The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) exists as a lonely island in a sea of corporate sugarcane. Standing at the gates of CIAT outside Palmira, Colombia, one absorbs the contrast between the research orientation of the CGIAR’s global food system model and the reality of corporate monoculture. This chapter situates CIAT’s history globally and locally. It introduces Colombian precursors, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Colombian Agricultural Program (1950–64), and the pivot to globally oriented international agricultural research centres in the 1960s. It contextualizes how CIAT came into existence amid broader Cold War and Green Revolution transitions. Just as scholars of the Colombian conflict have examined the effect of “deterritorialization” in the intensification of conflict, the chapter shows how the CGIAR network further internationalized and detached agricultural science from local contexts and applications. Paradoxically, despite the Green Revolution’s well-known Cold War geopolitical aspects, the creation of CIAT and CGIAR inadvertently contributed to the specific geographic, political, and economic conditions that fed armed conflict in Colombia.

From the Latin American Decolonial Environmental Thought (LDET) contributions, environmental violence can be defined as the deterritorialization of life expressed as the acceleration of the entropic dynamics of the biosphere, the loss of cultural (ontological) diversity of the world, and the transformation of nature into an external and commodifiable thing. This chapter presents the content of environmental violence as the deterritorialization of life. It begins by exposing the notion of environmental conflict and violence in the LDET. Then, this chapter shows four knowledge-power strategies that illustrate four emphases among decolonial thought and, at the same time, the critical dimensions to understand environmental violence sources. These emphases and dimensions are: (a) the social reappropriation of nature that emphasizes the politics of cultural difference; (b) the re-enchantment of the world, which emphasizes the politics of affect; (c) EcoSimia, a concept which emphasizes the difference-diversity of forms of production; and (d) peace as a restitution of the collective functions of territory, which emphasizes territorial difference. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the implications of LDET to understand environmental violence by arguing that the ultimate political ally to stopping violence is nature.

Quayson’s chapter compares the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1904 with the real-life multilingual city of Accra, Ghana. In these twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts, Quayson finds different forms of epic dreaming and material work. From among these celebrations of the kinetic aspects of urban life, he focuses on advertising billboards and personal slogans and pronouncements, arguing that these slogans and Joyce’s interior linguistic landscape in Ulysses exemplify what Deleuze and Guattari have described as the deterritorialization of language. Quayson draws on these theorists to offer a new way of understanding a central problem of language in Joyce’s writing – the self-interlocution and the relations between external stimuli and internal activities of the mind – and the nature of the Accra streetscape, in which vehicle slogans and inscriptions turn oral discourse into a written text, transforming stigmatized terms of African indigenous languages into co-creative dimensions of English discourse.

In this chapter, I argue that Asian American modernists Yone Noguchi, Sadakichi Hartmann, and José Garcia Villa experimented with the orientalist styles that were made popular by poets Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. Writing during the period of Asian exclusion in the USA (1882-1946), these three poets responded to the ideological contradictions between elitism and universalism that were present in Whitman’s and Pound’s poetry by calling for a more democratic and egalitarian America. Noguchi’s and Hartmann’s Japanese American haiku and tanka and Villa’s style of “reversed consonance” — “a new method of rhyming…which has never been used in the history of English poetry” — also articulate a queer diaspora that exposes heteronormative structures of power and calls on the USA to be more inclusive of racial and gay others. They do so by using nonbinary motifs in their poetry which critique the binary structure of racial exclusion: native/foreign. These nonbinary motifs are what theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “rhizomatic,” which is a theoretic concept that organizes ideas through nonhierarchical multiplicities. The rhizomes of their poetry are composed of “deterritorializing” the normativity of Asian exclusion and heterosexuality and “reterritorializing” the American landscape through inclusion. Despite their politics of inclusion, their works problematically objectify women.

Philip Jessup correctly observed sixty years ago that multinational corporate activity created new challenges for nation-states and their territorially based rules for jurisdiction, choice of law, and judgment recognitions. Those challenges are exponentially more difficult in the 21st century because electronic data—everything from e-mails and text messages to Facebook and Instagram posts to Twitter pronouncements to drone warfare data to search algorithms to financial transactions to cloud data storage—travel around the globe with little relationship to physical territory. In addition, all of this data is often in the custody and control of data intermediaries. Three important consequences flow from this ubiquitous technology-enabled, data-driven global societal activity. First, the territorial location of data becomes increasingly arbitrary and substantively unimportant. Second, territorially based courts (or law enforcement authorities generally) will often be unable to easily enforce their decisions because those decisions require cooperation from relevant actors in far-flung communities. Third, governmental and judicial authorities are increasingly turning to multinational corporate data intermediaries to carry out and enforce their orders because only those companies have sufficient global reach to make legal rulings effective.