Land, Cultural Dispossession, and Resistance

This volume provides readers with accounts of the contemporary consequences of the Eurocentric Western model of racialized power and extractivist development: cultural, linguistic, and land dispossession, displacement and forced migration, climate and water injustice, and the environmental destruction of Afro-descendent and indigenous communities in the Americas.

The past and present circumstances of Afro-descendent and Indigenous peoples in the Americas have been shaped by the “coloniality of power” of Western capitalist modernity. This Eurocentric Western model of racialized power, with its rhetoric of development, progress, salvation, and improvement and invented categories of nature, race, gender, nation, and knowledge, has resulted in the disposing of the worlds of Afro-descendent and Indigenous peoples. The chapters in this book provide critical theoretical and practical approaches to understanding land, territorial, and cultural dispossession and the forms of resistance practiced and engaged in by rural Afro-descendent communities and Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

This book will be of particular interest to all scholars, students, and practitioners of education and development, global studies in education, peace studies, international studies, Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as those working in sociology, development studies, and socio-environmental justice. The chapters in this book, except for chapter 4, were originally published in the Journal of Poverty.