City Road Podcast

As we reckon with the violent settler-colonial basis of our cities, Dallas talks with Adam Morton about a recent literary economy analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Adam published this reflection recently in the journal Political Geography. It is titled A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space (see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629821001463) There is a factual husk to Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness of the West, based on the real spaces and historical occurrences of a group of filibusterers, or mercenaries, based in the United States that engage in racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state in Mexico between the 1840s and 1850s. How are these conditions of settler-colonialism to be approached in the novel and what meaning do they convey about past and present experiences of violent dispossession of land, life and territory? By advancing an approach to world literature coverin