This introductory chapter begins by considering two general features of the politics of territory in modernity: the expectation that borders should be precisely defined as lines, and the central role of colonial legacies. The book centres on the relation between these two features. Four narratives about the global history of borders that the book seeks to engage with and modify are elaborated: first, colonial-inherited borders are generally remarkable for their vagueness; second, linear borders are originally and most properly a practice of sovereign states or nation-states; third, lines on maps determine politics; and fourth, linear borders were first practiced in Europe, then exported to the rest of the world through colonialism. The chapter outlines the argument and the rest of the book. At its most general level, the argument is that modern borders are distinct not because they express sovereignty but because of certain technical, apolitical practices.

In many parts of Africa, the mass production of printed texts began with Christian missions. Missionaries’ descriptions of African languages and their compilation of dictionaries were essential for the emergence of print cultures. However, missionary linguistics mirrored missionary politics. Two Protestant missionaries in Central Africa, one in Congo and the other in Malawi, differed in their views on both African languages and the European presence in Africa. Where Walter Henry Stapleton’s dictionary took an interest in colonial rule, David Clement Scott advanced dialogue in a radical vision for race relations. Both worked with widely spoken language forms, but the missionaries were driven by disparate motivations. Between them, the two dictionaries indicate considerable variation in the nineteenth-century missionary contributions to African print cultures. They, and the missionaries who compiled them, convey sharply divergent visions for African languages as contributions to human knowledge and imagination.

This chapter narrates the historical context that shaped the contemporary economic landscape of the Gulf states and critically examines the enduring impact of colonialism on the region’s economic fabric and how the entrenched “dual economic framework” imposed limitations on development. This chapter also sheds light on the emergence of resource nationalism as a transformative strategy for Gulf states to assert control over their natural resources and challenge this dependency. The creation of OPEC serves as a core moment in the realm of global energy politics, symbolizing a strategic move towards economic autonomy and the collective bargaining power of developing countries. Building upon this historical foundation, the chapter deconstructs the philosophical and theoretical frameworks that underpin development strategies during this era of rapid modernization in the Gulf and explores how Gulf policymakers creatively adapted these models to their unique socio-political and economic contexts, paving the way for their ascent as significant players in the global energy market.

The coda to the book reads the contemporary author Craig Santos Perez to reflect on the violence of US territory making and the role of literary language in reorganizing its effects. I provide a close reading of Perez’s from unincorporated territory and its orientation toward the modernism of Claude McKay. By reworking McKay, Perez makes a contribution to cartographic literature that helps to see the US map as a dialectical image, provisional and contingent as opposed to authoritative and final.

This notebook contains some of the ideas, ambitions, hopes, anxieties, interrogations, and fears that randomly or expectingly came to punctuate the writing of the previous chapters.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

This chapter explores the history of anticolonial sociology in Latin America between 1950 and 1970 with two case studies from the region: (a) the nationalist sociology promoted by Afro-Brazilian scholar Alberto Guerreiro Ramos (1915–1982) and (b) the critique of scientific colonialism advanced by Colombian Orlando Fals Borda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which led to a new form of social science methodology called Participatory-Action Research (PAR). Despite their differences, Ramos and Fals Borda shared a diagnosis of colonialism as a cultural and economic phenomenon that jeopardized the autonomous development of peripheral societies. While most postcolonial and decolonial scholars are skeptical about the democratizing potential of sociology, Fals Borda and Ramos demonstrate that it is possible to integrate a radical political position against colonialism into a rigorous form of sociology that does not reject the common heritage of the discipline.

William E. Hartmann and Joseph P. Gone use insights from Beatrice Medicine and Vine Deloria Jr., two luminaries in understanding how anthropology might better serve Indigenous peoples, as an evaluative framework to review five recent ethnographies on psychosocial well-being among Native Americans and three areas of Indigenous scholarship.Hartmann and Gone observe commonalities across areas of Indigenous scholarship and variation among ethnographic works in their degrees of theoretical abstraction, affordances for community control, and attention to relationality in knowledge production. Recommendations related to shifting the ethnographic gaze away from Indigenous peoples toward structures of power that constrain Indigenous self-determination are made in hopes of fostering more reciprocal relations between psychological anthropology and Native American peoples.

This chapter engages with the philosophy of liberation of the Algerian philosopher and anticolonial thinker Malek Bennabi (1905–1973). It argues that Bennabi’s decolonization theory aims at transforming the structural conditions of the colonized that made colonization even possible. The chapter lays out some of the significant aspects of Bennabi’s theory, focusing on how Bennabi conceived the problem of colonialism/colonizability and what answers he attempted to offer to overcome it. The chapter also examines Bennabi’s theory of society and its elementary aspects before explicating Bennabi’s politics of liberation that aims at transforming (and perfecting) both the means of transformation and the humans as its agents. Bennabi’s philosophy of liberation is not predicated on changing the political system or institutions but on the transformation of their sociopsychological infrastructures in which the behaviors of the individuals can be molded, making their social actions engender a different kind of politics.