In opening the book The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015), Aileen Moreton-Robinson leads with an epigraph: “The problem with white people is they think and believe that they own everything.” 1 In terms of a critique of the seven-centuries-long rollout and contestation of European dispossessive power, this citation is the alpha and the omega. It is incredibly hard to add anything that isn’t captured within its succinct analysis. Nevertheless, this special…

What formalism at, or on, the frontier does is to rotate or reorchestrate the point of view of the classical world. What is radical in the center may not be so from the periphery. The frontier is an artifact of modernity that most concerns its modes of contact. The frontier is the place where the soaring ideals of the Enlightenment touch down and slow to a grind against the earthly contingency of global expansion. In this morphology of touch, exposure, and exchange, the frontier signifies how modernity’s outside is produced, exploited, and policed. From this formal view of the frontier—as demonstrated by artists working at, and on, the frontier—it is possible to chart a fourfold articulation. That is, the cosmology of time, being, and belonging produced through the fourfold categories of the natural, the female, the racial, and the prior.

From 1772–75, Reinhold and Georg Forster, a father and son team of German naturalists, accompanied Captain James Cook on his second Pacific expedition. The voyage sought to map the unknown reaches of the South Pacific, and to discover the imagined Great Southern Continent. While anchored in the Melanesian archipelago (now New Caledonia), Third Lieutenant Richard Pickersgill encountered the social body of the ship’s map-making. The Forsters’s journal records the following scene in the course…

The Shell In The Mountain The theories of natural science that were nascent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be re-excavated through the figure of the marine shell—encountered as a form of stone, and lodged mysteriously in the highest mountains of Lower Saxony. These stone shells (as well as eels), Voltaire said, “made new systems blossom.” A cacophony of eminent philosophical and scientific voices entered to contest the origins of these aberrational geotic forms,…

When R.L. Stevenson undertook his first transatlantic voyage at the age of 25, journeying to reunite with his future wife in California, he wrote the essay “The Amateur Emigrant.” This writing became the first chapter of his collected works, Essays of Travel , published in 1905. On board the Devonia from London to New York in August of 1879, he opens with scenes from “The Second Cabin”: A few Scandinavians, who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and…