María Saldaña-Portillo

This book was an incredible look at processes of racialization and state formation. Saldana-Portillo does an amazing job of bringing together a WHOLE BUNCH of theory and making it legible (to me, at least) though I will admit I had to take it pretty slowly. But her use of heterotemporality is really intriguing as a historical lens in the future, and her reading of the different racial geographies that make up the US, Mexico, and the borderlands is a great reminder of how unstable categories of racialization really are. I strongly recommend this to anyone thinking about historical categories of race and the borderlands.… (altro)

This taught me a lot of things I didn't know about when and how we came to have 'the developed world' and 'the developing world,' how the links to colonialism and gender and capitalism work in a really complex way. I didn't know how shallow my own critical analysis of that stuff was before!

I've always thought that a lot of the narratives of development that circulate around the ways sf thinks about the future have a lot to do with how white its mainstream worldview is. One of the things Saldana-Portillo argues is that the developmental imagination is NOT white/western-only, though, so I don't know.… (altro)