Abstracts
Abstract
This piece is an edited transcript of a conversation on decolonizing Geography that took place between Lindsay Naylor and Tariq Jazeel in February 2024 in response to the ACME 20+ year anniversary celebrations. As decolonial theory and efforts around decolonizing geography continue to gain momentum, this conversation – between two differently located geographers – reflects on the trajectories, geographies, meanings and (institutional) politics of decoloniality as it has taken shape across the discipline. From their own experience and vantage points, Naylor and Jazeel consider the past, the promise, and the potential of decoloniality for Geography.
Keywords:
- decolonial,
- decolonize,
- modernity,
- coloniality,
- knowledge production
Appendices
Bibliography
- ACME Editorial Collective. 2023. “Proposals to Contribute to the ‘Critical Geography Conversations: ACME’s 20+ Year Anniversary CFP.’” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. March 16, 2023. https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/announcement/view/95.
- Asher, Kiran. “Latin American Decolonial Thought: or making the subaltern speak.” Geography Compass 7, 12 (2013): 832-842.
- Baldwin, Andrew. “Decolonizing Geographical Knowledges: the incommensurable, the university and democracy.” Area 49, 3 (2017): 329-331.
- Barnes, Trevor J., and Eric Sheppard [Eds.]. Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and beyond, John Wiley & Sons, 2019.
- Berg, Lawrence D., Ulrich Best, Mary Gilmartin, and Henrik Gutzon Larsen. 2021. Placing Critical Geography: Historical Geographies of Critical Geography. Routledge.
- Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
- Bhambra, Gurminder K., Kerem Nisancioglu, and Delia Gebrial, eds. Decolonizing the University. London: Pluto Press, 2018.
- Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1955].
- Clayton, Daniel, and Tariq Jazeel. “‘Scratching the Surface of the Taken as given, as a Process of Unsettling’: An Interview with Tariq Jazeel about His Book Postcolonialism (2019).” Scottish Geographical Journal 138, no. 3–4 (October 2, 2022): 228–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702541.2022.2110274.
- Curley, Andrew, Pallavi Gupta, Lara Lookabaugh, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith. 2022. “Decolonisation Is a Political Project: Overcoming Impasses between Indigenous Sovereignty and Abolition.” Antipode 54 (4): 1043–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12830.
- Daigle, Michelle. 2019. “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37 (4): 703–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818824342.
- Daigle, Michelle, and Margaret Marietta Ramírez. “Decolonial Geographies.” In The Antipode Collective (Eds.), Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, 78–84. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119558071.ch14.
- Daigle, Michelle, and Juanita Sundberg. “From Where We Stand: Unsettling Geographical Knowledges in the Classroom.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42, no. 3 (September 2017): 338–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12201.
- DeBoom, Meredith J. “Climate Coloniality as Atmospheric Violence: From Necropolitics toward Planetary Mutuality.” Political Geography 99 (2022): 102786.
- Desai, Vandana. 2017. “Black Minority Ethnic (BME) student and staff in contemporary British Geography.” Area 49, 3 (2017): 320-323.
- de Leeuw, Sarah, and Sarah Hunt. 2018. “Unsettling Decolonizing Geographies.” Geography Compass 12 (7): e12376. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12376.
- Driver, Felix. “Geography’s Empire: histories of geographical knowledge.” Environment and Planning d: Society and Space 10 (1992): 23-40.
- Driver, Felix. Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. https://philpapers.org/rec/DRIGMC/.
- Dussel, Enrrique. “Beyond Eurocentrism: the world-system and the limits of modernity.” In: F. Jameson and M. Miyosi (Eds.) The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998: 3–31.
- Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. “The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle.” Enlace Zapatista, 2005. http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/sdsl-es/.
- Elliot-Cooper, Adam. “‘Free, Decolonised Education’: a lesson from the South African student struggle.” Area 49, 3 (2017): 332-334.
- Esson, James, Patricia Noxolo, Richard Baxter, Patricia Daley, and Margaret Byron. 2017. “The 2017 RGS-IBG Chair’s Theme: Decolonising Geographical Knowledges, or Reproducing Coloniality?” Area 49 (3): 384–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12371.
- Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin, 2001 [1963]
- Gregory, Derek. Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994.
- Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. 1 edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
- Harvey, David. Social Justice and the City. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973.
- Jazeel, Tariq. “Mainstreaming Geography’s Decolonial Imperative.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42, no. 3 (September 1, 2017): 334–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12200.
- Jazeel, Tariq. Postcolonialism. 1st edition. London New York: Routledge, 2019.
- Jazeel, Tariq, Anson Mackay, Sarah L. Evans, and Catherine Souch. “Decolonising Spaces of Geographical Knowledge Production: ‘Thinking Geographically’ with Undergraduate Geographers in the RGS-IBG at Kensington Gore.” Area 54, no. 3 (September 2022): 516–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12797.
- Jazeel, Tariq, and Colin McFarlane. “Responsible Learning: cultures of knowledge production and the North-South divide.” Antipode 39, no. 5 (2007): 781-789.
- Legg, Stephen. “Decolonialism.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42, no. 3 (September 2017): 345–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12203.
- Livingstone, David N. The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Wiley-Blackwell, 1992. https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publications/the-geographical-tradition-episodes-in-the-history-of-a-contested.
- McFarlane, Colin. “Editorial: Geography in the World.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47, no. 1 (2022): 2–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12497.
- Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000.
- Mignolo, Walter. “Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21, 2–3 (2007): 449–514.
- Müller, Martin. 2021. “Worlding Geography: From Linguistic Privilege to Decolonial Anywheres.” Progress in Human Geography 45 (6): 1440–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520979356.
- Nail, Thomas. Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
- Naylor, Lindsay. “A Feminist Ethic of Care in the Neoliberal University.” Society & Space, Feminist, Queer and Trans Geographies, Radical Geographies and the Neoliberal University: Contradictions and Possibilities (October 2, 2023). https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/a-feminist-ethic-of-care-in-the-neoliberal-university.
- Naylor, Lindsay. All Geographers Should Be Feminist Geographers: Creating Carefull Academic Spaces. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2025.
- Naylor, Lindsay. Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
- Naylor, Lindsay. “Reframing Autonomy in Political Geography: A Feminist Geopolitics of Autonomous Resistance.” Political Geography 58 (May, 2017): 24–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.01.001.
- Naylor, Lindsay. “‘Some Are More Fair than Others’: Fair Trade Certification, Development, and North–South Subjects.” Agriculture and Human Values 31, no. 2 (June 1, 2014): 273–84.
- Naylor, Lindsay, and Nathan Thayer. “Between Paranoia and Possibility: Diverse Economies and the Decolonial Imperative.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47, no. 3 (September 2022): 791–805. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12534.
- Noxolo, Patricia. “Decolonial Theory in a Time of the Re‐colonisation of UK Research.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42, no. 3 (2017a): 342–44.
- Noxolo, Patricia. “Introduction: Decolonising geographical knowledge in a colonized and recolonizing postcolonial world.” Area 49, 3 (2017b): 317-319.
- Peake, Linda, and Eric Sheppard. “The emergence of radical/critical geography within North America.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 13, no.2 (2014): 305-327.
- Prince, Hugh. “The Geographical Imagination.” Landscape 11 (1962): 22-25
- Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (March 2007): 168–78.
- Radcliffe, Sarah A. “Decolonising Geographical Knowledges.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42, no. 3 (September 2017): 329–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12195.
- Radcliffe, Sarah A. Decolonizing Geography: An Introduction. John Wiley & Sons, 2022.
- Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
- Santos, Milton. For a New Geography. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
- Slater, David. “Reimagining the Geopolitics of Development: Continuing the Dialogue.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 19, no. 2 (1994): 228.
- Slater, David. “The Geopolitical Imagination and the Enframing of Development Theory.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18, no. 4 (January 1, 1993): 419–37.
- Slater, David. “Theories of Development and Politics of the Post-Modern - Exploring a Border Zone.” Development and Change 23, no. 3 (1992): 283–319.
- Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In In C. Nelson, & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271-316.
- Theodore, Nik, Tariq Jazeel, Andy Kent, and Katherine McKittrick. “Keywords in Radical Geography: An Introduction.” In The Antipode Collective (Eds.), Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, 1–13. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119558071.ch1.
- Tolia-Kelly, Divya P., “A Day in the Life of a Geographer: ‘lone’, black, female.” Area 49, 3 (2017): 324-328
- Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (August 9, 2012): 1–40.
- Yeung, Henry Wai-chung. Theory and Explanation in Geography. John Wiley & Sons, 2023.