In The Invention of Order, Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and who is excluded—becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity.

Don Thomas Deere is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University.

Foreword / Santiago Castro-Gómez  vii
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction  1
Part I. Genealogies of Colonial Space
1. Orders of the Grid  15
2. Orders of Movement: The Traveler and the Settler  33
Part II. Transmodern Cartographies
3. Transmodernity and the Battlefield of Coloniality  57
4. Archipelagos of Resistance: Limits of the Map  81
Notes  103
Bibliography  121
Index  131