Writing the Earth into the World: Speculative Geography and the Emplacement of Settler Futurity Available to Purchase

Chapter 2 elaborates the historical and theoretical context for the author’s conception of the notion of “speculative geography” across this project as a means through which colonial fantasy is projected onto the racialized space and place of the colonized other as a site of potency, of rendering earth into world. The chapter discusses geography as one of many European formations of scientific, philosophical, and technological knowledge imported in Colombia’s postcolonial nation-building endeavors. It then offers a close read of an 1807 report by noted Creole geographer Francisco Caldas, showing how a specifically Colombian geographic knowledge was developed as one that hinged on political speculation as well as an invocation of Discovery-oriented desire toward the country’s terrain. Geo-graphy, as a mode of writing the “wretched wastelands” of the earth into the “civilized” world, also writes the human into relational hierarchies that make possible that world—its epistemes and material arrangements.