The Invention of Order

Don Thomas Deere

ISBN 10: 1478032871 / ISBN 13: 9781478032878

Published by Duke University Press, US, 2026

About this Item

In The Invention of Order, 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.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781478032878

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Invention of Order
• Publisher: Duke University Press, US
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478032871
• ISBN 13: 9781478032878
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Dimensions: 15.24W x 5.08H x 22.86D centimeters 15.24 centimeters width by 5.08 centimeters height by 22.86 centimeters depth
• Weight: 445 grams

About this title

Synopsis

In The Invention of Order, 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.

About the Author

Don Thomas Deere is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University.