Multimedia | journal article
“The Nutmeg’s Curse”
Writer and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh takes us to the Banda Islands to unravel “The Nutmeg’s Curse.”
Writer and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh takes us to the Banda Islands to unravel “The Nutmeg’s Curse.”
Emerging from an Indigenous Nishnaabeg ontology, “survivance” calls for an understanding of other-than-human persons as agentially surviving and resisting colonial violence.
Drawing upon archival records in Namibia, South Africa, Portugal, the United States, and the United Kingdom, this article argues that concerns over the spread of plague across land borders led to the development of a nascent invasive species framework which indicted border-crossing “migrant” South African gerbils for the international spread of the disease.