The first book to be published in 2026 that was indexed by Southwest Humanities is Don Deere’s The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space, published on January 6 by Duke University Press. In The Invention of Order, Deere maps how the modern organization of physical space in the Americas and the Caribbean grew directly out of colonial power—and how those spatial logics continue to shape the world today. He argues that European colonial powers conquered people but also reconfigured landscapes, cities, trade routes, and patterns of movement in ways that dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed-heritage communities, and that these imposed forms of order still structure our ways of seeing and occupying space. Deere highlights familiar colonial features such as grid layouts in Spanish cities and Atlantic-wide commercial networks, showing how the control of movement—who can move, who can settle, and who is blocked—became a fundamental tool of empire. At the same time, he points to the persistent, eruptive forms of resistance emerging especially in Caribbean spaces that defy easy mapping or capture by colonial spatial logic. Particularly in its attention to insurgent geographies that resist imposed order, The Invention of Order enriches decolonial scholarship, documenting how landscapes in the Caribbean elude colonial capture—remaining dynamic, contested, and “excessive.” In this way, Deere opens conceptual space for understanding how resistance to coloniality persists in forms that are not easily clasped by colonial categories of control. The Invention of Order reframes spatial organization not as a background setting, but as a constitutive terrain of colonial power and resistance. Essential for anyone studying colonialism, spatial theory, decolonial thought, or the formation of modern global structures, as it connects physical geography with systems of knowledge, race, mobility, and power in compelling new ways. For more information about this exciting new title, please see the publisher’s website here.