The Passing of “Geography’s Empire” and Question of Geography in Decolonization, 1945–1980

Abstract

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.

History and philosophy of geography II: Rediscovering individuals, fostering interdisciplinarity and renegotiating the ‘margins’

“…Anglophone academic. This complements a burgeoning scholarship addressing historical experiences of anti-colonialism and decolonisation(Davies 2020;Clayton 2020), and of F., "History and Philosophy of Geography II: rediscovering individuals, fostering interdisciplinary and negotiating the margins", Progress in Human Geography, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0309132520973750 [pre-print author's version] radicalism and internationalism in global perspective (Featherstone, Copsey and Brasken 2020;Hodder, Heffernan and Legg 2020). An area which attracts special interest is Latin America, as the latest works on Brazilian critical geographies show(Ferretti 2020b and2020d).…”

Other radical geographies: Tropicality and decolonisation in 20th‐century French geography

“…While more work is needed on all these authors, this article has shown the importance of non-Anglophone radical geographical traditions and the need for continuing the investigation on the works of authors who were overlooked for political or epistemological reasons, and whose works and archives can still fuel current debates on the history of critical and radical geographies, as well as on decolonisation cultures (Craggs and Wintle 2016). While some comparative work on geographers' decolonisation has been recently started (Clayton 2020), the plurality and complexity of geographical traditions need to be further addressed by scholars studying decolonisation and postcolonialism. It is focusing on unorthodoxy and political dissidence that we can appreciate this diversity of geography, by rediscovering archives and specific figures, whose works had anyway collective dimensions as it is shown by the fact that these French dissident geographers were mutually connected and inserted in wider transnational anticolonial networks.…”

Editorial: Decolonial Tropical Geographies?

“…The relationships of tropical geography—and wider discourses of tropicality—to empire and the ways this was reworked subsequently, as well as postcolonial and decolonial alternatives have frequently figured in the SJTG (Sidaway et al ., 2018), with accounts of Anglophone (Bunnell et al ., 2013; Driver & Yeoh, 2000) as well as Francophone and Lusophone (Bowd & Clayton, 2003, 2005; Ferretti, 2017; Pimenta et al ., 2011; Power, 2020) narratives. These are part of a kaleidoscopic picture, whereby as Dan Clayton (2020: 1540) notes, there are questions about ‘how decolonization was differently positioned within different geographical traditions and debates and how geographical knowledge both advanced and challenged understanding of this process’.…”