The three texts addressed in this review essay challenge us to question and creatively re-imagine the representation of material spaces at the centre of the colonial project: oceans, islands, ships and archives. Elizabeth McMahon deconstructs the island and its metaphorics, charting the relationship of geography, politics and literature through the changing status of islands, as imagined by colonists, beginning in the Caribbean and ending in Australia. Renisa Mawani destabilises colonial geography by re-animating the ocean and presents, amongst others, the ship and the ocean, as both method and juridical form. Writing against the ‘free sea’, Mawani addresses the imperial reliance on control of the ocean and the intensive juridification of the sea. Stewart Motha re-imagines law’s aggressive acts of adjudication, and challenges its originary fictions by exploring the logic, aesthetics and violence of legal processes that preserve and disavow the past at the same time. Each monograph considers the imaginaries, fictions and material geographies of colonialism, alongside how these imaginaries have been used as sites of counter-claim and resistance by those subjected to their technologies.

中文翻译：

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跨越岛屿和海洋：重新想象过去和现在的殖民暴力

这篇评论文章中提到的三篇文章挑战我们质疑并创造性地重新想象殖民项目中心物质空间的表现：海洋、岛屿、船舶和档案。伊丽莎白·麦克马洪解构了岛屿及其隐喻，通过殖民者想象中的岛屿地位不断变化，描绘了地理、政治和文学之间的关系，从加勒比海开始，到澳大利亚结束。雷尼萨·马瓦尼 (Renisa Mawani) 通过重新激活海洋并以方法和法律形式呈现船舶和海洋等，从而破坏了殖民地理。Mawani 反对“自由海”，论述了帝国对控制海洋的依赖和对海洋的高度司法化。斯图尔特·莫塔 (Stewart Motha) 重新构想了法律的侵略性裁决行为，并通过探索同时保留和否认过去的法律程序的逻辑、美学和暴力来挑战其原始虚构。每本专着都考虑了殖民主义的想象、虚构和物质地理，以及这些想象如何被那些受其技术影响的人用作反诉和抵抗的场所。