Toward Expanding Links Between Political Geography and African Studies

Abstract

Africa receives limited attention from political geographers, and African studies scholars pay too little attention to political geography. In reviewing the recent literature on African political geography, several themes emerge. This essay concentrates on three of these: the new scramble for Africa, political ecology, and electoral geography. The first two are areas in which a fair amount of political geography work has been done, but where more focus on particularly urban dimensions is warranted. The third arena of research is found to be highly under‐represented in recent scholarship, despite its palpable potential for yielding new insights and greater synergies between African studies and the sub‐field of political geography.

Defiant scholarship: Dismantling coloniality in contemporary African geographies

“…Coloniality in geographies of Africa Important work has critiqued the 'epistemic violence' (Spivak, 1988) of imposing Eurocentric systems of knowledge in Africa (wa Thiong'o, 1986;Mudimbe, 1988;Oye ˇwùmí, 1997), including the 'thing-ification' of Africans (Césaire, 1955;Beti, 1972) in dominant scholarship and the racism embedded within colonial cartographic dissections of the continent. Scholars have critiqued the dominance of the Western academy in the production of knowledge about Africa (Ake, 1979;Watts, 1997;West & Martin, 1999;Zeleza, 2006;Branch, 2018); some addressing their disciplines directly (Mafege, 1996Magubane, 2006Mama, 2007), including geography (Myers, 2014;Daley & Kamata, 2017). Indeed, beyond Africa, much has been written on the colonial roots of geography (Kobayashi & Peake, 2000).…”

“…Colonial persistence is further revealed in how Africa is situated in other bodies of thought, including in the erasures of the functions of racialization (including whiteness) in scholarship on African societies within and beyond human geography. Colonial persistence is revealed in the marginalization of Africa within human geography, particularly beyond Southern Africa (Myers, 2014; Daley & Kamata, 2017) and Anglophone regions in Africa.…”

Difference as practice: Diffracting geography and the area studies turn

“…More specifically, the area studies turn in geography consists of: scholarly journal articles directly addressing the relationship between geography and area studies (Ashutosh, 2017; Barter, 2015; Chari, 2016; Mills and Hammond, 2016; Noxolo, 2016; Klinke, 2015; Koch, 2016; Myers, 2014; Jazeel, 2016; Sidaway, 2013; Young, 2017); associated discussions of a ‘new, new’ regional geography (Jones, 2017; Paasi and Metzger, 2017); special issues in geography journals Society and Space (Sidaway et al, 2016) and Political Geography (Powell et al, 2017) on area studies and their respective forums in 2015 at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the University of Oxford; the ongoing debate on ‘theorizing from the South’ (Robinson, 2002; Roy, 2009; Sheppard et al, 2013); geography journals placing increased emphasis on translation and ‘internationalizing’ their activities (see, for instance, Antipode ’s recent call for translation and outreach); and geographers (previously absent from debates within area studies) contributing to area studies journals such as the roundtable in the International Journal of Middle East Studies that focused explicitly on the relationship between geography and MES (Atia, 2017; Evered, 2017; Culcasi, 2017; Hamdan, 2017; Hammond, 2017; Koch, 2017).…”