Decolonizing Geography. Sarah A. Radcliffe

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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, 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 СКАЧАТЬ