyssal’ work figuratively turns to the Caribbean not to find a world‐saving ontology, to help the West correct the errors of modern reasoning, but to learn from those who have long been said to lack ‘being’ and ontological security.…”

Filling the hole? On new geographies of the subsurface

“…Instead, opacity is located within a cautious and careful method of disclosure (see also Povinelli, 2021). Chandler and Pugh (2022, 2023) have also recently theorized the specific mode of “abyssal” critique, departing from Glissant’s work to name the work of such “abyssal geographies.” These, they argue, are generatively formed in part through negating universalizing ontologies for their foundation in antiblackness. Though one wonders whether it would be possible or even desirable given the specific orientation and location of such critique, an opportunity exists to emphasize the varieties of “ under ” at work in “abyssal geographies.” The abyssal could help us relate scholarship on subaqueous and subterranean zones with and the situated historic logics of coloniality and human exceptionalism which prop up a version of “Man” as resting atop these undercommons and the fugitive labors.…”

GIScience III: Questions of time

“…As Secor et al (2022) show in their analysis of expectations surrounding Iraqi resettlement in the US, the problem of futurity is one that partially rests on progressive narratives of dreams being realized. Furthermore, the promise of the future distracts from what Anderson et al (2020: 628–9) describe as “modern biopolitics” that carry “within it multiple temporal registers that express uneven and shifting economies of harm, suffering and insecurity in liberal societies.” It is these uneven temporalities that foreground the need to recognize the rigidity in our frameworks for handling time, such that these frameworks might become objects of analysis (Smith and Vasudevan 2017) and deconstruction (Chandler and Pugh 2022).…”