Planetary Hinterlands

This open access book breaks new ground by considering a variety of contemporary hinterlands across social spaces and cultural imaginations, across the Global North and South (from the UK, the US, and the Netherlands to Mexico, Mozambique, South Africa, and China), across the urban and the rural, and across land and water. It is the first book on hinterlands to combine contributions from the humanities and the social sciences. By mobilizing approaches ranging from the environmental and oceanic humanities to posthumanism and new materialism, hinterlands are rethought as sites of entanglement that are planetary and always more-than-human. Besides exploring the complex, dynamic materialities of contemporary hinterlands, this book also asks what kinds of affective economies (from abandonment, desolation, and exhaustion to indignation, hope, and care) pervade them. In addition, it considers the tensions between the hinterland's literal meaning as a peripheral space harboring resources whose availability is taken for granted and its metaphorical association with that which lies beyond what is visible or known. The book's main aim is to make clear how the concept of the hinterland can help us to think through some of today's impasses pertaining to the haunting afterlives of colonialism, the logistical turn of global capitalism, the impending threat of environmental collapse, and persistent rural-urban divides and inequalities.