Don Thomas Deere, "The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space" (Duke UP, 2026)

About this episode

Don Thomas Deere discusses his book on the colonial origins of spatial organization and its impact on modern structures of knowledge and power.

I n The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space (Duke University Press, 2026), 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. Don Thomas Deere is Assistant Professor in the…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Don Thomas Deere

Topics covered

• colonialism
• spatial organization
• Indigenous populations
• urban development
• resistance geographies
• modernity

Keywords

• coloniality of space
• spatial control
• urban grid patterns
• trade routes
• Caribbean resistance
• modern structures
• knowledge and power

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Duke University Press, Texas A&M University, Wesleyan University, DePaul University, Cornell University

More episodes of New Books in Critical Theory

• Jeffrey R. Di Leo et al. eds., "Theory as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2025) · June 12, 2026 · 32 min
• Arlene W. Saxonhouse, "Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists" (U Notre Dame Press, 2026) · June 10, 2026 · 58 min
• Natalia Rogach Alexander, "Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey" (Columbia UP, 2025) · June 10, 2026 · 52 min
• Joanna Stalnaker, "The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death" (Yale UP, 2025) · June 9, 2026 · 1h 8m
• Javier Arbona-Homar, "Explosivity: Following What Remains" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) · June 8, 2026 · 1h 6m
• Christina Lord, "Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction" (Liverpool UP, 2023) · June 7, 2026 · 44 min