The Degeneration of Tropical Geography

Abstract

How did colonial and tropical geography as practiced in the aftermath of World War II become development geography by the 1970s? We excavate the genealogy of development geography, relating it to geopolitical, economic, and social traumas of decolonization. We examine how revolutionary pressures and insurgencies, coupled with the eclipse of formal colonialism, led to the degeneration and displacement of a particular way of writing geographical difference of ''the tropics.'' A key objective here is to complicate and enrich understandings of paradigmatic shifts and epistemological transitions, and to elaborate archaeologies of development knowledges and their association with geography. While interested in such a big picture, we also approach this story in part through engagements with the works of a series of geographers whose scholarship and teaching took them to the tropics, among them Keith Buchanan, a pioneering radical geographer trained at the School of Geography of the University of Birmingham, England, who later worked in South Africa, Nigeria, London, Singapore (as an external examiner), and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Geographies of internationalism: Radical development and critical geopolitics from the Northeast of Brazil

“…On the other hand, exile can also play a 'creative' role. In the case of Santos, for instance, it was his eviction from Brazil that pushed him to play a leading role in French development geography, and then it was his eviction from the Paris IEDES that pushed him to do the same in Anglo-American radical geographies (see also Power and Sidaway, 2004).…”

History and philosophy of geography 2004-2005: biographies, practices, sites

“…Again, such a claim must always be considered in relation to different people and places. As Power and Sidaway show, tropical geography was a powerful precursor, if not always an 'intentional' one, in the emergence in the 1960s of development geography in British human geography (Power and Sidaway, 2004). As Cosgrove cautions, there are always different 'ontological tropics', 'made up' tropics serving different geographical purposes (Cosgrove, 2005b: 215-16).…”

Economic Geographies of the Global South: Missed Opportunities and Promising Intersections with Development Studies

“…the subaltern). Moreover, there is an intense reflexivity in postcolonial geography, one which seeks to recognize, detail, and rectify the historical contribution of geography to the creation of colonial and postcolonial identities, spatial configurations, and knowledges (Power and Sidaway 2004). Culture – and the power concomitant with particular cultural practices and identities – is a central concept viewed by some as both a product of and institution in development processes (Radcliffe and Laurie 2006).…”