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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
The first book of its kind, Decolonizing Geography offers an indispensable introductory guide to the origins, current state and implications of the decolonial project in geography. Sarah A. Radcliffe recounts the influence of colonialism on the discipline of geography and introduces key decolonial ideas, explaining why they matter and how they change geography's understanding of people, environments and nature. She explores the international origins of decolonial ideas, through to current Indigenous thinking, coloniality-modernity, Black geographies and decolonial feminisms of colour. Throughout, she presents an original synthesis of wide-ranging literatures and offers a systematic decolonizing approach to space, place, nature, global-local relations, the Anthropocene and much more. Decolonizing Geography is an essential resource for students and instructors aiming to broaden their understanding of the nature, origins and purpose of a geographical education.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Preface
Foreword: Decolonizing in a North–South Dialogue, by Rogério Haesbaert
Figures, Tables and Boxes
1 Why Decolonize Geography?
I The Geographies of Coloniality
Coloniality’s urban landscapes and decolonizing action
II Coloniality (How to Recognize It) and Decolonizing
III Historical Geographies of Colonialism and Decolonization
Colonialisms: plural forms, diverse outcomes
Decolonization: political independence?
Decolonizing: unfinished business
IV Coloniality and Modernity in the One-World World
Physical geography and colonial science
Geography’s ‘one-world world’
V Racism in the Colonial Present
VI Decolonizing Geography: An Introduction
Decolonizing physical geography
Decolonizing in practice: re-drawing Los Angeles
Why decolonizing geography matters
VII Chapter Summary and Outline of Book
Outline of the book
Further Reading and Resources
Readings
Websites
Notes
2 Postcolonialism and Decoloniality
I Postcolonialism: Critiques of Colonial Discourse
Limitations of postcolonialism
II Subaltern Studies
Limitations of the subaltern studies approach
III Modernity-Coloniality-Decoloniality (MCD) Group
Limitations of the MCD approach
IV Indigenous and Settler Colonialism Theories
Limitations of Indigenous and settler colonialism theories
V Chapter Summary
Further Reading and Resources
Readings
Websites
Notes
3 Decolonizing Geographies
I Geography’s Sanctioned Ignorance
II ‘Alterable Geographies’: Ways to Decolonize Geography
III Turning the Decolonial into Geography
What geography adds to decolonizing
IV Decolonial Kaleidoscope
Indigenous geographies
Black geographies
Decolonial feminisms and decolonizing embodiments
Critical geographies of violence and peace
V Ways Forward: Limitations of Decolonizing Approaches
VI Chapter Summary
Further Reading and Resources
Readings
Websites
Notes
4 Decolonizing Geographical Concepts
I Space, Place and Scale
II Society and Space
III Environment and Landscape
IV Nature and the More-Than-Human
V Chapter Summary
Further Reading and Resources
Readings
Dictionaries of human geography
Websites
Notes
5 Decolonizing Geography’s Curriculum
I Coloniality and Education
II Decolonizing the Teaching-Learning Process
III Decolonizing the Curriculum
Decolonizing the canon
Reading and more
IV Tackling Classroom Racism
V Decolonizing Pedagogies
VI Opening the Classroom to the World
VII Decolonial Understanding and Multi-Epistemic Literacy
VIII Chapter Summary
Further Reading and Resources
Readings
Websites
Podcast
Notes
6 Decolonizing Geographical Research Practice
I Decolonizing Research: Principles and Goals
Experimentation
Humanizing research and building accountability
Principles of decolonizing research: in summary
II Decolonizing Research Design
Decolonizing research rationales from the start
Participatory research and decolonizing agendas
Refusal
Becoming a decolonizing scholar ally
III Designing Methodologies
IV Ethical Issues and Dilemmas
V Analysis, Writing and Sharing
VI Chapter Summary
Further Reading and Resources
Readings
Websites
Decolonizing research under Covid-19
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1
Racial disparities in UK and US geography
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Theoretical strands in geography’s decoloniality
Chapter 3
Table 3.1
Decolonizing geographies: a summary
Chapter 6
Table 6.1
What makes decolonizing research?
Table 6.2
Decolonizing research methods
Table: 6.3
Codes of best practice: Indigenous and decolonial research
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 ‘A Surge of Power (Jen Reid)’, statue by Marc Quinn
Figure 1.2 Indigenous Los Angeles: a plaque acknowledges Indigenous peoples and places in t...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Micronesian tool for navigating by the stars
Figure 3.2 Association for Curriculum Development in Geography 1983 conference, ‘Rac...
Figure 3.3 Geographies of peace
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Settler colonial geographies and Indigenous places in Oklahoma
Figure 4.2 Te Awa a Whanganui, Aotearoa-New Zealand
Figure 4.3 Lake Waikaremoana, Te Uruewa, Aotearoa-New Zealand
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Decolonizing the Curriculum
Ali Meghji,
Decolonizing Sociology
Robbie Shilliam,
Decolonizing Politics
Sarah A. Radcliffe,
Decolonizing Geography
Decolonizing Geography
An Introduction
Sarah A. Radcliffe
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Sarah A. Radcliffe 2022
The right of Sarah A. Radcliffe to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4159-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4160-7(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945136
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Dedication
For a World Where Many Worlds Fit
Author’s Note
For clarity, key terms appear in bold when first introduced. These terms are explained in the Glossary section. Emboldened references in brackets refer to sections, chapters, figures or textboxes in this book.
Preface
As with any piece of academic writing, this book reflects its author and where she stands in the context of social, institutional and geopolitical relations. As such, Decolonizing Geography: An Introduction is deeply situated and is not about decolonizing everywhere. It emerges principally out of Anglophone postcolonial and decolonial geography and Anglophone geographers’ critical engagements with numerous Other geographies and knowledges around the world. As such, the book speaks back to the global predominance of Anglophone geography in former colonial and settler colonial countries where racialization, the westernizing university and settler colonialism operate and are challenged. Brazilian, Mexican, French and Hungarian geographies, to name a few, have different stories to tell. I encourage all readers to think about this book in tandem with the local and regional decolonizing discussions where they live and work.
My position in these geopolitical and intersectional configurations is as a white, cis-gender woman with an Anglo name in an overwhelmingly white British department of geography. My training and experience are in human geography; the department includes human and physical geographers, the vast majority white, especially among faculty. Geographers of colour have argued rightly that geography’s urgent task of decolonizing must not rest solely on racialized minorities. I concur wholeheartedly, and as a white ally stress the importance of white geographers’ informing themselves about decolonizing and anti-racism. The construction of a decolonial pluri-geo-graphy – or a world of many worlds – depends on all of us. Plural decolonizing geographies crucially require white geographers to take responsibility for and actively work to overturn racialized exclusions and assumptions. The knowledge geopolitics behind this book additionally reflect my decades of ethnographic work with Latin American scholars, activists and communities, especially in Andean rural districts and with Indigenous groups, leaders and organizations. It is their critiques, experiences of racism and exclusion, and hopeful agendas for change that enliven this book. In terms of its focus, however, the book is written to be accessible and relevant for physical as much as human geographers. The chapters include physical and human geography examples, discussions, and pointers to further reading. The book was also influenced by events during the Covid-19 pandemic which provided daily reminders of coloniality’s persistence and of decolonizing ripostes such as the Black Lives Matter movement.
The book aims to broaden understanding of why decolonizing matters among instructors and students in geography and cognate disciplines. Chapters 1 through 4 provide a general introduction addressed particularly to geographers who, like me, are located in westernizing, white-dominated and/or wealthier countries. Chapter 5 deals with issues of teaching and learning, while Chapter 6 covers research of various kinds, including short student projects. To make the decolonizing framework and approach more accessible, a Glossary at the end of the book provides definitions of terms used in the book. North American, European and Australasian geographies appear throughout, although their tertiary education systems and terminologies vary. I have tried to avoid too many British-isms! Across these regions, geographers differ in whether and how they self-identify in racial-ethnic and territorial terms; I provide this information where available but cannot do so consistently. This book addresses exciting and rapidly moving debates which shift as activism and scholarship consider important dimensions related to colonialism. This context emphasizes the urgency for geography and geographers to change their approaches, materially and on short time scales. So, while reading this book, I encourage readers to put it into conversation with blogs, non-academic writings, activism and news stories that speak to decolonizing issues where you stand. Finally, in an introductory textbook it was inappropriate to address structural issues connected to neoliberal colonial academia that systematically influence hiring decisions, promotions, funding streams for research and the colonial biases of journals and peer review. These are crucial issues rightly critiqued in other forums.
To acknowledge the support, encouragement and care that made this book possible, I end with some thanks. Thanks to Pascal Porcheron, Stephanie Homer and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer at Polity, who encouraged and cajoled this manuscript to the end, in the nicest ways. I have tried to unlearn ingrained assumptions, so I’m extremely grateful to everyone who pulls me up on partial understandings and privileged blind spots. Key among those who did that are three anonymous readers. Incorporating their suggestions, together with bibliographies and insights into unfamiliar contexts, the book aims to do justice to those plural realities, albeit humbly and provisionally. Friends and colleagues near and far inspired me with writing, action and conversation during the book’s conception and writing: a big thank you to Laurie Denyer Willis, Rogerio Haesbaert, Humeira Iqtidar, Anna Laing, Sian Lazar, Monica Moreno Figueroa, Kamal Munir, Nancy Postero, Isabella Radhuber, Catherine Souch, Natasha Tanna, Yvonne Underhill-Sem, Georgie Wemyss and Sofia Zaragocín. I am very grateful to Nicola J. Thomas and Ian Cook for sharing teaching materials and reading a draft chapter. Debates at the Decolonial Research Lab sharpened my thinking; gracias to Tiffany Dang, Ellen Gordon, Ana Guasco, Sam Halvorsen, Laura Loyola-Hernandez, Tami Okamoto, Sandra Rodriguez Castañeda and Giulia Torino. Current postgraduate students Matipa Mukondiwa, Emiliano Cabrera Rocha, Ashley Masing and Lily Rubino bring news and plural perspectives to my attention over Zoom. Over the years, final-year students on the geographies of postcolonialism and decoloniality course have prompted me with questions; I hope this text does them justice. The Decolonizing Cambridge Geography working group – especially Sophie Thorpe, Sophia Georgescu, Fran Rigg, Joseph Martinez-Salinas, Josie Chambers, Ollie Banks, Charlotte Millbank, Ed Kiely and Fleur Nash – devised an agenda for departmental change where I work. Taking that agenda to the next level would not have been possible without steady support from Bhaskar Vira, Harriet Allen, Charlotte Lemanski, Michael Bravo, Sam Saville and Phil Howell, among others. Over longer stretches of time and distance, the experiences and voices of Ecuadorian Kichwa warmikuna and Tsáchila sonala continue to resonate through my thinking and acting on decoloniality; for that, I honour their strength in facing down numerous hurdles, and appreciate their generosity in dialoguing with me. And for my whole family, including a 2021 baby, a thousand thanks for many thousands of moments of love and care.
Sarah A. Radcliffe
Cambridge, September 2021
Foreword: Decolonizing in a North–South DialogueRogério Haesbaert
Decolonizing Geography is a book about action and doing, as all geography books should be; it is essential to look at space through the actions of different actors-subjects, human and more-than-human, in their multiple relations to time and space. Living, indeed, means transforming space and transforming ourselves through space, since it constitutes us in the first place as bodies (or body-territories, as we have learned from Indigenous peoples and Latin American feminists). Consistent with decolonial approaches, our aim should be not only to treat every theoretical approach analytically, but to treat categories of analysis also in dialogue with categories of practice – that is, ultimately deriving from common sense and struggles ‘from below’. Additionally, these categories are normative in pointing to a new geographic horizon for the future.
In making a decolonizing geography, Sarah Radcliffe has engaged openly in dialogue with what sometimes, in a simplified way, we see as ‘the South’, as if a well-defined geography was delineated between a North and a South – the North always positioned ‘on the top’ of the map or compass. Making geography is always about understanding and practising one fundamental characteristic of space in motion, namely its ability to change one’s perspective and thereby discover other worlds. Thus, practising space – doing geography – means, above all, seeking to look at the world from the point of view of Others. The book does this masterfully, based on Radcliffe’s longstanding and generous life’s work alongside peoples and cultures often labelled ‘peripheral’ (such as Kichwa peoples in Ecuador), and her teaching and learning with them. Indigenous peoples show us today how relative the categories of North, South, centre and periphery are. To decolonize is precisely to have the ability to understand/recognize the Other’s gaze and transform ourselves with it, changing our perspective and ‘classificatory’ vision. Today, indeed, peripheral, Southern and colonized groups bring fundamental lessons that many central or Northern geographers, in their anthropocentric and dominating/classifying zeal, ignored or despised for a long time.
Taking up points emphasized by the author, I would like to focus on the critiques of decolonial approaches, which defenders of this way of sentipensar and acting constantly face. A Spanish and Portuguese term used by Latin American decolonial thinkers, sentipensar is a neologism that breaks the binary of feeling (‘sentir’ to feel) and thinking (‘pensar’ to think). In her book, Sarah Radcliffe warns us not to romanticize pre-colonial societies. These societies were already very complex and differentiated; for instance, some pre-Colombian states such as the Aztecs and Incas practised forms of colonialism with the ambition of dominating and imposing ideologies (albeit far from present-day capitalism’s extent and intensity). On the other hand, we must always be attentive to the risk of oversimplifying decolonial critiques of ‘modernity’, which, despite all its processes of domination, was also the cradle of autonomous thought. The philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, for instance, says that modernity is based on a constant dispute between two social projects, one heteronomic (domination/subordination) and the other autonomous-liberatory, with the triumph of the former. Likewise, not all (‘modern’) European thought is Eurocentric, defending the imposition of a modern-Euro-colonial ‘one-world world’ universalism. In the Latin American case, the situation is even more complex, as North America imposes itself through colonizing power, starting with the name: ‘American’ designates a resident of the United States as well as an inhabitant of the entire continent, aspects that reflect the Monroe Doctrine (1823) and its ambiguous motto ‘America for [North] Americans’. For this reason, Indigenous peoples in the continent decolonize America by re-naming it Abya Yala (‘living earth’).
Another dilemma of decolonial thinking is the risk of overemphasizing oppressions of race-ethnicity and gender and downplaying their intersectionality with class domination. Treating all these dimensions as mutually constitutive and contextualizing them geo-historically, however, is no easy task. The designation modernity-coloniality has always been closely linked to capitalism, as for the colonization process, as this book reminds us, can never be dissociated from the expansive impetus of capitalist accumulation and consumption, as exemplified by Latin America’s current subjection to the extractive economic model. Thus, the concept of coloniality can never be dissociated from a critical reading of the capitalist world system as a whole.
Sarah Radcliffe also points out that decolonial thinking and attitudes are not new, and link back to the work of several geographers who were concerned with a critical reading ‘from below’ based on specific spaces and subalternized groups. They established more egalitarian relationships, with the purpose of making geography across North and South. ‘Collaborative and Southern geographies have existed for decades, even if they were not always labelled decolonial’, says the author. Achieving this more egalitarian North–South relationship is difficult, however, due to the coloniality of language. From my perspective looking from the South, language appears crucial, and northern intellectuals may not appreciate the importance of mastering a foreign language to carry out a decolonization process, fleeing from the (often implicit) belief that what is ‘recognized’ or what is ‘better’ is already (or will soon be) published in the hegemonic language of English. During my time as a post-doctoral researcher at the Open University, I was surprised during a seminar when Doreen Massey introduced me and pointed out that English was my fourth language. Only later did I realize the importance of this, as few geography professors spoke a second language, let alone more, whereas in Brazilian universities managing two foreign languages is a necessary condition to pursue a doctorate. Arguably the ‘universalizing’ character of English today, especially via the internet, significantly accelerates and facilitates communication, but every self-respecting decolonial study necessarily needs a greater involvement with multiple languages, in order to appreciate the worldviews and geographies of subalternized groups.
Among the lessons to be learnt in a ‘North–South’ dialogue with Latin America is ‘anthropophagy’ (as the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade discussed in his 1928 ‘Manifesto Antropofágico’) – to receive the Other and somehow ‘swallow’ it and make something else of it. This Latin American hybridity or ‘transculturation’ (a term from the Cuban essayist Fernando Ortiz) took place in large part, of course, under the violence of colonization. But much hybridity arises from the longstanding societies and politics of original peoples who, even when forcibly transformed, bring forward decolonial proposals such as the one that opens this book, namely to build ‘a world where many worlds fit’ (un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos, to quote the Zapatista movement). Transculturation thus allows the delineation and building of what Radcliffe calls ‘decolonial pluri-geo-graphies’. Having more than one world means accommodating non-hierarchical, diverse, worlds (a pluriverse) and overcoming divisions such as between First, Second and Third worlds.
In addition to the geographical concepts discussed in Chapter 4 there is the concept of region (or regionalization processes), which carries strong Eurocentric overtones, as in the world’s division into continents. By contrast, in Brazil, Josué de Castro brings a pioneering approach for a ‘regionalization from below’ (by identifying the regionalizing of Brazil’s starving populations), focusing directly on subalternized groups. Mariátegui, the Peruvian Marxist thinker, in turn, speaks of a ‘new regionalism’ in Peru, centred around Indigenous peoples and land issues. The concept of territory similarly can be decolonized further. The concept of territory in Latin America informs critical geographical accounts because of the term’s use in struggles ‘not only for land but also for territory’, as Indigenous peoples say. As Radcliffe points out, unlike Anglophone geographies’ functional and ‘technological’ definition of territory, here territory is understood as a defensive and affirmative space of life, struggling for existence or, as Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves expresses it, a r-existencia (resisting in order to exist). Always in movement, territory must be seen in the multiplicity of its manifestations and overlaps, in short, as a multi- or trans-territoriality – as Guaraní peoples on the border between Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina claim. This existential ‘life-territory’ is evident also in Arturo Escobar’s discussion of Afro-descendant peoples in Colombia’s Pacific region. These geographies alert us to the practical and political relevance of our concepts. As Radcliffe demonstrates here, Latin American Indigenous feminists engage in political activism using the concept of body-territory, which links their ‘domain and appropriation’ over space to their own bodies (as Sofía Zaragocín indicates when proposing that the female uterus itself generates territoriality).
The ‘novelty’ of decolonial approaches is therefore not so new if we situate it in relation to diverse Indigenous and Latin American thought. Likewise it is important not to make the so-called decolonial turn into a theoretical paradigm that will impose itself with full force against other ways of thinking about space and doing geography. As Doreen Massey said, we must be very careful because tomorrow ‘our own theory’ will be questioned and surpassed. Hence decolonizing entails overcoming the idea of radical paradigm shifts and instead promotes coexistence between diverse approaches. As Radcliffe states: ‘to ensure geography transforms into a discipline appropriate for a world “where many worlds fit”, this analytical plurality is crucial. Indeed, acknowledging plural theoretical reference points is entirely fitting, being consistent with decolonial agendas to acknowledge and value multiple systems of knowledge.’
Finally, this book calls on everyone to carry out their own plural decolonizations from the spatiotemporal and geo-historical contexts in which they are situated. ‘I encourage all readers to think about this book in tandem with the local and regional decolonizing discussions where they live and work.’ Clearly recognizing the situation in which our knowledge is conceived is the first indispensable step for the construction of decolonizing dialogues with human and more-than-human Others, dialogues that expand our views of the world(s). Decolonizing is, ultimately, about proposing the challenge of new ways of building power relations, of making politics that is always spatiotemporally situated, attentive to the limits of the act of (dis)ordering space (including concerns about the rights of nature), and to all kinds of inequalities and/or differences.
In summary, this book can be read not only for its analytical vigour and innovative approach to space and geography, but also as a stimulus for action. In times as difficult as these in which we live, especially for subalternized populations in the majority world ‘periphery’, this book conveys encouragement as well as critique, dialogue as well as action. Decolonizing geography, in Sarah Radcliffe’s book, recognizes that there are many legitimate ways of reading and making space, and that our greatest struggle and challenge is to embrace this diversity of world perspectives while tackling its inequality.
Figures, Tables and Boxes
Figure 1.1 ‘A Surge of Power (Jen Reid)’
Figure 1.2 Indigenous Los Angeles: a plaque acknowledges Indigenous peoples and places in the city
Figure 3.1 Micronesian tool for navigating by the stars
Figure 3.2 Association for Curriculum Development in Geography 1983 conference, ‘Racist society, geography curriculum’
Figure 3.3 Geographies of peace
Figure 4.1 Settler colonial geographies and Indigenous places in Oklahoma
Figure 4.2 Te Awa a Whanganui, Aotearoa-New Zealand
Figure 4.3 Lake Waikaremoana, Te Uruewa, Aotearoa-New Zealand
Table 1.1 Racial disparities in UK and US geography
Table 2.1 Theoretical strands in geography’s decoloniality
Table 3.1 Decolonizing geographies: a summary
Table 6.1 What makes decolonizing research?
Table 6.2 Decolonizing research methods
Table 6.3 Codes of best practice: Indigenous and decolonial research
Box 1.1 British opinion on colonial histories
Box 1.2Resisting European knowledge systems in Africa
Box 1.3 Decolonizing Europe
Box 2.1 Overlapping borders and identities
Box 2.2 Coloniality and the who/where of knowledge
Box 2.3 Connecting physical geography and postcolonial-decolonial approaches
Box 3.1 Anti-racism and school geographies in the UK
Box 3.2 Plantation futures: Katherine McKittrick
Box 4.1 Indigenous place-making under settler colonialism: Oklahoma
Box 4.2 Murdered and missing Indigenous, Black and racialized women and girls in the Americas
Box 4.3 Body-territory/Cuerpo-territorio
Box 4.4 Rights of nature: rethinking nature as a legal being
Box 4.5 Pluriverse: ‘a world in which many worlds fit’
Box 5.1 The challenges of decolonizing a university
Box 5.2 Critical race topics and geography
Box 5.3 Global lives in public spaces: cultural and historical geography
Box 5.4 Learning from the land
Box 6.1 Short student projects: learning to decolonize
Box 6.2 The novice researcher and decolonizing processes
Box 6.3 Decolonizing physical geography: water catchment research
Box 6.4 Sample consent form and agreement
Box 6.5 Aymara Indigenous control over writing and sharing
1 Why Decolonize Geography?
I The Geographies of Coloniality
The contemporary world witnesses relations of power, organization of space, priorities, and mindsets that are deeply influenced by patterns of hierarchy and domination that originated in modern forms of colonialism and empire. While not unchanged, these colonial relations, organizations and mindsets are present here and now, from Australia to Canada, Mexico to Finland. We call these patterns of power coloniality, a term that alerts us to the systematic exclusions and narrow interpretations that define early twenty-first-century modernity. Against this background, the process of decolonizing offers a multifaceted programme to identify and challenge coloniality’s material, institutional and ideological outcomes. Coloniality and decolonizing are intertwined dimensions of the modern world, found all around us in urban landscapes, universities, political arrangements, and ideas about nature.
This book provides an introduction to decolonizing geography. Geography here refers to the world in all its variation, as well as to the academic discipline that researches and teaches about that world. Decolonizing geography involves mapping configurations of coloniality as they touch down in a place, making it unique and connecting it with stretched out spatial structures, flows and mentalities. Coloniality is not the sole influence on geographies, but it has been largely taken for granted. Geographical scholarship has largely overlooked it because the discipline itself is steeped in coloniality. Many commentators argue that geography has a very long way to go before it can contribute to decolonizing – they are right, for reasons this chapter will explain. Yet the process of decolonizing geography’s communities and analytical lenses, the book suggests, has the potential to generate important insights into coloniality’s operations across space and the shaping of geographical imaginations and theorizations; indeed, in principle the discipline contains vital practices and agendas for real decolonizing change. This introductory chapter provides an entry point into understanding what coloniality is, why geographers should take it into account, and what decolonizing aims to achieve. We start with a case study, which demonstrates the operations of coloniality in a specific place. This, like the many other physical and human geography examples throughout the book, will show how coloniality operates and why and how decolonizing actions and thought challenge it.
Coloniality
Coloniality refers to mindsets, knowledges, identities and structures of power that have persisted over centuries. Coloniality became the modern globally dominant socio-spatial system from the late fifteenth century onwards. It comprises dynamic economic, political, social and cultural processes, which combine in various ways across time and space (see section 1.II).
Coloniality’s urban landscapes and decolonizing action
In July 2020, a black resin statue of Bristol resident Jen Reid appeared on a plinth where, until a month previously, a bronze figure of the slave-trader Edward Colston had stood for over a century (Figure 1.1). Prior to the appearance of the Jen Reid statue, protesters against the racist murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis had gathered in central Bristol in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. During these protests, the Colston statue was taken from its central city location and tipped into the harbour.1 Now ringed by art galleries, museums and new housing, the harbour had served for centuries as a major hub in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Companies led by men like Colston had profited from the enslavement of Black Africans and from the international trade in human labour, tobacco, sugar and tropical fruit.
Figure 1.1 ‘A Surge of Power (Jen Reid)’, statue by Marc Quinn
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Edward Colston was a seventeenth-century Bristol merchant working for the Royal Africa Company, whose monopoly on West African trade in gold, slaves and ivory began in 1662. Between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, British companies and traders like Colston controlled the mercantilist and then capitalist economic system, which accumulated bullion through trade and enslavement. Like Spanish colonialism in South America, the British traders’ pursuit of gold and silver was based on the enslavement of Africans. It is estimated that around half a million enslaved Africans were moved in Bristol ships over the period 1698–1807 (Bristol Black Archives Partnership undated: 3). In the age of mercantilism and imperial capitalism in the nineteenth century, only a small number of enslaved and free Africans (and later Afro-Caribbeans) lived in Bristol, but that situation changed in the 1940s.
After the Second World War, the British government invited people from what were then its colonies and dominions, including the Caribbean colonies of Jamaica, Barbados, St Kitts, Nevis and Dominica, to take up jobs in Britain. In the memorable phrase of the British-Sri Lankan intellectual Ambalavaner Sivanandan (1923–2018), ‘we [migrants from the former colonies, dominions and protectorates] are here [in the UK] because you [British colonizers] were there’. Today, Bristol is multiracial, reflecting colonial-modern economic structures, geopolitical ties across the world, migrant flows, and – underlying them in turn – a mindset that assumes certain groups and places serve the interests of a former colonial country. Colonial-modern relations thus very much exist in the present day, linking historic relations between places and people to entrenched patterns that embed themselves firmly in cities, interpersonal relations and the prevailing ‘common sense’. The British slave trade was ended in the early nineteenth century, and Bristol’s economy is now based on the aviation industry, tourism, media, information technology and financial services. Yet urban inequalities for Black residents are longstanding, and exist alongside the injustice of the city’s commemorations of colonialism and enslavement.
Imperialism
Imperialism is a type of geopolitical relation whereby one state (‘empire’) dominates the political authority of another state or territory through formal (including military and administrative) or informal (cultural, economic) means. Imperialism is a broad category that includes US post-war influence, direct colonization and diverse forms of colonialism.
Looking closely at coloniality raises critical questions about how Colston is lauded as a philanthropist, while Black residents of Bristol face stark inequalities and racism, with negative impacts on housing, jobs and policing. Focusing on colonial-modern economy, power and society also sheds light on the reasons behind the toppling of Colston’s statue in protests against the racist murder of George Floyd thousands of miles away. In further protests against police brutality in both the USA and the UK, the colonial structure of racism was also at issue. The two Bristol statues – of Jen Reid and Edward Colston – exemplify the relations of power in what the geographer Derek Gregory terms the ‘colonial present’. The colonial present consists, he argues, in the Anglo-American amnesia towards colonial pasts and a nostalgia for the British Empire, expressed through interventions to make Other (non-Anglo-American) people’s geographies serve their own purposes. The colonial present informed the military intervention in the Middle East after 9/11 (Gregory 2004), but it also applies to Bristol’s situation and elsewhere. Analysis of the Bristol statues’ contexts and meanings reveals the spatially situated workings of coloniality and of the struggles against it – key themes in decolonizing geography.
Decolonizing
Decolonizing refers to practices and processes that actively seek to delink from coloniality. Decolonizing comprises ‘a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power’ (Tuhiwai Smith 2012: 33).
Decolonizing action draws attention to the most enduring and exclusionary dynamics of power at work in the world today, and seeks ways to undo them. Precisely due to its shape-shifting over time and space, coloniality is not unchanging; it has been – and will continue to be – challenged and contested. Critical anti-racism and decolonial voices make visible enslavement’s consequences in unequal job opportunities, under-resourced neighbourhoods, and narratives of imperial greatness that ignore everyday racism. Bringing coloniality to light refuses complicity with it, and seeks to reorient institutions, practices and frameworks of understanding that fuel and legitimize coloniality. In this respect, decolonizing offers hopeful agendas for transformed futures (section 1.VI). In Bristol, after the toppling of the Colston statue, the mayor Marvin Rees called for action to ‘make the legacy of today about the future of our city, tackling racism and inequality. I call on everyone to challenge racism and inequality in every corner of our city, and wherever we see it.’2
As coloniality touches down in a place, so decolonizing futures are envisioned and constructed, resulting in diverse and vibrant action and thinking. As the Bristol case exemplifies, although colonialism is often imagined to be ‘over there’, coloniality and decolonizing are present here and now. Decolonizing is very much about geography, just as geography has a lot to say about decolonizing, as later chapters will show.
Entitled ‘A Surge of Power’, the statue of protestor Jen Reid (Figure 1.1) recreates and commemorates the moment she leapt onto the recently emptied Colston plinth. Colston’s statue had become an issue of concern for many Bristol residents. From the 1990s onwards, campaigners argued that the statue celebrated an oppressive and dehumanizing industry and petitioned for its removal. They challenged historical narratives that place slavery solely in ‘the past’, and drew attention to ongoing patterns of exclusion in Bristol and beyond. On Anti-Slavery Day in 2018, artist-activists placed figures identified with modern-day slavery jobs, including nail-bar staff and agricultural labourers, next to the statue, in an example of ‘guerrilla memorialisation’ (Rice 2012). Critical questions were asked about why Colston’s statue was erected some 175 years after his death (at the height of the British Empire), and declared a heritage monument in 1977 when the city’s Society of Merchant Venturers were actively involved in his commemoration. These decisions to honour rather than question Colston reflect colonial mindsets and knowledge. Decolonizing, by contrast, asks critical questions in order to understand coloniality in a given location in relation to wider colonial-modern sites and flows. Decolonial thinking and doing – ‘praxis’ – thereby seek to undo coloniality in an institution or place and to challenge relations of domination and exclusion.
The remainder of this chapter provides an introductory guide to the operation of coloniality (section II), and an overview of forms of colonialism and the messy outcomes of independence for former colonies (section III). There then follows a discussion of two key pillars of coloniality: the modes of thought and power behind its enduring influence (section IV), and the structured exclusions arising from racial hierarchies (section V). In each case, the geography discipline’s problematic connections with coloniality are examined, leading to a discussion of the reasons for and the routes to decolonizing geography (section VI), demonstrated through an extended case study of decolonizing Los Angeles. The chapter ends by making the case for decolonizing geography, from physical and environmental geographies to human geography (section VII). A chapter summary and outline of the book follows, together with a list of further reading and resources.
II Coloniality (How to Recognize It) and Decolonizing
The events in Bristol illustrate coloniality in a specific social, urban, political and ideological context. In one sense, Bristol is unique in relation to the characteristics and dynamics of colonialism and decolonizing action. Yet, as this section explains, the city cannot be understood outside the frames of global linkages, enforced racial hierarchies and enduring inequalities that render coloniality such an extensive and enduring influence on the world. Although it exists everywhere, coloniality is not expressed uniformly in identical urban landscapes, racial exclusions, and contests over place. Coloniality encompasses diverse economic, social, political and ideological processes that touch down in a place, making it both context-specific and interconnected with other spaces and scales. As the Bristol case demonstrates, coloniality is not limited to a colonial or imperial past; its operations are very much in the present.
To address coloniality through action and critical awareness thus requires understanding its operations and concrete dimensions. Coloniality works via the structures, institutions, flows and everyday processes that actively construct systems of power, thinking and behaviour across differentiated social sectors and areas. Identification of key economic, social, political and ideological colonial processes provides the basis for understanding contemporary expressions of coloniality-modernityin its uneven and differentiated pathways across the world. Colonial projects are not external to modernity, but neither do they fully determine social and material relations today, due to both continuities and discontinuities, reorganization and resistance. The concept of coloniality thus recognizes there is no direct equivalence between the past and the present, yet it does suggest that the key drivers of connections between the (colonial-imperial) past and the present can be identified, understood and lead to socio-political change (Ahmed 2000). Coloniality demonstrates both continuity and discontinuity because it occurs across space in variegated and dynamic ways. For the Caribbean decolonial thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres, coloniality saturates ‘so many … aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day’ (2007: 243). For decolonial geographers, coloniality is encountered in every location and place. As modern subjects, we live and work in, move through and occupy, spaces that are shaped everywhere by coloniality.
Coloniality refers to enduring relations of power and difference that have, since the late fifteenth century, configured routines of exchange, encounter, rule, identity, exploration, imagination and sense of self. These routines have been codified in institutions, interactions and narratives passed from one generation to the next. In material forms, coloniality has systematically deployed different types of violence that result in racial, class and gendered oppression and psychological harm (section 1.III). Because of its institutionalization, codification and violence, coloniality has, it is argued, become inseparable from modernity. Coloniality comprises the dark side of modernity (Mignolo 2000), with processes in the present linking back discontinuously to processes from the past.
Yet, for many, coloniality is just the way the world works. Due to the profound restructuring of the world after the conquest of the Americas – what critics term the catastrophe, or the Columbian legacy of genocide – relations of economy, politics and society were transformed, and became interlinked in ways that favour western Europe and North America. The power relations of coloniality rested – and still rest – upon the articulations of race, labour, space and peoples to the benefit of capitalist institutions, white populations and north Atlantic metropolitan countries (Quijano 2000; Escobar 2007). The pursuit of power and wealth entailed the displacement and separation of Black, Indigenous and diverse subordinate populations from their territories and communities. These subordinated groups’ ways of living in and knowing about the world have also been radically restructured, through the imposition of Eurocentric social, religious, ideological orders and rules of social interaction. Hence coloniality operates ‘all the way down’, from globe-spanning economic relations through to the books we read. Coloniality thus refers to
longstanding patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self. (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243)
In the colonial-modern world, racial difference and hierarchy are fundamental to relations of power. Western concentrations of wealth and territory have been constructed through the exploitation of enslaved and indentured labour, and the dispossession of groups designated as racially inferior to white Europeans and settlers. Racial hierarchies shape the spaces and the nature of social encounters, and consolidate unequal access to formal education, property and social standing. Coloniality is intricately connected to a racial capitalism by which market-driven production, labour and control of capital co-developed through enslavement, genocide, and resource and territorial appropriation.
One facet of coloniality’s operation is the discomfort felt when colonial power is made visible. Colonial-modern worldviews deny that colonialism is present now and every day, and instead attribute it to the past or even take pride in that past (Box 1.1). Acknowledging that coloniality is present now and everywhere is unsettling, as it challenges those who benefit from coloniality to face it. Colonial power and domination are not discussed openly and thoroughly in national debates or in geography, and frequently cause the voices of those affected by racism and dispossession to be less audible. Consequently coloniality is treated complacently, relieving the privileged minority from becoming accountable. One key step in decolonizing then involves stepping into and inhabiting that discomfort and recognizing that, in comparison with coloniality’s injustices and truncation of lives, a sense of discomfort is manageable. Concretely, decolonizing is furthered by taking responsibility for the causes of discomfort, and using that discomfort to prompt decolonial action (Ahmed 2000; de Leeuw and Hunt 2018).
Box 1.1British opinion on colonial histories
In January 2016, the UK-based market research firm YouGov found that 29 per cent of respondents agreed that ‘Britain tends to view our history of colonisation too positively’, while around the same share (28%) declared Britain’s colonial history was viewed too negatively (the remainder felt the balance was about right). In the same poll, three-fifths thought the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Oxford should not be taken down, despite widespread student mobilization (Chantiluke et al. 2018). In 2016, young people aged eighteen to twenty-four years were the most likely to hold negative views of colonial history (40 per cent) (YouGov 2016). In a 2019 survey across selected European countries and Japan, around one-third of British respondents viewed the empire more as a source of pride than shame, second only to the Netherlands (YouGov 2020). Meanwhile in Oxford, the Rhodes statue remains in place.
As the textbox on colonial histories suggests, coloniality’s ‘taken for grantedness’ rests in part on attitudes and the types of knowledge people hold about what modernity is. Decolonial commentators argue that coloniality imbues modern modalities of thought that become dominant through key institutions and processes. One domain is education, as students, instructors, books, and theories circulate in schools and universities and out into society. Together they reproduce the dominant ideas about how the world works (de Sousa Santos 2014; Cupples and Grosfoguel 2018). Formal education coexists with influential media, communities and public debates that shape customary understandings, assumptions and social attitudes. Throughout late modern colonialism, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, English, French and other European languages, knowledges and criteria of academic excellence were institutionalized in colonies (Box 1.2). As section 1.IV shows, geography was entangled with imperial projects and colonial schooling, fashioning its current racial make-up, curriculum and teaching (Chapter 5). Because of these processes, the geography discipline has only recently begun to take responsibility for and challenge coloniality.
Box 1.2Resisting European knowledge systems in Africa
Since the 1800s, African and African-diaspora thinkers have developed a number of critical approaches to European, colonially imposed worldviews. These include Garveyism, Ethiopianism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism and Afrocentricity, each with their distinctive criticisms of Eurocentric thinking. Diverse Black political and intellectual contributions have challenged the colonialityof power which exists differentially across Africa (Sihlongonyane 2015). In post-independence Tanzania, for instance, President Julius Nyerere adopted the non-tribal, non-European language of Swahili to counter colonialism. In post-independence Kenya, academics argued for the abolition of the University of Nairobi English Department (which taught selected British texts) and its replacement with African-language programmes (wa Thiong’o 1995; Barnett 2020). Scholars Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Henry Owuor-Anyumba and Taban Lo Liyong campaigned for African literature and languages to be included on reading lists (wa Thiong’o 1995). The exclusion of speaking and writing in local languages, they argued, meant that unique non-western expressions and relations with the world were being lost. Wa Thiong’o advocated ‘decolonizing the mind’, starting in universities whose teachings naturalize and validate coloniality (wa Thiong’o 1986).
Calls to decolonize are heard across the world today. This chapter places decolonial action across society in dialogue with processes to decolonize academic geography. From the Dakota pipeline protests to Māori claims over rivers, decolonizing brings together diverse voices from multiple geographies, histories, ecologies and socio-spatial relations. Dissent from and resistance to colonial logics have existed since the European conquest of the Americas in the late fifteenth century (Young 2003), while action to dismantle the colonial aftermath in imaginations, social relations and territorial-ecological relations began over 500 years ago (Galeano 1971). In this respect, geography – whether in South Africa or the UK, Australia or Canada – needs to move beyond acknowledging the discipline’s role in colonialism to confront its colonial present and address the ‘active nature of geographical knowledge in sustaining colonial relations’ (Holmes et al. 2014: 541). Yet decolonizing is not straightforward, as recent media coverage highlights. Colonial institutions, attitudes and practices push back against decolonial action and thinking, adaptively reproducing the unquestioned dominance that benefits some, while truncating lives and degrading places elsewhere. For this reason, decolonizing generates moments of revelation and feelings of discomposure. It is not about abstract theoretical debates. It is a discomforting journey for individuals and institutions to realize that what we (here meaning English-speaking, mostly white readers in western-type universities) think and do contributes actively and materially to coloniality.
In summary, coloniality comprises concrete and enduring processes arising from the configuration of European forms of modernity that gained hegemonic power through expansive and deliberate measures to further wealth concentration, political control, and the organization of space from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first. To fully understand coloniality and decolonizing requires looking at the geographically variable patterns of colonization and the outcomes of colonial and imperial power in territories around the world.
