At the Border of Decolonization

Abstract

In the last decades, we have become used to understanding North and South America as two different worlds. This essay stitches our continent back together – as a single entity – by looking on both hemispheres at instruments of settler colonialism, in particular borders and grids, either by European colonizers or by already established american nation-states. Thus, if colonialism is a violent act of bordering, of transforming indigenous lands into registered, taxable properties, then one of the keys to decolonizing, they suggest, might be to rethink the tools and arguments behind the creations of different kinds of borders.