by Mary Pat Brady

about Mary Pat Brady

Mary Pat Brady is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Latino Studies Program at Cornell University. She is the author of Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space.

Territoriality

“Quisqueya,” “Borinquen,” “México de afuera,” “Aztlán,” “Greater Cuba”: these richly evocative names describe and collate familiar topos and draw together felt affinities, carefully harbored histories, and methods of knowing that shift between institutional abstractions and more intimate articulations. These names and concepts produce territoriality—which is to say they provide opportunities to ascribe forms of belonging that reach across and away from national and imperial claims to a monopoly on violent control of a geospatial arena. These are terms that circulate with the currents of nationalism, but that also try to plumb the decolonial depths in order to undo the work that territoriality typically does in an imperial register. “Territoriality” names a way of thinking about the world, space, ownership, and belonging. An old word, derived from the Latin for _terra_ (_tierra_, earth), it suggests ontologically the condition of being a territory and also a stance, a practice of defending or guarding a resource and thus an epistemological practice of understanding. Its earliest and most common uses revolve around forms of management that splice power into a sociospatial register in order to enhance and coagulate power and domination. For people interested in Latina/o or Latinx cultures and histories, the word has...