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

About this episode

Don Thomas Deere discusses 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

Guest: Don Thomas Deere

Topics covered

• colonialism
• spatial organization
• urban studies
• resistance
• Caribbean studies
• knowledge and power

Keywords

• coloniality of space
• urban grid patterns
• Indigenous populations
• African populations
• trade routes
• geographies of resistance
• modernity

Mentioned in this episode

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

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