This article examines conflicting notions of political home or homeland (waṭan) in the early twentieth-century Western Indian Ocean. In a period of colonial consolidation and shifts in trans-oceanic mobility, determining political belonging took on urgency for both British officials and Omani intellectuals and migrants. This article examines how, in contrast to both anti-colonial nationalists and British colonial officials, homeland in Omani religious scholarship was neither bounded territorially nor articulated through origins or subjecthood. Yet, it was spatial, affective, and hierarchically determined. And, it was manifest, embodied, and performed in the daily requirements of prayer. Spatial but not territorial, necessary but personally, hierarchically, and affectively decided, this pious notion of homeland has for the most part been replaced by the nation-state form. Yet, legacies of attachment to waṭan outside the bounded territorial model occasionally surface, operating as a simultaneous, but not synonymous, expression of political and personal belonging.

This article examines the history of Haitian-owned freighters that have been trading between Haiti and the Miami River since the 1970s, how this shipping economy became racialized in ways that marked it and the river with a “threatening” Haitian Blackness, and how local government agencies, real estate developers, and law enforcement officials worked to remake the aesthetics of the river as something other than Haitian and Black. Projects to re-racialize the riverway played with the spurious surface-and-subsurface spatial logic of racial discourses more generally—that is, the mistaken but widely-held belief that visible, physical markers of race reveal hidden capacities and propensities. Policing that pushed Haitian commerce into an economy of containerization—a race- and class-marked shipping technology on the river—allowed the Haiti trade to “pass” as non-Haitian on a gentrifying waterway. Law enforcement programs that seized and sank Haitian freighters to create artificial reefs off the Florida coast bluewashed the river’s surface and its ethnoracially coded, “polluting” vessels by transforming them into subsurface, “White” recreational ecologies. These processes reveal how politically fraught contests over racialization recruit layered material environments as part of larger projects of policing, re-racialization, and urban renewal. In exploring this history, the article pushes against arguments from some quarters for a “post-critical” turn by demonstrating that reflexive critique, with its focus on the hidden and the submerged, remains necessary for grasping the ways racialization processes operate through structures of material and discursive layering.

The article explores how the British Caribbean turned into an unlikely refuge for intercolonial escapees from slavery in the 1820s and 1830s. During this period, hundreds of enslaved men and women fled from French, Danish, and Dutch Caribbean colonies into British territories and entered in intense, and often contentious, encounters with low-ranking officials on the ground. The article examines how these individuals made use of legal ambiguities and loopholes in British slave trade abolition, thereby resetting, reinterpreting, and broadening the meaning and scope of freedom granted under it. The consequences of their actions were far-reaching and often uncontrollable, as they carved out a legal grey zone that created, in practice, a quasi-free-soil sanctuary in the heart of Britain’s planation complex. For more than a decade, local assemblies and officials, legal experts, British and foreign planters and their lobbies, foreign diplomats and British politicians grappled to close this grey zone. As it reincorporates enslaved fugitives in the history of state-sponsored antislavery, the article also shows how the case of these fugitives triggered a fierce debate about the essential parameters of imperial governance around 1800. This debate involved the renegotiation of the boundaries of freedom and slavery, and of subjecthood and (un)belonging. It gave rise to crucial questions related to imperial governance, including the scope of executive power and the challenge of coordinating imperial and colonial law as part of one coherent legal space. Because it involved other empires, the fugitives’ case also highlighted the connections between antislavery, sovereignty, and inter-state law.

This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was an effort to plant American rootstocks, which were relatively resistant. The Ottoman response to phylloxera offers another example of the ways in which the alleged “sick man of Europe” was actually much more dynamic than its detractors insisted. The invocation of phylloxera moreover became a way for post-Ottoman states like Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia to protect their national grape economies. The article’s broader analysis explains how the shared environment of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean incubated both the spread of phylloxera and—in the protectionist legal regimes formed in response—the architecture of the region’s peculiarly integrated disconnection. The article closes by considering the agriculture of displacement amidst the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, and how it further entrenched these dynamics as migrants took vines with them and planted them in the remarkably similar environments of their new national homes.

The article tells the story of the remains of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who were killed in Ekaterinburg in 1918, discovered in 1979, found again in 1991, solemnly buried in 1998, and canonized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. Thoroughly researched in the cause of official criminal investigation and identified with genetic tests in several labs in Russia and abroad, the royal remains have not been recognized by the Church. The failure to reach a consensus on the veracity of the remains of the Romanovs occurred in parallel with the inability to decide what to do with the mummified body of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, a contemporary of Nicholas II who has been kept in a mausoleum in the Red Square since the 1920s. Though, after 1991, voices have been raised for removing his body from this symbolic center of the country, no consensus has been reached so far as to where to move it and why. Revisiting Verdery’s famous work, the present article argues that such a movement necessitates a political commitment to voicing new notions of belonging and citizenship. The liminal status of these two bodies proves that the contemporary state in Russia is a continuation of both the Soviet and imperial state programs, not a new political structure like other post-socialist countries. Based on the works by Kantorowicz and Cherniavsky, this research develops the concept of popular theopolitics and aims to examine how people’s political and religious ontologies make use of the Tsar’s image.

One of the chief debates in the academic study of transhumanism is whether or not this emergent movement that advocates for the technological overcoming of the limits of humanity should be considered religious in nature. This question stems from the fact that, while the vast majority of transhumanists explicitly reject established religion, elements of transhumanism seem strikingly similar to Christian eschatology. This article explores this question by asking how the ontology of an avowedly religious transhumanist movement, the Mormon Transhumanist Association, differs from the informatic ontology identified in secular transhumanism. It shows how contemporary Mormon Transhumanist imaginings of various forms of technological resurrection are informed by the infrastructure and materialist ontology associated with the Mormon practice of “Proxy baptisms” (otherwise known as baptisms for the dead) and other initiatory rituals conducted by proxy on behalf of the deceased. This influence suggests that, at least in this case, there are identifiable differences between secular transhumanism and religious transhumanism that complicate any easy reading of secular transhumanism as being crypto-religion.

The Greek anti-Ottoman revolt in the 1820s brought increased suspicion among the empire’s ruling circles toward not only Greeks but non-Muslim subjects in general. This sparked government security measures in Istanbul, home to substantial Christian and Jewish populations. This article examines such measures intended to bring non-Muslim subjects under control, and the overall impact the Greek revolt had on the Ottoman approach to its subjects. It argues that the revolt catalyzed changes in the state’s attitude toward population surveillance and its treatment of non-Muslims. When the empire felt the need to bring non-Muslims under control, a major challenge was how to verify and vouch for the latter’s identity, since they deemed Muslim officials incapable of doing so. Thus, though they were suspicious of non-Muslims, they actively used the religious authorities of their communities to implement various security measures, including the creation of a population record and the introduction of internal passports. At the same time, religious authorities found it essential to demonstrate their and their community’s pro-Ottoman position by cooperating with the state in its efforts to find enemies within. Incorporation of non-Muslim religious authorities into imperial governance led to official recognition of the representatives of smaller non-Muslim groups, including Latin subjects, Armenian Catholics, and Jews. The result was a standardization of non-Muslim communities with officially recognized representatives before the government.

Japan is the only place in the world where bananas are marketed and priced by cultivation altitude. In the late 1980s, plantation managers sourcing the fruit from the southern Philippine region of Mindanao discovered a paradigm-shifting formula: the higher up one grew, the sweeter the bananas became. And the sweeter the bananas were, the closer they were to replicating the taste of colonial Taiwanese bananas, lost in the switch to Philippine supply. This paper offers the first transnational history of the banana’s transition along the spectrum from a fungible commodity to a nonfungible product in the Asia-Pacific region. Engaging critical studies of commodities and plantations, it takes fungibility as the characteristic that makes goods interchangeable and as the principle that renders landscape and labor as empty vessels open to the projection of others’ desires. The paper argues that the introduction of kōchi saibai banana or “highland cultivated bananas” for the Japanese market brought not the reversal of fungible life to the Philippine highlands but rather its continuation. In so doing, this work critiques conceptual frameworks that understand fungibility through the idioms of liquidification and immateriality. Instead, it proposes a topographical approach, which sees processes of fungibilization as operating through the profoundly material rearrangement of human and environmental communities. By focusing on the tensions between fungibility and differentiation, this paper offers an account of both an idiosyncratic marketing strategy particular to the Philippines and Japan, and a dynamic that pervades the creation of all commodities under capitalism.

Scholars of various backgrounds have noted how societies across the globe have come to rely on more and more policing and incarceration since the late 1970s. To date, however, detailed analyses of the causes and consequences of this “punitive turn” have been limited to the Global North, with the vast majority of studies focused on the expansion of states’ capacity for violence. This article offers a corrective to the global study of the punitive turn by tracing the rise of South Africa’s private security industry from its inception in the late apartheid period to its current position as one of the largest of its kind in the world. Using newspaper reports, archival material from the apartheid state’s security apparatus, and ethnographic interviews of former and current members of the security industry, it shows how counterinsurgency doctrine, civil war, and deindustrialization shaped South Africa’s punitive turn, precipitating a process where violence was devolved from the state to private actors, including local militias, vigilante groups, and private security firms. This process, it is argued, is far from anomalous, and should be seen as a paradigm for the way the post-1970s punitive turn has unfolded in the majority of the world.