rural hauntings, urban spectres: lyrical reflections of a border dweller

What is a city? It’s a basic question that concerns us, not just because it’s the title of this journal. As a collective of editors, we do not have a coherent definition; not that one is actually necessary. In fact, we have multiple definitions; some are explicit and others implicit. Our plurality is our strength.

Or, is it?

The answer may be a resounding ‘yes’ from multiple angles, depending of course on the efficacy of our organisational structure in light of structural demands of everyday life (Madden 2022). But the weight of the question persists because it speaks to the rigour and ethics of our editorial practice: how does CITY define ‘city’? Rather than definitions, the pages of CITY contain multiple trends in critical urban studies. These trends reveal the kinds of struggles we face in defining the kind of city we want to construct and deconstruct. I use this particular word because I enjoy working with the hauntings of deconstruction, its fixity on the particularities of language, especially the negative aspects of presence as articulated in Jacques Derrida's (1994) Specters of Marx. Through this lens a symbol gains presence or becomes known by its negative; that is to say, a symbol is defined by what it is not. The negative is defined by its opacity, a vast mystery haunted by the presence of absence (Glissant 1997). Present before me is the definition of ‘city’ which can be defined through its negative, or its antonym, one might say. As such, the definition of city can be known through the question: what is the antonym of city?

In this editorial I mean to work from the negative of ‘city’ with the assumption that it is not inherently opaque but that its opacity can serve as a generative mystery. I am also relating ‘city’ to the urban, understanding that this relation may fall apart in specific conditions. This is an exploratory exercise of the negative, opacity allows me to get lost despite the mappings I may conjure. The reader, like the writer, will have to embrace this journey taking into consideration that this uncertainty is part of the human experience of working with symbols in all of their iterations. The question, ‘what is a city?’, is my starting point for the exploration that follows. In trying to hold on to this question, I assume the position of a rural border dweller in direct contact with the urban, illustrating thus the symbolic and material weight of the urban. In particular, I’m working through personal experiences in the coastal regions of Guerrero, Mexico, the geography where I grew up and am now conducting long term ethnographic research. This is not and cannot be an exhaustive exercise, for borders are geographical and historical. Ultimately, my purpose is to provoke reflection about geopolitical implications of the basic assumption of how the urban is defined in our pages and beyond.

symbolic ruptures

The antonym of ‘city’ is as spatial as it is temporal. Like any other symbol, its negative also has histories and geographies. Such complex plurality is difficult to represent: it is as plural as it is mobile. My emphasis here is on the negative as a spatiality which can be construed as a tool for critical analysis. I am not necessarily concerned with space but rather the moments when space becomes geography through symbolic action. I call these moments bordering, a rupturing of the symbolic (dis)order from whence space is unbound, wild and wily, beyond the trappings of symbols in their multiple iterations. In this sense, all we know of language is bordering and the negative is integral to this practice because inherent in the construction of any symbol is also its deconstruction.

My understanding of deconstruction is not an activity that an academic does, per se, but rather as the inherent progression of symbols; they are each already in a process of deconstruction through its circulation or lack thereof, independent of a scholar's intervention. This should not imply that a scholar's intervention is unnecessary; on the contrary, it is one vital way for deconstruction to accelerate its critical outcome. The critical outcome of deconstruction is not the obliteration of any particular symbol. Some symbols persist, transforming themselves in the process and producing a litany of negatives that are imbued with the relational life of the dead, the marginalised, the abject, the queer. The critical outcome of deconstruction is transformation and contextual transcendence of oppressive binaries. City is one of these persistent symbols (Zeiderman and Dawson 2022) though we must be careful in assuming linearity in our contemporary renditions: relationality does not equate to continuity. As one of the many journals that help in the proliferation of city, we must critically reflect on the negatives we help to produce.

In their relational dynamics, the negatives are not infinite or absolute. When they are named, the negatives have negatives and not just their inherent positives from which they were marked as negative. For example, if we agree that the rural is the negative of the urban, then the rural also has negatives which are not categorically urban. Conceptually, these negatives may remain unnamed, and, better yet, they remain open to naming if they are identified. Identification, of course, implies using a particular method with its associated language to identify. Transparency is key for these exercises to gain critical and radical traction, as well as an understanding that the negatives exist simultaneously in named and unnamed positions. However, the unnamed must not be characterised as lifeless: it may already be named in a different language (human or nonhuman); thus, its value may not be readily understood. As such, the negatives (of urbanity and beyond) may be staunchly mysterious, opaque, even, in the way that Édouard Glissant (1997) describes opacity as a right.

intimate temporalities, violent urbanities

I remember. I remember. Everything we say these days begins with: “I remember.”

- The retreating world, Naomi Wallace (2003)

I remember the childhood days we spent in our rural homelands. One of my brothers still tends to his cows in El Potrero, a place hidden in the municipality of Atoyac de Alvarez, near the coastal regions of Guerrero. Ranching was a way for him to reconnect with his past, but it has also proven to be a modestly profitable venture. Our house can be found on Google Maps, if you know where to look.

In the vast open fields, surrounded by woods and hills, and close to a creek, there once stood four houses scattered far apart. My closest neighbours were a Nahua family who spoke Nahuatl amongst themselves. Their youngest child, Yaotl, was my best friend. The other three households were our relatives, so our indigenous neighbours felt and were made to feel like outsiders. They came from the mountains to work with a family member that ultimately moved away. They remained to care for the land in exchange for housing. Unbeknownst to us, we inherited and practised a racialised hierarchy where we assumed a superior position to them. They were forest dwellers of a certain kind even though, absurdly, they were our closest neighbours in the same geography.

Rural relationships are intensified, magnified by our proximity and isolation. We are each other’s worlds which can be both too large and too little. Our quarrels felt intense: we would stop speaking to one another and if we ever crossed paths, we would twist our mouths as a sign of mutual disgust and disdain. I want to believe that they refused to feel less than us, that they rejected our internalised racialism. We were ultimately each other’s only social support system, and any enmities would immediately become trivial during an emergency.

I remember one evening Yaotl ran to our house, calling for my mother. “¡Mamá Celia! ¡Mamá Celia!” His cries summoned in her a sense of communal motherhood, a bond exceeding biological kinship. His mother was experiencing a medical emergency, and all the women in the village were called to help. There are countless tragedies to be told about rural women’s health. Equally, there are a myriad forms of solidarity that emerge from these moments. His mother survived, yet there was a common sense of grief. Yaotl seemed especially struck when I visited him days later. It was not something we could talk about. I went to invite him to go play in the red clay deposits near the creek. We shared a particular kind of tenderness towards one another, while we built clay structures with roads and bridges to drive the wooden toy cars his father had made for us.

In my solitary moments, I would often explore the woods and revel in the vastness of my surroundings (see Figure 1). That was until I finally visited a small city nearby called El Ticui, which was completely different from what I had experienced in the woods. The urban structures I had created in my mind and brought to life with clay were nothing like the intensity and overwhelming atmosphere of the city. I remember … 

Figure 1: My childhood home in the vast hills of El Potrero. Photo by Ulises Moreno-Tabarez, 12 April 2019.

Perhaps the most obvious answer to my question is that the rural is the antonym of city, of the urban. In this interlocking of symbols, the rural becomes a key site for the definition of the urban: the urban ends where the rural begins, or vice versa, depending on one's positionality. Sheppard and Nagar (2004) refer to this particular spatiality—where the urban meets the rural—as the rural-urban continuum, pointing to the lack of sharp divisions between rural and urban geographies. However, the concept dates back to the mid-20th century (Dewey, 1960) and has become associated with mainstream urban studies.

Refusing easy translations and insisting on the linguistic relevance of space, Yimin Zhao (2020: 535) points to a geographically specific spatial concept called Jiebehu which illustrates Beijing’s ‘rural-urban juncture’ with a focus on the interstices between this term and urban frontiers. I prefer to think of it as a border thus linking this to the rich theoretical oeuvre around this spatiality (e.g., Gloria Anzaldua (1987), D. Robert DeChaine (2012), and Thomas Nail (2007) to name a few). A continuum need not be mutually exclusive with a border, but a border demands a particular relationality between opposites and to take seriously different forms of ‘detachment’ at the edges of urban spatialities (Simone and Broto 2022). These spatial dynamics produce tensions which are under theorised and of concern given the amount of discourses and resources allocated to maintain rural-urban borders.

I remember we had to walk about an hour to get to our rural primary school. The nearest town was two hours away on foot. What used to be a footpath is now a dirt road leading to El Ticui, the first town in the state of Guerrero to have electricity. Most locals are unaware of this fact; they would pride themselves if they knew, but so much of our identities is made up of forgotten and erased histories.

In the early 1900s, Spanish industrialists installed El Progreso del Sur, a spinning and weaving factory which was powered by hydroelectricity from the Atoyac river (see Figure 2). They sold cotton seeds to local farmers which they then grew and sold back to the factory. My great grandfather was one of these farmers, but I don't know if he did this voluntarily as it is rumoured that some farmers were forced to grow cotton.

Figure 2: The ruins of the spinning and weaving factory “Progreso Del Sur”. Photo by Ulises Moreno-Tabarez, 17 July 2022.

This was prior to the Revolution of 1910, so things changed in the aftermath. The Spaniards were ousted and locals were instructed to set up a communal committee to manage the factory. They did so successfully until Hurricane Tara (1961) deviated the river's path, leaving the factory without electricity.

The locals eventually ransacked it. One of my uncles, the mayor of the town at that time, joined the looters. He loaded a truck with machinery and travelled out of state to sell it as ‘scrap metal’. The factory is now in ruins, its different attempts at industrialisation and revolution remain ghostly, a border in decay.

Borders make cities. Bordering makes space geography. While they are in flux, borders wield an incredible amount of power. But, can this power be called agency, capital, or subjectivity? Each of these words carries its own set of assumptions which determine the writers/speakers, voices/languages, audiences/interlocutors, actors/subjects, and how the entire story is to be staged. In our previous editorial, Lindsay Sawyer (2022) asked poignant questions related to the speaker’s positionality, language, and audience, all of which make explicit the need to work with voices from the majority world to cultivate global conversations.

Here, I am highlighting how the urban holds a significant amount of power over the rural (Lefebvre 2022). It’s often understood as more legitimate, more modern, and more desirable. But as a border dweller, I want to work through this positionality to challenge these power dynamics and offer a more intimate voice (Anzaldua 1987; Alexander 2014). It's an intervention, a way of breaking through the borders that often silence or erase rural voices. By speaking from my own experience and positioning myself as a border dweller, I hope to contribute to those necessary ‘global’ conversations understanding the limitations of knowledge production and consumption. As such, the global may well consist only of plural networks which are most likely non-linear and disconnected from one another.

After milking the cows, my father would travel to El Ticui to sell the milk. I must have been six years old when my parents first sent me to do it. They loaded our mare with milk jugs and mounted me on her back. I braided her hair while she led the way. She had a really peaceful way about her even though my father most likely overworked her.

I delivered the milk to Angela, the milk buyer, when we got into town. I wondered if the money was enough, so I decided to visit my aunt who lived across the street. She confirmed it was a fair exchange. At the time, most of my relatives lived in El Ticui, including those who were forced to move away from El Potrero during and after the Dirty War (1962-1982).

If the Cold War was an ideological warfare, the Mexican Dirty War was one of its battlegrounds. La Guerra Sucia was a period of state-sponsored political and military violence and repression against political dissidents with Socialist and Marxist leanings. One of these dissidents was a school teacher named Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, my uncle. He was the leader of a guerrilla peasant movement which took arms against the state to protest ongoing forced displacement and marginalisation of rural and Indigenous groups as a result of government-led urbanisation and development projects, including mining operations in the mountains and large-scale coconut plantations in the coasts. The military searched for him in rural areas, conducting illegal raids, employing terror tactics, and forcibly disappearing men, women, and children.

I have cousins and uncles who are registered in official lists of the disappeared. Rural populations, such as those in El Potrero, began to move away to El Ticui or other cities, some close and others far away. My immediate family eventually returned to El Potrero when things settled, but things never really settled. The call of the urban beckoned with its promise of modernity. Or, was it postmodernity in a postcolonial world?

The ‘post’ in postcolonialism implies a temporal border, transforming colonialism into a spectral mode of governance. It suggests its formal end, but discards the persistence of its effects on shaping political, economic, and cultural landscapes, particularly when one takes the violent precepts of liberal democracies and the resurgence of imperialism into account (Mbembe 2019; Harvey 2003). It is a spectral force that persists, often evading responsibility citing its formal end despite a myriad of psycho-socio-material permutations. This aligns with Derrida's (1994) definition of spectres as a continuum of absence and presence that haunts the present. Similarly, colonialism, despite being relegated to the past, continues to influence postcolonial forms of governance. Consider that we are pressed to name a postcolonial form of governance that is not inherently linked to colonialism. The obvious one is neo-colonialism, but even democracy, monarchy, theocracy, republic, oligarchy, federalism, communism, totalitarianism, and socialism, are all inherently indebted to colonial power. The past refuses to stay in the past. It continues to shape the present and, like any spectre, it resists easy categorisation and definition.

Urbanisation, as a form of colonial power, is no exception to the spectral influence of colonialism. The development and expansion of cities, often driven by (internalised) colonial interests, have historically resulted in the displacement of rural and indigenous groups and the hetero/normalisation of western norms and values on the built environment and its associated sociocultural lifescapes (Roy 2010). For us in the coastal regions of Guerrero, Acapulco serves as a prime example of how colonialism continues to shape the present through its legacy in urbanism. The Spanish Crown transformed the city into a major port for trade with Asia through the Manila-Acapulco Galleon trade route. In the postcolonial era, it was later transformed again by tourism catering to the global elite and the upper-middle classes in Mexico. In the present day, Acapulco continues to experience the consequences of its colonial past, including socio-economic inequalities, spatial hierarchies, cultural erasure, colonial-era racial divides resulting in ongoing marginalisation for poor, rural, Black, and Indigenous groups. By the time this editorial is published, we will have a series of blogs exploring these aspects of Acapulco on our website: cityjournal.online

The state's brutal violence and repression during La Guerra Sucia remains shrouded in denial. Through the testimony of family members I interviewed, it's clear that the military committed indiscriminate acts of terror, including forced disappearances, against innocent civilians. Personal tragedy hits close to home, as I mourn the loss of two of many family members who suffered at the hands of the state's brutal violence and repression during La Guerra Sucia, including my cousin Nicolas Tabares Noriega and uncle Lucio Cabañas Tabares. Both were subjected to horrific acts of violence, with Nicolas believed to have been killed and his body disposed of in the ocean. The wider Cabañas family suffered widespread loss and heartbreak due to numerous forced disappearances (Navarrete Gorgón et al. 2014). The documentary “Trazando Aleida” (Burkhard 2008) highlights the devastating effects of state violence as it tells the story of a woman's tireless search for her brother who was separated from her during a military raid on their home when they were still toddlers. Aleida and her brother only have vague memories of living together in Atoyac but do not officially remember each other. The raid on their home was part of the military's search for their parents who were activists promoting Socialist values. It is not a coincidence they both met at the Escuela Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa, the same school that was home to the 43 students who were forcibly disappeared in 2014.

Lucio Cabañas Barrientos was eventually captured and killed, but a statue of him now stands in the zocalo in front of Atoyac's city hall. The statue reflects not a successful revolution, but the political co-optation of a rebellious school teacher who dared to challenge the state's structural abandonment which continues to haunt the region’s development. As shown by the case of the 43 Ayotzinapa students, these events continue to impact the state of Guerrero, where narco violence reinforces a climate of fear to suppress opposition and hinder rural groups’ ability to protest and resist state and narco-state factions. I am in conversation with members of a new truth commission entitled, ‘Comisión para Acceso a la Verdad, Esclarecimiento Histórico e Impulso a la Justicia de violaciones graves a derechos humanos de 1965 a 1990’. I hope this editorial will encourage us to have complex conversations about personal and intimate narratives and their connection to national and global political phenomena. This is especially important as we work to build transformative justice projects with radical politics that seek to dismantle entrenched assumptions which champion colonial spatial structures over pre-colonial and post-postcolonial spatialities.

Urbanisation was used as a tool for state terror during La Guerra Sucia, serving as a centralised logic for forcibly displacing rural subjects. In Mexico and much of Latin America, the ideals of urbanisation reflect the aspirations and impulse towards modernisation, a (neo)imperialist project with internalised colonial logics aimed at displacing rural subjects. Forced into urban areas, rural peoples’ traditional ways of life were disrupted, their rural power structures eroded, and they became more susceptible to state violence (Sánchez Serrano 2009). The cities failed to deliver on the promise of “modernity,” and instead served as a refuge for my family and many others who fled state terror. However, they were not citizens in the cities they lived in, but refugees facing new economic, social, and cultural difficulties. They were corralled into depoliticised resistance movements that were easily neutralised.

I remember I used to wander around the woods alone in El Potrero. Most of my mother’s family were born and raised there. During its prime, El Potrero and its neighbouring settlements were home to nearly sixty families. This is a significant number considering the average family size was eight to fourteen children. As the youngest of ten siblings, I was allowed to play in the woods while my older siblings worked after they returned from school. I often lingered near the creek, hoping to encounter the mythical children known as ‘chaneques’. According to my family’s version, these spectral and mischievous figures would appear to children and take them to the creek to wash their hands and play. Of course, this is a softer version of the more popular cautionary tale in which they could cause harm, depending on their disposition towards the child. I sought them out thinking that they could tell me stories like those my mother used to share about her family and the people who lived there previously.

On his hunting trips, my father would go deep into the woods. Sometimes he would return with clay figurines and other artefacts he found in his excursions. These small treasures hinted at a rich history, the tales of which were not passed down through generations of our family. As a child, I too was captivated by the allure of these relics and wanted to uncover their secrets. I wanted the chaneques to show me where and what they were, what they meant, and why they were made. I was never able to find any figurines of my own, but as an adult, I recently went back and I stumbled upon the handle of a metate, a traditional Indigenous grinding stone used for food preparation made of volcanic rock (see Figure 3). We used to believe the area was an archeological zone, but it is now much harder to find remnants of indigenous life that once existed there. While it is clear that people lived in the area, the types of settlements they built and inhabited remain unclear. There are no towering pyramids or grand ruins, indicating that the inhabitants were likely rural relative to their regional counterparts. Unfortunately, the state has made very little effort to excavate and uncover any social history, urban or rural, especially rural.

Figure 3: A small plate-like artefact found in El Cerro de la Negra, a neighbouring hill of El Potrero. Photo by Ulises Moreno-Tabarez, 15 November 2020.

The archeology of Guerrero, Mexico has been minimally explored. It represents a spectral presence which haunts the region’s present with the absence of its cultural heritage. Gutierrez (2006) argues that this lack of exploration is because of a combination of factors, including difficult topography, lack of paved highways, and social strife (narco violence). Even though Mexican and foreign archeologists have made significant efforts, the state’s rich archeological heritage remains largely unexplored, resulting in what he calls a ‘big black box’ of unproven ideas. However, he goes on to argue that while the cultures that inhabited the state have been classified as peripheral, marginal, non-urban, and pre-state, the archeological remains evince patterns of development similar to other regions in Mesoamerica during the same time period. Spectral as they may be, these pre-colonial histories offer valuable insight into alternative forms of urbanisation that challenge northwestern centric paradigms in urban studies. However, important as archeology is to urban studies, my argument does not rest on the urban built environment. While the archaeology of Guerrero remains largely unexplored, the narratives surrounding the Spanish conquest also pose challenges to accurately tell the urban history of the region.

When not told from the perspective of the conquistadores, the history of Spanish conquest is framed as the meeting of two civilisations: the Spanish and the Mexica. Pointing to the fallacy that flattens geography, Massey (2005) attempts to issue a corrective to urban histories that frame Tenochtitlan as a surface awaiting Cortés’s conquest; this imperial city had its own dynamic and active spatial histories. While theoretically sound, the argument falters empirically when Massey (2005, 2) claims that ‘the Aztecs had conquered all before them’. The coastal regions of what is now the state of Guerrero break with simplistic depictions of Mexica hegemony over the territory; in turn, these breaks can help to articulate more dynamic and active urban histories. Some of these breaks are evident in language, or rather, in the power relations evinced in the languages being used to tell these histories.

There are language nodes that reveal imbricated power relations which reinscribe imperial domination of both the Mexica and Spanish. Take for example the naming of the Guerrero coasts which are split into three official regions: Costa Grande, Acapulco, and Costa Chica. On the surface, the language reflects Spanish colonisation, yet these regions also map onto the pre-Columbian territorial struggles.

The Costa Grande was inhabited by various cultures, one of whom were the Cuitlateca who spoke a language isolate which is now extinct. The Mexica and Purépecha empires competed for partial control of the city-states in the region (INAH 2007). The Mexica had a habit of changing the names of the regions they conquered. Prior to being called Costa Grande, the Mexica changed Cuitlatepan to Cihuatlán [Nahuatl for place of women]. With historical Olmec influence, Acapulco [Nahuatl for where the reeds were destroyed] was a border city under the control of the Yope empire though contested by the Mexica who wanted to but could not, despite their best efforts, dominate the Yope peoples (INAH 2007). Known for their warrior prowess, the Yope controlled what are now the Costa Chica and La Montaña regions. Though not without struggle, they gave up control of Acapulco and retreated into the mountains, eventually founding a city called Tlapa (Nahuatl for dyed or stained). Their descendants are popularly known as Tlapanecos although they prefer to call themselves and their language Me’phaa, to dissociate with the ‘dirty’ connotations in Nahuatl. These language nodes reveal a codependent relationship between the Spanish and the Mexica that oscillates between usurpation, complicity, and resistance.

In the process of colonisation, several local regional languages were lost. In Mexico, there are 11 indigenous language families, 68 languages spoken, and 364 variants of these languages (INEGI 2022). The overarching point I am arguing here is that in these geographies there are at least 68 different and existing ways of saying ‘urbanisation’. Each of these words also have their antonyms, their own negatives of city and the urban with their own histories and geographies. Any kind of simplistic translation will never do these histories and geographies justice: there is layered violence from pre-colonial empires and colonial powers. Once again, Sawyer’s (2022) editorial bears relevance here in critiquing the practice of simply taking a word in the local language and offering northwestern-centric or simplistic explanations for that particular concept that word may engender. Moreover, Yimin Zhao’s (2020) argument for translation to be redefined as a ‘fusion of horizons’ is compelling. Though, we must be critical of the power differentials between the rural and the urban. The language reflects and informs the internal logics of the material processes that make up urbanisation. City by any other name is not the same!

The Nn’anncue Ñomdaa (Nahuatl: Amuzgo) pueblo of the Costa Chica of Guerrero, where I conducted ethnographic research for three years (2019-2022), does not have a specific translation for the word ‘urbanisation’. They have several. One of them is Jawidyeti nn’antsjoom which is a compound term that indicates that the pueblo is growing. But this is not the same growth one might associate with northwestern ideas of urbanism which, in theory, prioritises economic and political power, with a focus of maximising economic growth, utility, and efficiency for the few. The word Jawidyeti speaks of a healthy kind of growth, one that is constantly striving for the creation of community, a fellowship forged in difference. And the word nn’antsjoom best translates to pueblo, but again, not the Spanish kind of pueblo but one with a specific nonlinear temporal component which references their mythological origins (an island out there) and simultaneously a future utopia which should guide the physical construction of the built environment. This term encompasses a wide range of beliefs, rituals, and rituals associated with nature worship, ancestor worship, and the celebration of life events such as births, romantic unions, and deaths; it involves a close relationship with the environment and with the gods, who are understood as integral to the natural world and its cycles of life and death. The Nn’anncue Ñomdaa believe that by participating in these practices, they maintain balance and harmony in the world and ensure the well-being of their communities. While there is much to learn from the unravelling of these language nodes, Jawidyeti nn’antsjoom in practice is a different story, one that needs its own space for exploration and explanation.

conclusion

To return to my guiding question: What is a city? The answers need to be plural and take seriously the negatives that urbanisation processes help to produce. These negatives, too, are plural and mobile, and, beyond the rural, they have many names in scholarship on our pages and beyond. Non-urban areas that are neither urban or rural have been typically called suburban, exurban, or even semi-urban areas such as periurban, urban fringe, exurbs, edge cities, transition zones, hinterlands, and more. The common theme across these categorisations is that they are more readily linked to the urban than they are to the rural. Moreover, in some cases, such as industrial parks, the link between city and the urban may actually break apart (Gündoğan 2021). The colonisation of the ‘planetary urbanisation’ discourse, its oversimplification, and the aspiration towards epistemological elitism in northwestern scholars’ citational practices contribute to the dominance of the urban as a spatiality in both contemporary and historical literature.

As a border dweller, I seek to narrate an intimate-social account of the ways in which urbanism was used to inflict pain upon rural subjects, my family included. My life’s circumstances and migratory trajectory have made thinking with borders a necessity to try to make sense of the world (Moreno-Tabarez 2012). I find power and potential for emancipation in the process of inhabiting borders on my terms. The notion that urban borders exist within urban areas is a common one, with scholars like Fauser (2017) arguing that national borders are now more heavily enforced in urban areas than at national boundaries. In a recent Special Feature co-edited by Anna Gawlewicz and Oren Yiftachel (2022), the concept of the “throwntogetherness” and “thrownapartness” of urban life forms is explored using the work of Doreen Massey. These variant borders are shaped by a range of social, economic, and cultural factors, such as class, race, ethnicity, ability, gender, sexuality, and even the sensory elements of a city, like its smells, visual aesthetics, and soundscapes. Likewise, Thieme, Lancione, and Rosa, (2017) co-edited one of our earlier Special Features exploring urban marginality in the context of city margins rather than urban borders. Kho (2017) and Zhao (2017) in this Special Feature stand out as they examine the violence inflicted by the urban on border zones like Special Economic Zones and green belts, though these are both assumed to be extensions of the urban. The significance of the negative in these conceptualizations lies in its challenge to the notion that the urban has dominated all forms of spatialities produced by both humans and nonhumans, in addition to and alongside with, as De Landa (1997) argues, geological and ecological processes.

Derrida (1994) wrote Specters of Marx in response to Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that communism was dead and that liberal democracy had triumphed. This marked the only time Derrida engaged Marx’s work in published writing. He wanted to bring his project of deconstruction in conversation with historical materialism, particularly highlighting how the latter benefited from the former’s interdisciplinarity. For Derrida, deconstruction embodies Marx’s spirit of self-critique, the critical reflexivity necessary to conjure justice for spectres, that which is no longer and is not yet. Deconstruction induces a healthy dose of critical reflexivity of the radical and emancipatory possibilities of the urban, particularly when the urban is used as a violent tool to eradicate other forms of alternative spacetimes. Ultimately, as Chari (2017), citing Derrida, argues, there are some ‘ghosts’ with whom we must learn to live.

* the use of lowercase letters in the titles is intentional, paying homage to bell hooks, a radical black feminist who chose to write her name in all lowercase letters as an active choice to equalise language structures. i am working in an afro-indigenous geographic context and for me, this serves as a symbol of solidarity across borders.