In (Post)colonial ports: Place and (non)place in the ecotone, Jill Didur and Nalini Mohabir bring together 12 essays that frame ports as entry points for examining postcolonial agency across multiple contexts, adopting a strong interdisciplinary, culture-based perspective. After an introduction by Didur, the collection spans the Caribbean, Africa, North America, Europe, and the Pacific. The contributions are consistently self-reflexive. They draw on literature, visual culture, ethnography, and artistic research to offer multilayered perspectives on the intertwined spatialities of “(post)colonial” ports. By conceptualizing postcolonial ports as a socio-spatial typology, the volume foregrounds concrete postcolonial places as sites for theory-building. The authors position postcolonial spaces as a tangible concept within geography, critical urban studies, and design-oriented disciplines such as urbanism and architecture. “Ecotone,” the recurrent motif, is borrowed from ecology, where it describes a transition zone between distinct biological communities. This metaphor is used to reflect on the relationality and ambiguity of postcolonial entanglements. As a concept, “ecotone” resonates with Caribbean intellectual traditions such as the work of Édouard Glissant on hybridity and archipelagos and Orlando Fals Borda on amphibious structures. Similarly, Didur and Mohabir mobilize “ecotone” to frame ports as spatio-temporal and cultural hinge places: zones of encounter where land and sea—as well as differently conceived, lived, and perceived pasts and presents—intersect. Hence, ports in this volume do not appear as functional infrastructures of circulation, but as complex spaces where the agency of built structures, legal frameworks, and territorial interpretations persist and mutate. The tripartite structure of the book: Section 1 Trans-Port, Section 2 Passages, Partings, Terminus, and “Section 3 Environmental Insecurities and Flows of Power—provides a clear argumentative framework. The first section emphasizes transition and relationality; the second conceptualizes the port as gate, mediating access and exclusion; the third foregrounds environmental injustice and uneven ecological risk as a consequence of the colonial past. Together, the sections bundle geographically dispersed case studies into a coherent conversation that underscores the global dimension of postcolonialism. The topic is tackled from different angles, revealing both direct and subtle continuities between colonial power relations and contemporary configurations. A major strength of the collection lies in its coherence uniting a broader interdisciplinary and methodological range. Didur, a scholar of English, and Mohabir, a geographer and planner, model a collaboration that highlights the concept of literary geographies. This methodological orientation is evident, for instance, in Mike Lehman's reading of Behrouz Boochani's autobiographically grounded No friend but the mountains in Chapter 4, which foregrounds the lived experience of an Iranian-Kurdish asylum seeker detained by Australian authorities on Manus Island. The chapter exposes what it terms “neocolonial formations of extraterritorial prisons” (p. 77), linking contemporary border regimes to longer imperial geographies. Other contributions mobilize artistic practices to similar effect. Shelley Miller's chapter, based on her artistic research, reflects on sugar-made azulejos as material re-enactments that critically recall plantation economies and their transnational afterlives. Urban-geographical approaches such as Mohabir's analysis of Georgetown's extractivist past and present, ethnographic inquiries like Charlotte Hammond's study of female labour in Haiti's second-hand clothing trade, and materially grounded cultural analysis including Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert's study of the Ozama River, further demonstrate how postcolonial agency is present in today's uneven economies and environmental injustices. Implicitly, extractivism recurs as a connective thread linking colonial pasts of exploitation with ongoing plantation economies and contemporary petro-capitalist practices. This connective thread of extractivism renders visible the direct relation between contemporary economic and ecological vulnerabilities with the colonial past of these territories. Together with the final section's engagement with environmental insecurity and uneven exposure to risk, this thread resonates with broader calls to think together decarbonization and decolonization. Across the chapters, colonialism is treated not as a closed historical period but as a harsh rupture whose spatial logics and agencies continue to shape contemporary realities. Port cities, past and contemporary transatlantic relations and flows, the narrowing of territories to their extractable resources, and the reduction of humans to shipped bodies are framed as enduring colonial systems: the often-unnoticed reproduction and continuity of colonial logic make use of material and ideological structures originating from colonial time. In this understanding, ports emerge as spatio-temporal nodes where extraction, circulation, and resistance unfold simultaneously. Considering this, it remains surprising that the spatio-conceptual pairing announced in the title—“place and (non)place”—is less evenly developed than the ecotone framework. Postcolonial critique is consistently and reflexively present across the contributions, but the spatial dimension of “place and (non)place” receives comparatively limited theoretical elaboration. The collection unsettles any straightforward reading of ports as placeless logistical spaces; however, the “(non)place” of the title seems to function more as a suggestive provocation than as a sustained analytical axis. This asymmetry does not weaken the empirical richness of the volume, but it leaves room for further conceptual clarification. Writing as a European urbanist working on postcolonial urban spaces in Latin America and Europe and currently based in Barranquilla—itself a Caribbean port shaped by counter-colonial histories—I found the volume's insistence on ports as ecotonal formations particularly resonant. In an era marked by the restructuring of global spheres of influence and persistent extractive regimes, (Post)colonial Ports argues convincingly that the critical analysis of a specific typology of infrastructure—conceptualized as postcolonial spaces—demonstrates how a culture-based analysis of concrete places can illuminate contemporary conditions. Beyond this intervention, the volume's greatest strength lies in its methodological precision and openness, sustained by consistent critical reflexivity. For scholars of geography and urban and cultural studies, as well as architects and urbanists interested in theories of postcolonial spaces, this collection provides both a robust conceptual compendium and a timely invitation to reconsider sites marked by postcolonial legacies as central terrains for confronting present spatial and environmental challenges.
Alissa Diesch (Sun,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: