The critical literature on 'tropicality' -the colonising discourse that constructs the tropical world as the West's environmental Other -focuses chiefly on its historical links with colonialism and on the agency of Western colonisers. Scant attention has been paid to the trajectory of this discourse between the 1940s and 1970s, or to how it has been resisted by the 'tropicalised'. This paper teases out how, in this post-war era of decolonisation and Cold War, there arose in Western experience a potent image of the tropics as militant -as combative, belligerent and revolutionary. The term militant tropicality is deployed to recall this image and identify a suite of counterhegemonic knowledges, practices and experiences emanating from the tropical world that challenged the way the West judged the tropics against the presumed normality of the temperate north. The paper dwells on two sites in the promulgation of this militant tropicality -the Caribbean during the 1940s and 1950s, and Vietnam during the 1960s -and probes some of its salient imaginative and material geographies using a range of sources (literature, art, journalism, revolutionary thought, and government and military records). The paper underscores the (little studied) martial quality of tropicality and how, by the 1960s, militant tropicality had become closely associated with guerrilla wars in jungle settings that fractured the West's 'temperate' model of war.

Critical engagement with the relations between geography and empire has become integral to the view that geography is a power-laden venture rather than an impartial or self-contained discipline. However, the literature on this imbroglio focuses either on the imperial past or on present-day colonialisms and pays scant attention to the postwar era of decolonization (1945-1980). Why is this so? What happened when the empires that geography had helped to shape came to an end after World War II? What impact did decolonization have on the discipline? It is claimed that decolonization had a marginal place in postwar geography, but can still be discerned, in buried forms, and that some geographers wrote about it with perspicacity. This contention is pursued with reference to the writing of Western (mainly American, British and French), and some African and Asian, geographers and probes how decolonization was differently positioned within different geographical traditions and debates, and how geographical knowledge both advanced and challenged understanding of this process. The essay promotes a comparative approach to the two facets of the title, and delineates both differences and commonalities in geographers's views and experiences. Two key findings are: first, that geographers were much more interested in the everyday geographical violence of decolonization than in its high politics or the writings of revolutionaries; and second, that this concern prompted some to observe that questions of decolonization were subordinated too easily to ones of development.

This paper examines the fieldwork undertaken by the distinguished French geographer Pierre Gourou (1900-99) in the Tonkin Delta (Red River Delta) of northern Vietnam in the 1920s and 1930s, and his wider configuration of "the tropical world" as a distinct space of knowledge and radical otherness. Gourou's fieldwork endeavours in French Indochina are interpreted in the light of recent work on "tropicality": the idea that "the tropics" need to be understood as a western cultural construction and colonising discourse that essentialised the hot, wet regions of the world, and exalted the temperate world over its tropical counterpart. The paper focuses on Gourou's monumental 1936 study Les paysans du delta tonkinois, étude de géographie humaine. It is argued that in this study, and his later comparative work on the tropics, Gourou elaborated a distinct geographical variant of tropicality, but one that, ultimately, reinforced the essentialist logic and momentum of this discourse. Particular attention is paid to the geographical ideas, fieldwork techniques and discursive strategies that Gourou used in his 1936 study, and the French colonial context in which he worked. The article shows how Gourou appealed to western reason and science as tools of study, identified overpopulation as the key problem facing the Tonkin Delta, and suggested that colonial practices of modernisation had a limited place and ineffectual role in the rice plains of the region.

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