ABSTRACT
The concepts of intersectionality, assemblage, articulation, and connectivities with their specific genealogies and histories are used to map a world of entanglements and enfoldments. However, we can learn a great deal from the operation of the nation and empire as constituting and being constituted by their relationship to the inanimate and non-human. A focus on humans as the unit of analysis slights the material relations between humans and the non-human (including the environment and the inanimate world of objects and commodities) as they construct and are constructed by categories of difference. These networks of relationalities, both biopolitical and geopolitical, reflect upon the entanglement of the nation and empire in sustaining colonial modernity’s notions of difference through the inanimate and non-human. I ask what happens when we use these concepts to understand the complex and dynamic web of relations and multiple axes of power and privilege sustained through material culture while it is in motion transnationally.
