Decolonizing Geography. Sarah A. Radcliffe
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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 Dialogue Rogério 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,