Unsettling Geographies (Antiblackness, Gendered Violence, and Indigenous Dispossession in Guyana)

Unsettling Geographies offers an original approach to examining Guyana’s post-independence political landscape, tracing how colonial imaginaries of frontier extraction—the plantation and the bush—haunt everyday life. From an embodied ethnographic attunement to the erasure of Indigenous political life and the racialized intimacies that transgress partitioned geographies of the coastland and hinterland, Shanya Cordis puts forth what she calls “relational difference,” a feminist framework that illuminates the co-constitutive logics of Indigenous dispossession, antiblackness, and gendered violence that undergird capital. She critically interrogates state and party politics that promise the good life yet situate Indigenous peoples and working-class Afro- and Indo-Guyanese as sacrifices to developmentalism’s seemingly progressive arc. These colonial logics operate through the gendered and sexualized positioning of Amerindian, African, and Indian bodies under the plantation system, recognition policies, and the appropriation and economic management of Indigenous territories that inform contemporary land relations. Formulating relational difference as a means to render visible interlocking relations of power, Cordis disrupts the mirage of political parties and the state as the arbiters of redress, gesturing toward liberatory possibilities and relational ways of being.