(Post)Colonial Ports: Place and (Non)Place in the Ecotone

This book examines the role of (post)colonial ports in creating and shaping the ecotonal, cultural, historical, material, environmental, socio-political, and economic contexts in formerly colonized regions, spanning the Caribbean, Africa, North America, Europe, and the Pacific.

The essays assess the role that literature, visual culture, architecture, archives, and ethnography can play in enriching our understanding of the complex histories of ports and port cities. They present the relation between ports and colonial infrastructure such as immigration checkpoints, detention centers, mines, plantations, shipping containers, canals, sewers, and rivers, and their impact on human and more-than-human environments. The volume approaches (post)colonial ports through the “ecotone,” a concept borrowed from geography and ecology to describe a transition zone where two biological communities meet and mix―such as a forest and a grassland―to bring attention to port (non)spaces as a hinge between their environments, communities, and colonial infrastructure. It foregrounds postcolonial and decolonial approaches to the ecotone to draw attention to the cultural, ecological, and geographical dynamics that inform the social fabric of contemporary ports and port cities in the wake of the empire.

This volume is aimed at scholars and postgraduates across disciplines such as literature, geography, fine arts, cultural studies, and history.

Jill Didur is a Professor in English at Concordia University, Montreal. She is co-editor of Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015) and author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (2006). Her research focuses on postcolonial approaches to understanding sustainability and the Anthropocene.

Nalini Mohabir is an Associate Professor in Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University, Montreal. She teaches in the fields of feminist and postcolonial migration geographies. Her work has appeared in several journals including Small Axe, Habitat International, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, and Interventions.