ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
UNITED KINGDOM
Popular territories is an increasingly favored designation of urban spaces designed and developed by an amalgam of poor, working, and lower-middle classes reflecting an intersection of home-grown practices and political sensibilities. While such territories appear increasingly riven by authoritarian populisms, religious conservatism and a systemic undermining of the economic relations that once supported intensive collaboration, they remain a locus through which new institutional arrangements are prefigured. From Brazil to Indonesia to Nigeria, they facilitate the gestation of new economic and political solidarities; where forms of affiliation and cooperation take shape, where statuses, identities, and functions are aligned in ways that do not necessarily line up with a conventional sense of neighborhoods or communities. This article examines the ways in which particular conceptions of Blackness might be mobilized to highlight how the entanglements of perspective, circulatory trajectories, and ways of life shape such territories. Blackness has long been appropriated as a mechanism of decanting, de-selection, and extraction, deployed to particularize specific territories and populations as objects of disposal, surplus or exoticization. The singularities of popular territories thus emanate from a constant tension between the generativity of their own self-produced histories and their enforced vulnerabilities to expropriations beyond their control. Blackness operates as a methodological lens suited to apprehend such “ontologies” in their doubleness.
urban; Indonesia; youth; blackness; circulation
It is 3:30 am, halfway between Ambon and Sorong in Eastern Indonesia on the 42-hour P. T. ASDP ferry. In the upper deck there are some two hundred young men and women, animated on cheap sugary coffee, amid extended arguments about the best way to make a living. Some are heading for both contracted and non-contracted work in the oil and mining operations of Union Oil, Amoco, Agip, Conoco, Phillips, Esso, Texaco, Mobil, Shell, Petromer Trend Exploration, Atlantic Richfield, Sun Oil and Freeport (US); Oppenheimer (South Africa); Total (France); Ingold (Canada); Marathon Oil, Kepala Burung (UK); Dominion Mining, Aneka Tambang, BHP, Cudgen RZ, and CRA (Australia). Others are returning from stints as casual labor in Kupang and Makassar, with boxes of assorted goods barely intact after weeks on various ferries. The atmosphere is tense, as exhausted bodies banter, cajole and provoke about which of them is more eligible to have access to what kinds of opportunities and resources. They argue about which forces and actors are primarily responsible for their sense of precarity, for the multiple disruptions and uncertainties facing their families and communities. The talk is intensely racialized, who can be trusted, who is most complicit with the predominant threats posed, which religion or ethnicity is most associated with corrupt politicians or military officials, who is a “real” Indonesian, and who is not, or whether it even matters. Regardless of their own individual willingness, they have been sent out into the larger world from homes increasingly disappearing as more people are in motion, but where this very motion reiterates the salience of home.
The upper deck of the ferry assembles a cross-section of almost the entirety of East Indonesia—people from the Moluccas, Kei Islands, Lembata, Alor, Flores, Nusa Tenggara Timur, West Papua, as well as Javanese and Minahasans. Except for the latter, these youth are often called, “Melanesians,” a loose term for designating “blackness,” but with little overarching coherence or consensus. Although increasingly ascendant, blackness is an infrequent term of self-attribution but one through which others are denigrated or emplaced. It is invoked to describe who is either against or allied under continuously shifting circumstances. For in this area identity is as fluid and turbulent as the sea. The youth gathered have an underlying appreciation that they are all in “the same boat,” despite their sometime wild claims of having the upper hand. At times racially-inflected provocations seem intentionally leveled as a means of eliciting rejoinders potentially replete with useful information, where the anticipated self-defense might give away something. For everyone seeks something from each other—confirmation about impressions, tips about possible work opportunities, assessments about conditions in particular places or work sites; all the ins and outs about how to more successfully manage lives on the move across this area.
The youth in circulation are not just a particular socio-psychological or cultural stage of development that then proceeds onto adulthood but a more generalized and sometimes permanent state of being transitory (Farrugia 2014). As such, they are like many “youths” around the world, people who will never attain the normative benchmarks of adulthood. Some will succumb to desperate measures to demonstrate some basic sense of worthiness, while others will become increasingly indifferent to it. They may come to amplify the very characteristics that would seem to disqualify them.
What is the glue that holds together specific ways in which youth attempt to operate collectively in transitory conditions and what impact does this have on particularly metropolitan areas? As youth face greater levels of economy precarity, the transitory is normalized as a key organizing logic of everyday life. This is reflected in youth “moving around,” only sometimes migrating from one underdeveloped region to one more replete with employment opportunities. These circulations may entail relinquishing a sense of progress and individual attainment through the pursuit of a career or a step-by-step plan of accomplishment. It involves circulating through different housing options, experimenting with different ways of living together and shaping “family” and kinship relations.
More extensive circulation of youth in search of better opportunities also constitutes an income opportunity for residents to convert space in their homes into short-term rentals. Specific neighborhoods reflect an atmosphere of transiency, of people coming and going, which may destabilize local solidarities but also provide an enlarged set of connections to worlds beyond the neighborhood. In the Eastern provinces of Indonesia, youth increasingly displaced from villages and towns long anchored in barter and subsistence economies move around in increasingly elongated circuits of opportunistic migration (Habibi and Juliawan 2018; Tirtosudarmo 2018). Using cities such as Kupang, Ambon, and Sorong as temporary bases, they ferry across different plantations, mines, large urban ports on short-term contracts or in informal ancillary trades.
If circulating youth traverse wider expanses of territory, as well as social identities, what tropes of belonging come to the fore, both in terms of how they are designated by others and how they regard themselves? With the momentous reassertions of thinking blackness across different geographies and its popular use as a means of experiencing a sense of commonality across such geographies, how is racial belonging part and parcel of a process of forging collective life in movement? Widely known is the role racialization plays in processes of accumulation, profit-making, and the formations of property, as well as the ways race acts as key benchmark to determine what is a life worth living and who is eligible to live it. But what if blackness itself was a mode of popular territorialization—a way of conjoining the purported absence of a route toward stable subjectification with operations that unsettle the need for such stability, and thus the basis for judging someone as lesser or ineligible. Here blackness is the figuration of a spatio-temporal area that refuses institutionalization but nevertheless conjoins disparate populations into a tacit sense of common positioning and purpose. That which came into the world to institute a hierarchy of wealth, a measure of deservingness and a sense of inexplicable excess beyond measure becomes a constantly volatile atmosphere of tentative collaborations that stake little on their ongoingness or consolidation but as a turbulent accompaniment to turbulent conditions.
Not only does race prove particularly obdurate and flexible in its capacities to enjoin the economic, symbolic, psychological and cultural in configuring the “right way” of things and those transgressive dimensions that are both feared and desired, but extant notions of blackness are being troubled in the very hands of youth in motion. Across the East Indonesia, youth are continuously working out a sense of “blackness” in contexts where government and police have been particularly heavy-handed in their efforts to control youth circulation. In Eastern Indonesia, blackness is a highly contested term but one having increased traction as a means of consolidating a “common purpose” for people of the “East” by both extending the terms of blackness beyond its conventional geographies and using this “extension” as way for youth to extend themselves to each other (Slama and Munro 2015; Surya 2019).
These reflections on the relation between blackness and territory raise critical questions about how we might understand the notion of area beyond the artifice of political technology? What is territory amid intricate itineraries and trajectories of movement? What is area, beyond the markers of conquest, accommodation, or morphologies of various kinds? How is area a particular schema of entanglement, where the diverse materiality of specific ecologies, infrastructures, imaginations, and “facts on the ground” intersect in ways that both enhance and limit the operational capacities of each element, and figure a sense of stability in the arrangement. Furthermore, how do we experience such stability when, as Gilbert Simondon ([1958] 2017) points out in his notion of transindividuation, each actuality depends upon an incomputable range of articulations to virtual arrangements—i.e. ways of relating that need not ever materialize or even involve discernibly discrete entities? For entanglements do not only point to a process of emplacement, but also the murky encounters of things across various trajectories of movement, such as the youth at sea.
For example, if we consider infrastructure as a political technology, it is not only important what it brings together, how it connects actions, bodies, and sites, but also how it provides channeled lines of flight that enable people and things to exit from concentrations—a way to get away from having to absorb or be the bearings of work, home, institution, or place. Both mirroring and enabling the lines of flight of youth in motion, infrastructure seems also to “run away” from the intense simultaneity of multiple temporalities—the prospects that many things could and did happen somewhere. So, the burden of bearing the weight of such intensity is displaced through the connective tissues of infrastructures. Not only do we largely know what the vast multiplicity of activity taking place concurrently and incipiently means for us in terms of their likely causations and impact on our lives through infrastructure, but we are constantly reminded about what we don’t know by it as well. Our everyday routines and itineraries constantly skirt on the interface between habituation and improvisation, where improvisation entails knowing from where we set off from but always raises that question about how to get “home.” The trajectories of movement on the part of black Indonesian youth seem to confound clear cut centrifugal and centripetal lines in oscillating consolidations and dispersals.
Confronted with a world of impersonal forces indifferent to the existence of any entity and forces propelled as the unforeseen consequences of prior actions, we largely navigate this world indirectly, rather than confronting such forces head-on. Infrastructure as a political technology tries to elide and circumvent these same impersonal forces, constituting a bet that by enfolding materials, places, and bodies into various connections, responsibilities can be reciprocally distributed. Thus, as recipients of the benefits of infrastructure, we also become complicit with the bet that we can dodge bullets from unseen directions. By offering to tie things down, to make things relate, to bring what is far near and to transport what is near to further regions, infrastructure becomes a confidence game.
What this means in terms of area, such as the “Eastern” Indonesia traversed by black youth in movement, is that it never is where it seems to be, or rather that it is always in many places at once. In some sense how could this be otherwise, as the interactions among capital accumulation, land use, residential history, social practices, governance, location, and logistics come to produce an uneven patchwork of singular territories within the same area, or increasingly among disparate rural, peripheral, and urban regions encompassing a wide swathe of geographical territory, but which functions as an increasingly compressed and articulated domain (Keil 2018; Gordillo 2019). Such is being construed as new forms of the metropolitan, characterized by increasingly lateral relations among different institutions, as competencies, resources, and authority are extended across a broader range of actors, such as states, charities, brokers, community associations, and unions.
As authority and provisioning are extended across diverse institutions, populations will circulate, either in actual physical terms in their search for more affordable and resourced locations or in their relationships with specific institutions as they maintain many different kinds of affiliations in order to maximize their access to resources (Monté-Mor 2018).
So, area is an entanglement of materiality that consolidates specific complementarities and reciprocities among entities that are individuated and defined through the dynamics of the entanglement itself. But it is also a continuous unsettling of form and arrangement as such entanglements are always posing implications and potentials that both propel entities outwards as well as constituting a gravitational force that attracts new objects and situations.
There is a double projection at work here, working from the inside-out, and the outside-in. In other words, it is a projection working from the middle. Turbulence may be the default condition of this middle. Just as the black youth are simultaneously running away and running toward and away, again. In general, the political technology of administrative demarcations, infrastructural pathways, and definitive economic sectors is no longer adequate to stabilize long-term volatilities, and perhaps, more importantly, neither is infrastructure nor the technical confined to what we have always assumed them to be—so that, for example, basic urban functions, such as the efficacy of drainage or power relay systems are increasingly contingent upon a wider range of contingent factors and adverse feedback loops (Rutherford and Marvin 2023). Intensifying agitations in face of insufficient systems, climatic and political events, lead to compensations that often further exacerbate instability, and thus additional rounds of debilitating compensatory action (Wakefield 2022; Wiig and Silver 2019).
Here, turbulence is not only palpable but a prevailing condition (Barua 2021). At the same time, as the French philosopher Frédéric Neyrat (2019, 78) notes: “The ecology of resilience has so completely accepted the axiom of turbulence that it finds itself in the situation of being ontologically incapable of giving an account of the turbulence that nourishes it.” In part, this is because of the exhaustion of the bifurcations that characterize the relationships between human and nature, human and (non)human, white and black, being and having, primary and secondary qualities.
Every urban politic has been oriented toward mediating the false ontological distinctions ascribed to these divides. As such politics becomes increasingly insufficient for conceptualizing the contemporary urban or regional domain, turbulence is both a condition of unimpeded capital accumulation, increasingly through the dispossession of experiential and conceptual anchorage, and the affective correlate of needing to start in the middle of things as the operational procedure to navigate the assemblages of massive carbonization, artificial intelligence, logistics, overproduction, value inflation, social media(tion) and infrastructural collapse that characterize urban regions today. Subsequently, turbulence comes to characterize the socio-psychological situation of the urban inhabitant—always having to readjust, recalibrate without recourse to anything but the most truncated of convictions—as reflected in the resurgence of nationalist and identitarian sentiments.
But on the other hand, the intensified circulations of urban populations as noted above do not simply represent a new relational calculus of maximizing the potentialities of liveliness that are associated with notions of resilience. They are also the performances of a mobile politics where inhabitants actively seek to engage a more multiple and heterogeneous series of occasions, not as resources or affordances to extract from, but to experiment with various ways to become aspects of different “lineages,” chains and folds. Understanding, perhaps only faintly and implicitly, the ways in which their multiple existences derive from intricate circuits of material flows and compositions. Just as our youth exemplify a process of becoming-urban that always detaches itself from representative, definitive figures of the “inhabitant” across various superpositions that see in the same way very different things.
One way to get at this process of operating in the turbulence of a middle situated between entanglement as stability and unsettlement is to revisit the notion of popular territory that has been used, most frequently in Latin America, to account for mobile, shape-shifting configurations of relationalities and place that are capable of effectively operationalizing the requirements of the urban poor and working classes to strengthen whatever entanglements might prevail within the predominant regimes of power and, at the same time, function apart from them as well. Here, the volatility of class struggle, complicity, autonomous movements, and the production of material and built environments that are both articulated and detached from the “grid” of governance is both the source of precarity and generativity. It is sometimes impossible to distinguish between them.
As Bernando Fernandes (2005, 27) puts it, territory is a “space appropriated by a determinate social relation that produces and maintains it through a form of power.” As power is multiple, reflecting repressive, functional, and constitutive and exploratory, territory is multidimensional and multi-scalar. It incorporates both material and immaterial space and diverse “intentionalities” that may produce contradiction, solidarity and conflict. While popular territories today appear increasingly riven by authoritarian populisms, religious conservatism and a systemic undermining of the economic relations that supported intensive collaboration, they do embody specific historical trajectories of their own. Ones that do not simply mirror an increased subsumption into the logics of neoliberal urbanisms, but rather recuperable in what Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012) calls collective dis-orientations. They are a locus through which new institutional arrangements are prefigured, or facilitate the gestation of new economic and political solidarities; where forms of affiliation and cooperation take shape, where statuses, identities, and functions are aligned in ways that do not necessarily line up with a conventional sense of neighborhoods or communities. Here it is possible to grasp something of what a more fluid sense of area might be.
Popular territories are replete with overlaps, points of contact, elimination of boundaries and interconnections between legal and illegal, formal and informal. In attempts to incorporate popular territories into the formal economy, local economic logics focused on intersecting practices of reciprocity, complementarity, and syncretism are marginalized and undermined. Yet the expansion of urban space through formal and legal orders inevitably expands the spaces of operation not administered by that very order. Particularly in the restructuring of labor markets and legislation, new uncertainties about just what exactly constitutes work and income are introduced.
Popular territories of interstitial spaces reflect neither household ownership, collective property, public or private but rather domains of incessant contestation that wax and wane across different intensities. Gardens, kitchens, balconies, repair garages, showers and prayer rooms can become functionally entangled in ways that blur the boundaries of proprietorship and everyday belonging. It was not so much then that the territory occluded the multiplicity of functions, which can always be presented to the outside world under the rubric of individuated ownerships. Rather, what is occluded is the impossibility of a final instance, a superseding definition or framing of the surface according to a final weighting of often competing narratives, a weighting that appeals to a particular version of time, i.e. to who did what first or longest under the prevailing regime of authorization.
This occlusion does not obviate vulnerability, as money can be thrown at specific actors to withdraw themselves as a critical piece of an intricate “lego” construction or chess game. Indeed, such brutal lures exist everywhere. But even here, territories were sometimes quick to adapt as the histories of mutual witnessing and conjoint actions mean that everyone is prepared to do the “jobs” of everyone else in a game of interchangeability that has been known to replicate itself across varying “replacements.” This is evident when an entire neighborhood is removed to more structured and rationalized built environment situated elsewhere. It is not that the former practices are deployed in their former shape all over again, but rather that there is a kind of “memory-forward,” where these practices are translated into new vernaculars and capabilities as if they had been there all along.
This game of interchangeability was also reflected in overlaid land tenure practices. These entailed histories of divergent claims, overlaid footprints of passages and waits, constellations of groups to make things, from re-engineering and refurbishing phones, or extending balconies into a newly rented living space or for workshops. Importantly, as electricity and water lines comes in via the toil of brokers and tenant’s newly established political contacts in municipal, village councils, to lobby higher-ups, it’s their receipts—“the name and address listing bi-monthly bill,” and, at times even the electricity lamp post set up after a recent election, that renegotiates real estate surpluses between new tenants to older ones and the often only in the last instance that of the land owner.
A key point then in terms of how and for what purposes popular territories were composed is that the thicknesses of tenure constituted a key dimension of the territories’ spatiality—whereas the abstractions imposed by regularizations and purported legibility diluted space. The thickening materialized through the radical re-distribution of property surpluses beyond landowner and tenant, as well as an investment in the territory’s own improbability—i.e. the prospect that collaborations, institutional arrangements, and use could entail relations among very disparate actors. As such, the radical here is both the life of property and property as life.
At the same time, the materialization of the promise of forward progression and even a prosperous destination entailed a fundamental opportunity for extraction of the energies, general intelligence, and resourcefulness of these territories; a concrete act of abstraction steering the social reproduction of territories away from their own internal adaptations and urban proficiencies to now a series of data points, formats of indebtedness, and prolific compensations. The very forms of self-valorization for popular territories became an instrument of expropriation, as reflected in the amplification of resilience as the engine of adaptation, of transformations undertaken to reiterate the same.
The interweaving of territories gives way to a particularization of spaces, which also becomes the predominant character of time. For if the future as a specific realizable trajectory of promises gives way to the maneuvers through which financialization capitalizes on calculative relations between probability and uncertainty, gives way to seemingly interminable indebtedness, where one is always owing the future, and gives way to the dissipation of both national and global narratives of progress, then it is time which becomes intensely politicized. This is manifested in the various sentiments regarding the end of times, redemptive time, geologic time, time of the occult, the expendability of all of those not properly regarded as sufficiently human. Yet it also entails times that do not owe anything to external validation or accounting procedures, in what Stephanie Wakefield (2022) calls a “war of times”—a diverging of the very means of inhabiting present conditions.
Here entanglement in terms of area moves from a strictly spatial descriptor to a mode of interwoven and diverging temporalities. It is about things moving in different directions and different speeds and rhythms, and so the identification of any clear middle is a continuous conundrum. This is particularly the case for those who appear simultaneously at the center of things but are also constantly peripheralized. Those who move toward the center of action but have a continuous stake in the peripheries of both space and time.
Let us return then to the far Eastern region of Indonesia, which is now a critical nexus in the rapid development of low-carbon extraction, i.e. the mining of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and rare earth metals. Kupang is the largest city in Eastern Indonesia and its major port and transportation hub. It is city full of youth from all over the region who have migrated to the city in search of work given its centrality, but also use the city as a waiting hub for periods prior and after journeys to short-term jobs in oil fields, mines, plantations, as well as construction and industrial jobs in Surabaya, Jakarta and Makassar. It is a center of information exchange about jobs, opportunities and the city best serviced by ferries, which is the predominant mode of transport across the region. Thousands of youths occupy themselves with low-wage delivery and longshoreman jobs, domestic work, and petrol bunkering. Many simply wait around, trying to raise money to move onwards.
Sorong, West Papua is one of the fastest growing cities in Indonesia. It is viewed as the center of the modernization projects of West Papua—an attempt by the Indonesian state to settle once and for all questions about its legitimate inclusion in Indonesia. The construction of a trans-Papuan highway network is further opening up the province to even more mines and plantations. Infrastructure is clearly perceived by native Papuans as a military weapon. Sorong is one of Indonesia’s most cosmopolitan cities in demography if not always in atmosphere, and is the largest constellation of a so-called black, Melanesian population, largely Christian, in contrast to the majoritarian Muslim identification of Indonesia, with residents from Ambon, Northern Sulawesi, Kei, Arawak Islands, Nusa Tenggara Timur. They bring with them particular skills and orientations cultivated by their original locales and the colonially shaped expressions they were allowed to take: ex-fighters, brawlers, drivers, thieves, mechanics, tricksters, marketeers, seafarers.
The solidity of any consolidation of ethnicities and regionalisms into a “black identity” waxes and wanes, shows up and dissipates according to the situation or place at hand, and who and what is being contrasted or enjoined. It is particularly enjoined in attempts to counter the substantial state subsidized influx of Muslims for Java. But more importantly it becomes a vernacular of entanglements, of the ways in which youth of different backgrounds extend themselves to each other, thus extending the compositions of those very backgrounds and constituting a particular territorialization of their being with each other.
Sorong has an overwhelmingly young population, and schools, churches, mosques, clubs are teeming with different experiments, with words, performances, sensibilities, and tensions. The growing articulations between Nusa Tenggara Timur, Maluku and West Papuan provinces substantiates a vast new metropolitan region of interlinked populations, resource extraction, migratory flows, infrastructure development, and an increasing subsumption of diverse ethnicities into an overarching Melanesian (Black) identity (Kusumaryati 2020; Kirksey 2012; Timmer 2007).
Intensifications of logistical operations in the Eastern Region are driven by both a substantial expansion of extraction economies and enhanced access to a larger world. This deepens the displacement of bodies and ways of life. Youth, who increasingly defer the normative attainment of adulthood, nevertheless attempt to construct their own itineraries across multiple places and occupations. They become a mode of extensionality, and blackness a particular vernacular of those extensions. Though it may be no more but the profusion of various words for designating “blackness” on their lips, such tropes provide an accessible discourse of mediation between accounting for perceptions of exclusion, disqualification and their determinations to successfully function in a larger world in their own terms, which still largely need to be invented.
While caught in oppressive contexts of hyper-militarization, systematic attempts by governing regimes to divide and rule, and seductions into the highly particularized practices of sects and micro-territories, youth seek to configure new spaces of operation with others, if not necessarily of belonging. Vulnerable to manipulation and the extraction of their energies and ideas, blackness seems particularly well suited for pointing to solidarities that are being continuously worked out, that remain unembedded in line with the logistical universes they attempt to navigate. They reflect the plurality of modes of entanglement and constitute a provisional yet burgeoning area of relatedness against the grain. Such relatedness requires specific ways of paying attention, of experimentation and decision-making—all of which deepen and extend our available understandings of STS.
AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow Emeritus at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, co-director of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, Polytechnic University of Turin, and Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Among his many publications are For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities (2004), Jakarta: Drawing the City Near (2014), and The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture (2022).
Barua, Maan. 2021. “Infrastructure and Non-Human life: A Wider Ontology.” Progress in Human Geography 45(6): 1467–1489.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132521991220.
Cusicanqui, Sylvia Rivera. 2012. “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111(1): 95–109.
https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1472612.
Farrugia, David. 2014. “Towards a Spatialised Youth Sociology: The Rural and the Urban in Times of Change.” Journal of Youth Studies 17(3): 293–307.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2013.830700.
Fernandes, Bernardo M. 2005. “Movimentos Socioterritoriais e Movimentos Socioespaciais: Contribuição Teórica para Uma Leitura Geográfica Dos Movimentos Sociais” [Socioterritoiral Movements and Sociospatial Movements: Theoretical Contribution for a Geographical Reading of Social Movements]. Revista Nera 8(6): 14–34.
https://doi.org/10.47946/rnera.v0i6.1460.
Gordillo, Gastón. 2019. “The Metropolis: The Infrastructure of the Anthropocene.” In Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, edited by Kregg Hetherington, 66–94. Durham: Duke University Press.
Habibi, Muhtar, and Benny Hari Juliawan. 2018. “Creating Surplus Labour: Neo-Liberal Transformations and the Development of Relative Surplus Population in Indonesia.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 48(4): 649–670.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2018.1429007.
Keil, Roger. 2018. “Extended Urbanization, ‘Disjunct Fragments’ and Global Suburbanisms.” Environmental and Planning D: Society and Space 36(3): 494–511.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775817749594.
Kirksey, Eben. 2012. Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua in the Architecture of Global Power. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kusumaryati, Veronika. 2020. “Adat Institutionalisation, the State and the Quest for Self-Determination in West Papua.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 21(1): 1–16.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2019.1670238.
Monte-Mór, Roberto Luís. 2018. “Urbanisation, Sustainability and Development: Contemporary Complexities and Diversities in the Production of Urban Space.” In Emerging Urban Spaces: A Planetary Perspective, edited by Phillipp Horn, Paola Alfaro d’Alençon, and Ana Claudia Duarte Cardoso, 201–215. Cham: Springer.
Neyrat, Frédéric. 2019. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation. Translated by Drew S. Burk. New York: Fordham University Press.
Rutherford, Jonathan, and Simon Marvin. 2023. “Urban Smart Microgrids: A Political Technology of Emergency-Normalcy.” Urban Geography 44(8): 1794–1815.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2022.2126609.
Simondon, Gilbert. [1958] 2017. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.
Slama, Martin, and Jenny Munro, eds. 2015. From ‘Stone-Age’ to ‘Real-Time’: Exploring Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities and Religiosities. Canberra: ANU Press.
Surya, Andrew P. 2019. The Kneel for Social Justice: Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe, and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Master’s thesis, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Accessed October 27, 2025.
https://www.proquest.com/openview/e0ebf12fd9f70472f6ed88c821aa712a/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.
Timmer, Jaap. 2007. “Erring Decentralization and Elite Politics in Papua.” In Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia, edited by Henk Schulte Nordholt and Gerry van Klinken, 459–482. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Tirtosudarmo, Riwanto. 2018. The Politics of Migration in Indonesia and Beyond. Cham: Springer.
Wakefield, Stephanie. 2022. “Critical Urban Theory in the Anthropocene.” Urban Studies 59(5): 917–936.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980211045523.
Wiig, Alan, and Jonathan Silver. 2019. “Turbulent Presents, Precarious Futures: Urbanization and the Deployment of Global Infrastructure.” Regional Studies 53(6): 912–923.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2019.1566703.
To cite this article: Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2025. “Unsettled Area: Popular Territories of Blackness.”
Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 11(2): 109–119.
https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2025.3053.
To email contact AbdouMaliq Simone: a.t.simone@sheffield.ac.uk.