Artery: Entanglements of Race and Nature on Colombia’s Magdalena River

The Magdalena River, linking Colombia’s Andean interior and Caribbean coast, has long served as a conduit for the expansion of colonial and racial capitalism in the Americas. Now a state-backed megaproject seeks to transform the waterway into a logistics corridor. In Artery, Austin Zeiderman relates the Magdalena’s fraught past and uncertain future to global entanglements of race, nature, and capital. Refusing disciplinary parochialism, Zeiderman engages with debates across the social sciences and humanities to examine how racial orders shape ecologies and infrastructures, thereby upholding exploitative relations not only among human populations, but also between people and the planet. Alert to ethnographic specificity and broad relevance, Zeiderman positions the Magdalena River within regimes of extractivism and inequality that continue to afflict the modern world.

Austin Zeiderman is Associate Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics and author of Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá, also published by Duke University Press.