Artery

“Through lucid ethnography along Colombia’s Magdalena River, Austin Zeiderman shows how attempts to forge a fluvial ‘logistics corridor’ revive and sustain racial and spatial difference. With deep sensitivity to the human and nonhuman life that traverses these terraqueous environs, Zeiderman offers a deft critique of the fetishisms of logistics and of governable supply chains and their smooth flow, revealing logistics to be aleatory and extremely lucrative, unpredictable and deeply contradictory.” - Sharad Chari, author of Apartheid Remains

“Going upstream on Colombia’s Magdalena River has occasioned many great stories, and Austin Zeiderman’s is an inordinately skilled wayfinding into the conjoined circulations of race and nature on a river constantly remade and remaking the life worlds engaged with it, now in concert with new logistical imaginaries. Yet the materialization of these imaginaries results in uncertain dispositions amid the terraqueous cadences of exploitation and inventiveness, local vernaculars and imported technicities, capture and autonomy, whose unpredictable proportions require skilled navigation from us all.” - AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture

“Through the story of a river, multiple social, geopolitical, and environmental scales of racialization, gendering, and class formation are revealed. Artery is replete with the rich particularities of place, personhood, and intricate networks of human and other-than-human relations assembled through regional association and driven apart by spatial hierarchies. Simultaneously attentive to the scars of colonization and the often subtle and occasionally stark changes brought about by transformations in conditions of labor and increasing global connectivity, the narrative is equally concerned with struggles for liberation and the possibilities of living otherwise. Astute and compelling.” - Hazel V. Carby, author of Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands

"For anyone seeking to understand how colonial legacies operate in contemporary development projects, or how environmental and racial justice movements might find common ground, Artery offers essential insights." - Wafa Rasheeq, LSE Review of Books

"Artery offers a powerful lens for thinking about environmental justice not as an abstract goal, but as a contested and unfinished process grounded in place." - Marek Kong, ReVista