The political geographies of D/decolonization: Variegation and decolonial challenges of /in geography

• Main Authors: Radcliffe, SA, Radhuber, IM
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier BV 2020
• Subjects: 4406 Human Geography; 4408 Political Science; 44 Human Society; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/302322; https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.49395

Anglophone and North Atlantic geography is enmeshed institutionally, epistemically and racially in colonial modern privilege, highlighting the urgent task of addressing its modes of theorization, interpretation, and research. Decolonizing analysis builds from postcolonial, critical, feminist and racism critiques, and problematizes accounts of knowledge, subjectivity and power. In pursuit of decolonizing knowledge production and addressing global inequalities, this paper enjoins political geography to more systematically engage with decolonial analysis, conceptualization and theory. Political geography has much to contribute to interdisciplinary decolonial scholarship through contextualized, grounded, multiscalar and granular analysis of socio-spatial relations. The paper examines the common ground and potential tensions between Anglophone political geographies and decolonial theory (῾decoloniality’), then examines the case of Ecuador's politics of plurinationalism to illustrate a decolonizing political geographical analysis. The case highlights how the variegated political geographies of decolonization arising within and against coloniality require from political geography a decolonial turn, which would entail divesting core political geography concepts of western norms, including plural epistemologies of space and power in analysis, and recalibrating knowledge production processes.