Postcolonial Geographies Research Articles

Placing (the absences of) West African sardinellas in Senegal on the animal geographies map

ABSTRACT Starting from the vantage point that animal geographies remain primarily concerned with present animals, what might we learn from an attentiveness to the absence(s) of animals in the context of human-nonhuman relations as approached by the subdiscipline? This prompt is addressed in this commentary by placing (the absences of) West African sardinellas – small pelagic fish – in Senegal on the animal geographies map. Focusing on a derivative of sardinellas, keccax (artisanally smoked and dried fish), and its traces in fish-processing infrastructures in one fishing town on the Senegalese seaboard, the following remarks address twofold absences of the fish: sardinellas’ absence in the animal geographies literature; and sardinellas’ absence in certain locales in Senegal at the current moment. Against these absences, I argue that animal geographies would significantly benefit, both empirically and theoretically, from more deliberate inquiries into how humans experience animals as absent, across their life and death cycle. Such an attentiveness to animal absences, their diverse and always situated manifestations, and the ways they are being experienced by humans entangled in transforming more-than-human political economies, affords inquiring into ways of remaining ‘afloat’ in such post-colonial geographies of protracted extractivism as the one presented in this intervention.

Slow Dissent and Worldmaking beyond Imperial Relations in “Kamer-amère” (Bitter Cameroon)

Abstract Working in the subfields of postcolonial geographies of responsibility and Black and African Geographies, my analysis centers on Cameroonian political resistance and practices of worldmaking. From January 2016 to August 2023, political activists experienced a set of difficulties: A wariness and oftentimes hostility to France’s continued support for the authoritarian state, dismissals by state representatives that dissenters were “externally supported,” and misappropriations of the anti-imperial mantel by government representatives. Over the preceding several decades, the state fostered a political environment antagonistic toward Cameroonians of the diaspora, and this was instrumentalized in the widespread dismissal of activists as foreign, foreign-backed, or foreign-influenced. Activists were hesitant but sometimes strategically prepared to call upon transnational groups for attention and political action against repression and violence in Cameroon. In the context of the state’s appropriation of an anti-imperialist ideology, I argue that transnational solidarities must be attuned to and integrated with local politics in Cameroon. Making sense of popular debates regarding (anti)imperialism, (anti)intervention, and transnational solidarity in conditions of authoritarianism matters for political debates across the African continent.

Financial Subordination and Postcolonial Geographies of Renewable Energy Finance in South Africa: A Critique of the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan

The renewable energy market is expanding in Africa, along with funding from the West for numerous projects on renewable energy. In this article, I problematise renewable energy finance in Africa, with a specific focus on the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan in South Africa, building on and contributing to literature on financial subordination and geographies of renewables finance. I critically analyse, through a desktop study and documentary analysis of the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan, how racial capitalism continues through postcolonial renewable financing for electricity generation in South Africa, driving private sector participation in the public sector, under a neocolonialist framework. First, I draw on literature focusing on race and postcolonialism in Africa regarding financing of renewable energy. Second, I critically assess South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Partnership and Investment Plan from a critical theory perspective. I argue for an understanding of renewable energy financing through the lens of postcolonial financial subordination that not only continues colonial logic but furthers the racialisation of capitalism in South Africa along lines benefitting the West and its interests through the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan, and the capitalist class in South Africa.

Tracing the Postcolonial Ecocritical Aspects of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

This research article examines Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide in the theories of Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism. It provides a new perspective by interrelating postcolonial and ecological issues of indigenous people in the novel. The research article addresses the harsh realities of the protagonist in Sundarbans Island and reflects on the power of colonialization and the degradation of ecological wealth. The research article also traces the postcolonial elements and ecological aspects through various episodes, anecdotes, and experiences narrated in the novel. It focuses on the Sundarbans (Island) and investigates the link between the postcolonial geographies and identities. The research article highlights the problems of indigenous people in the novel. The research examines how the British colonization of India affected the local people and the environment. It mainly examines how the indigenous people play a role in safeguarding their environment. The article also interrelates the aspects of Postcolonial and Ecocriticism to highlight other social issues that the book raises.

Postcolonial Pessimisms and Alternative Spatial Practices: Critical Interpretation of the concept of the Third Space through the Case of Fatahillah Square, Indonesia

Abstract Spatial practice is at the core of postcolonial geography's response to the geography of colonialism. However, the methodology of postcolonial spatial practice is linked to pessimisms within the postcolonial debate. This study aims to overcome pessimisms of postcolonialism by analysing a case of postcolonial spatial practice through literature review, expert interview, and field study. The case under investigation is Fatahillah Square in Jakarta, which has been transformed through postcolonial spatial practices from a space that symbolised the tragedy of colonialism into one of culture and art. Here, the characteristics of Homi K. Bhabha's “third space” are apparent, but this case may also be interpreted as an extension of the concept. Through the hybrid and emancipatory plurality of its spatial practice, it refutes the pessimisms of postcolonialism and calls for further postcolonial practice and analysis.

Rethinking self-determination: colonial and relational geographies in Asia

ABSTRACT This paper argues for a geographical analysis of self-determination by bringing literature on self-determination into dialogue with scholarship on postcolonial geographies and relational space. First, we draw from scholarship that conceptualises colonialism, including non-European colonialism, as playing out differently in different places. This shines a spotlight on a set of self-determination claims, which are resolutely anti-colonial but do not fit neatly into existing conceptions of saltwater and settler colonialism. Second, we discuss three communities who make such claims: the Nagas, the Tibetans, and the Karen. These communities have recently rearticulated the right to self-determination as a mechanism for progressing their causes amidst protracted conflicts and political stasis. In each case, we explore how self-determination is a relationally constituted claim, informed by interactions across various sites and scales. Paying attention to moments, events, and practices foregrounds the tensions that underpin how self-determination is claimed and realised, encompassing: who has the agency to speak on behalf of the ‘people’; the scale at which self-determination is articulated; and how territory is understood vis-à-vis self-determination. This demonstrates how a geographical approach can drive critical analyses of self-determination as a right that is being reworked on the ground, imbued with aspirational and regenerative politics.

“People expect you to choose”: Postcolonial hybridity in complex geographies of scaled diaspora identities

Hybridity in geography, specifically hybridity through a postcolonial lens, is often removed from postcolonial origins regarding geographic scale. I argue that postcolonial hybridity is key to situating geographic scalar identity within the context of postcolonial diasporas navigating competing ideas of nationalism and regionalism. Postcolonial hybridity as opposed to hybridity as hyphenated identity, provides a historically contingent lens useful to contextualizing lived scalar identities within diaspora communities, particularly in the United States, a nation founded on settler colonial ideologies. Drawing from 3 years of observational and interview-based research in the US Indian Tamil diaspora, I argue that scalar identity is a directly influenced by colonial constructions of race, identity, and ideas of nationalism. Drawing from Bhabha’s (1994) concept of hybridity, I demonstrate how scalar identity can be reconceptualized with respect to postcolonial geographies of identity.

'Attorneys of the Poor': the lived experience of general practitioners working in disadvantaged parts of rural Ireland.

The experience of structural violence impacts not only patients but also GPs who deliver their primary care. Farmer (1999) claims that 'sickness due to structural violence results from neither culture nor pure individual will, but historically given and economically driven processes and forces that conspire to constrain individual agency'. I aimed to explore qualitatively the lived experience of GPs in remote rural areas who cared for disadvantaged populations selected from the Haase-Pratschke Deprivation Index (2016). I visited ten GPs in remote rural areas, did semi-structured interviews, explored the hinterland of their practices and observed the historical geography of their locality. In all cases, interviews were transcribed verbatim. NVivo was used for thematic analysis using Grounded Theory. Findings were framed in the literature around postcolonial geographies, care and societal inequality. Participants were aged from 35 years to 65 years; half were women and half were men. Three main themes emerged: GPs value their lifeworld; they feel at high risk from over-work, inaccessible secondary care for patients and under-acknowledgment of their work; and they experience satisfaction in providing lifelong primary care. They fear that difficulties recruiting younger doctors may terminate the continuity of care that creates a sense of place. Rural GPs are linchpins of community for disadvantaged people. But GPs suffer the effects of structural violence and feel alienated from being their personal and professional best. Factors to consider are the roll-out of the Irish government's 2017 healthcare policy, Sláintecare, changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic in the Irish healthcare system and poor retention of Irish-trained doctors.

The Un-Human Beings

This essay traces the political and legal discourses around migrants and refugees in two distinct conditions: the postcolonial and the postsocialist of India and Poland, respectively. The two countries have recently turned to nationalist right-wing politics with an increasingly hostile focus on foreign Others, particularly Muslims. In the context of increased global surveillance and criminalization of Muslims, we show how the bodies of Muslim migrants are dehumanized and constructed as threats, denying their humanity in the process. We do this through the two cases of Ayub and Ameer, two Muslim men navigating their “illegality” in two different contexts in India and Poland. This essay is a contribution to the literature on postcolonial and postsocialist theories and critical debates about the possibilities of dialogue between postsocialist and postcolonial geographies. The examples we use demonstrate that the postcolonial and postsocialist nation-states respond to global phenomena such as migration and Islamophobia in ways that have discernible traces of their histories and are constituted distinctively from the western metropoles.

Choose France! Containment, circulation and postcolonial (dis)continuities in transnational education

ABSTRACT Understanding the post-colonial geographies of transnational education spanning France and Africa requires a closer look at the actors that facilitate and inhibit international student mobilities: transnational higher education institutions. Conceptualising offshore campuses as infrastructures of selective (im)mobility, we analyse how French business and engineering schools shifted their strategies from envisioning their campuses in Francophone Africa as ‘alternatives to migration’ towards facilitating various circulations. We show how French offshore campuses do not simply enact French migration and higher education policies but increasingly adapt to competitive pressures and demands of fee-paying students for mobility, thereby emulating ‘Anglo-Saxon’ market-oriented strategies.

Promises of a truth machine: deception and power in smart grids in India

ABSTRACT Smartness in smart grids and cities is an assemblage of devices that produce data as truth claims and deploy new modes of governance focused on chal (deception, cunning) and bal (power) with a promise to reduce losses and maximise profits. Building on postcolonial geographies, the paper argues that chal (छल) and bal (बल) are central to understanding the deployment of smart grids in India. Managers use the idea of the practice of chal and bal by political citizen-subjects, and the disorder of governance this causes, to justify the deployment of smart infrastructure. However, the paper shows that smartness can be understood as automation, and deployment from a distance, of chal and bal by a capital-state nexus to counter the chaliya (छलिया) (deceptive/cunning/cheat/trickster) citizen-subjects. Planners and implementers expect data and digitalisation to bring order by (re)training and excluding lower-level workers and consumers. These promise to reduce resource losses, making electricity utilities profitable. Rather than being distinctly corporate or clearly in the domain of the state, smart is situated at the fracture of public and private resources, and political and civil spaces. By developing a postcolonial analysis of smart grids and focusing on the ‘inbetweeners’, electricity utility staff and middle-class citizen-subjects, the paper furthers the understanding of smartness and subalternity of elites.

Remittances, development and financialisation beyond the Global North.

In the context of the global financial crisis and the crunch in development financing, remittances have become linked to the financial inclusion agenda in what has been termed as ‘financialization of remittances’ (FOR). This special issue brings together seven articles that analyze the socioculturally specific histories and the everyday manifestations of the FOR in the Caribbean, Central America, Colombia, Ghana, Mexico, Nepal and Senegal. The contributors engage in a transdisciplinary conversation, mobilizing insights from feminist, postcolonial, poststructural and political geography theories. They propose two majors shifts for financialisation analysis: towards an investigation beyond the global North and towards taking seriously failures, contradictions and contestations of financialisation processes. By doing so, the special issue contributes to financialization research in five major ways: to expose colonial legacies of remittances and their financialization; to challenge the supposedly neutral character of the FOR by revealing the caste, gendered and racialized power relations in financialization processes; to destabilizes the notion of the universal individual financial subject and show how multiple financial subjectivities are constituted in constellations; to document the complexities, ambiguities, contradictions and failures of financialization processes and the (everyday) contestations they face; and to show how remittances and their financialization are implicated in reconfiguring authorities, citizenship and social dynamics. The contributions propose relational understandings of financialization that conceptualize the co-constitution of economic, political and sociocultural dimensions of financialization across and beyond the North-South divide.

Melancholia is (geo)political! Postcolonial geography in the Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul

This article examines how melancholia constitutes a psycho-geopolitical space interweaving Korean subjects’ psychic and political lives with the dynamics of the (post) Cold War alliance between Japan and the US. The Wednesday Demonstration is the weekly protest in Seoul that calls for an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government for comfort women who worked in the sexual slavery system under the Japanese Empire during WWII. The fact that the weekly protests have continued for 30 years since 1992 signifies that the comfort women issue has remained an unresolved (geo)political issue between South Korea and Japan for three decades, despite apologies and monetary compensations by the Japanese government. This article offers a psychoanalytic-geopolitical rationale for the endless grief of Korean postcolonial subjects who cannot accept the measures of the Japanese government regarding the comfort women issue. Based on 1-year’s participant observations and in-depth interviews with Korean activists who engaged in the Wednesday Demonstration from September 2019 to August 2020, this article aims to accomplish three goals. Firstly, this article shows how Korean postcolonial subjects were/are haunted by colonial past. Secondly, I examine why Koreans cannot complete mourning for comfort women in the context of ROK-US-Japan geopolitical relations. Lastly, this article interrogates how ethno-nationalists intervene to turn melancholia into a motivation for ethnic solidarity and how their attempt might have failed by exploring a Korean postcolonial subject’s psychic lives. In doing so, I argue that the wounds of Koreans related to the comfort women issue are not simply from colonial history, but they are postcolonial wounds that have not healed ‘appropriately’ under the (US-sponsored) South Korean/Japanese (post-)Cold War security arrangement.

Migration after empire: postcolonial masculinities and the transnational dynamics of subalternity

ABSTRACT Drawing on a qualitative study on migrant men recently arrived in Portugal, this paper examines how the experience of migration leads to the rebuilding of masculinity. The experiences of discrimination and strategies of resistance are linked to the history of Portuguese colonialism and the ways men hailing from contrasting colonial and postcolonial geographies within the Portuguese Empire (Brazil, Mozambique and Cape Verde) discover their subordination in the Portuguese context. We advance two central ideas. Firstly, we engage in an active historicisation of transnationalism and defend the postcolonial character of migrant masculinities. Rather than neutral or a-historical, transnational experiences of migration are better interpreted through the lens of specific histories of colonialism and postcolonialism. Secondly, while recognising the centrality of the hegemonic model of masculinity, we argue that the conceptualisation of masculinity as a complex structure of material and symbolic capitals permits to avoid one-dimensional accounts of subordination and dominance. Furthermore, the notion of capital is helpful for tying together the micro-enactments of masculinity and the macro-historical dynamics of colonialism and postcolonialism. Expanding the notion of postcolonial masculinities implies working with renewed tools suited for analysing how subordination is perpetuated through colonial devaluation or contested via the mobilisation of certain capitals.

Tracing the Links between Infrastructure‐Led Development, Urban Transformation, and Inequality in China’s Belt and Road Initiative

AbstractIn this paper, I explore the links between infrastructure‐led development, urban transformation and inequality in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). I theorise the BRI as a spatial fix to the overaccumulation problems of Chinese capitalism and I pay particular attention to the role of urbanisation. By drawing on postcolonial geographies, my goal is to offer a relational analysis of divergent trajectories of socio‐spatial urban change driven by BRI projects in Athens, Colombo and London. My key argument is that urban transformation driven by the BRI signals the emergence of a new form of infrastructure‐led, authoritarian neoliberal urbanism. This engenders both new urban formations and new urban politics that, despite variegated expressions across different contexts, are reconfiguring urban space and are transforming the social geography of each city by creating, facilitating or exacerbating spatial fragmentation and social segregation.

Global retail capital and urban futures: Feminist postcolonial perspectives

AbstractCritical scholarship on urban development and displacement has a long history in geography. Yet one emergent driver remains strikingly understudied and poorly understood: global retail capital (GRC). This essay engages feminist postcolonial approaches, grounded in African continental feminist work, to theorize from the urban transformations, displacements, and resistances driven by GRC and emerging in urban East Africa. This framework engages an intersectional understanding of capitalism, and its work driving urban displacement, as always co‐produced through gender, racial, colonial, heteronormative, nationalist, and other power‐geometries. We assert that feminist postcolonial geography helps us imagine other urban futures, within and beyond Africa: critical of colonial past‐presents; free of the modernizing imperatives of normative urban planning; and that recognize the work and insights—intellectual and material—of African women.

Forged in flames: indigeneity, forest fire and geographies of blame in the Philippines

ABSTRACT The forests of Southeast Asia are represented as increasingly ‘at-risk' to fire, constituting a regional fire politics concerned with the management and organisation of environmental blame. State governments often place culpability for this increasing flammability on histories of deforestation that disproportionately blame Indigenous peoples who now face a correspondingly large burden in conservation schemes. By tracing the history of fire management from the colonial period to the 1980s, this paper explores how the management of forests and fire in the Philippines has been shaped over time with imperatives to govern and economically exploit upland spaces. While these histories clearly point to a political economy of knowledge production, they also show how forest governance in the Philippines has worked to construct ethnic difference through policies and practices that naturalise livelihoods, spaces and qualities to essentialised ‘tribal' uplanders. To understand the contemporary geography of blame that surrounds forest fires and deforestation in the Philippines and Southeast Asia more broadly, we argue for a more nuanced examination of ‘the uplands’ as a post-colonial geography co-constituted with the historical production of indigeneity and environmental knowledge. We conclude by emphasising the historical role of colonial forest and land management institutions in fashioning lasting socio-spatial differences.

Gender and ethnicity in the Soviet Muslim peripheries: a feminist postcolonial geography of women’s work in the Tajik SSR (1950–1991)

ABSTRACT This article explores the articulation and experience of Soviet gendered ideology regarding work in the Tajik SSR, one of the Muslim Soviet peripheries, during the post-war period ending with Perestroika. Central Asian women’s work was used for economic purposes, as well as being a key driver for fulfilling the ideological objective of emancipating Central Asian women from religion and tradition. Through a feminist postcolonial geography approach, attentive to questions of discourse and material lived experiences, this article explores the ways in which gender and ethnicity were co-produced by Soviet ideology. Analysis of scientific publications produced by Tajikistani female researchers, and of women’s magazines from the 1950s, is contrasted with ethnographic data on workers from various collective farms and semi-urban places, including ‘work heroines’ (peshqadam). Our findings illustrate the hybrid nature of the Soviet regime, advancing theoretical debates on the use of postcolonial theory in Soviet Central Asia.

Postcolonial geographies and colonialism's mutations: The geo‐graphing of South Asia

AbstractThis article builds on postcolonial geography's concepts of imaginative geographies, worlding, and subaltern geopolitics by applying them to an examination of South Asia's regional formation in the mid‐20th century. Following a review of debates in postcolonial geography, I analyze the mutations of colonialism as they shaped the dynamics of South Asia in the wake of formal decolonization. First, the Indian subcontinent's partition inscribed colonial knowledge onto the imaginative geographies of postcolonial nation‐states. Second, South Asia was symptomatic of the Cold War's process of worlding, as reflected in the division of global space and the forms of knowledge generated by American area studies. Third, decolonization and postcolonial migrations provided subaltern geopolitical configurations of the region in tension with the nation‐state. This analysis emphasizes postcolonial geography's value in tracking colonialism's shifts across networks of empire and in the passage from anticolonial movements to postcolonial state territorialization.

A Darling® of the beauty trade: race, care, and the imperial debris of synthetic hair

This article pushes for a postcolonial geography of care, through hair. Working with the ‘imperial debris’ of care as a disciplinary racial logic, we show how it is renewed, remade, and resisted in the present through the travels, narratives, and practices of the African synthetic hair trade. Here we interrogate Lebanese business expansion, entrepreneurialism, manufacture, and styling, tracing in each case how contemporary narratives of care mirror, entrench, and rework colonial ideals and subjectivities of Whiteness. Disrupting these logics, we close by attending to the influences of Ugandan stylists and consumers who draw on Caribbean, US-American, and other diasporic circuits of Blackness, along with locally rooted innovations. Our work demonstrates how racial power travels through time and across space, asserting the important and sustained insights of a postcolonial geography of care.