Unsettling Geographies

“Unsettling Geographies offers a sophisticated analysis of how the colonial political terrain continues to haunt everyday life in Guyana. Shanya Cordis adeptly recasts the afterlives of conquest, slavery, and indenture to propose a fresh new theorization of indigenous dispossession, which provides critical insight into the struggle for indigenous self-determination and its relationship to racial capitalism.” - Oneka LaBennett, author of Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond

“Shanya Cordis brilliantly shows us that to understand Guyana’s transformation into a petrostate in the twenty-first century means paying attention to how the ghosts of conquest, dispossession, slavery, indentureship, and nationalist state formation still haunt the country. She mobilizes critical Black and Indigenous Studies to reveal what Guyana can teach us, not only about the ways the past lives in the present, but also about the poignant and pointed modes of imagining futures!” - Deborah A. Thomas, author of Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance