Planetary postcolonialism

James D. Sidaway,1 Chih Yuan Woon1 and Jane M. Jacobs2

1Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore2Social Sciences, Yale-NUS College, Singapore

Correspondence: James D. Sidaway (email: geojds@nus.edu.sg)

This position paper aims to frame and supplement other papers in this special issue on advancing

postcolonial geographies. We offer five pathways for postcolonial geography: (i) narrating the

planetary (which then configures the other paths), (ii) acknowledging other postcolonialisms, (iii)

planetary indigeneity, (iv) seeing like an empire and (v) problematizing translations. These inter-

sect and none are exhaustive. Nor are they completed routes. Instead the five paths that follow are

offered as invitations to scholarly reflection and empirically informed research.

Keywords: postcolonial, imperialism, comparative, indigenous, empire, planetary

Introduction: advancing postcolonial geographies

Ali Hashemi the mullah (the protagonist of Roy Mottahedeh’s 1985 novel on religionand politics in Iran) listens to his secular friend, the Tehran University professor, Ahmed,who explains why he left the sacred city of Qom where they had both been studentsdecades before (in the 1950s):

The war made me fall in love with world history; world history led me to fall in love with a

whole variety of philosophies, Islamic and non-Islamic; and my ability to say ‘You too are right’

led me to fall in love with the indecisive character and perplexity of all human thought. As

Hafez [the Persian poet] says, ‘Love seemed easy at first, but then difficulties befell.’

(Mottahedeh, 1985: 361)

When it comes to advancing postcolonial geographies, we discern no easy paths. Ratherlike Ahmed (and Hafez before him), we have come to realize that what at first seems socompelling, even easy, is full of challenges. The contributors in this special issue of theSingapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG) each offer pathways for ‘advancing post-colonial geographies’. This introductory essay supplements and extends their offerings.All eight of the papers that follow this introduction were first presented at a February2013 symposium held at the National University of Singapore (NUS). That event camejust over a decade after an earlier NUS workshop that similarly yielded an SJTG specialissue on ‘geography and postcolonialism’ (Sidaway et al., 2003).

We embarked on organizing the symposium knowing that postcolonial perspectiveshad lost some vigor, especially within the context of geography’s fast changing theo-retical predilections. This essay expresses our belief that thinking through the postco-lonial still has relevance as well as yet-to-be-realized potential (Young, 2012). In whatfollows we offer five speculative pathways for postcolonial geography: (i) narrating theplanetary, (ii) acknowledging other postcolonialisms, (iii) planetary indigeneity, (iv)seeing like an empire and (v) problematizing translations. Clearly these intersect andnone are exhaustive. Each path that follows invites further scholarly reflection andempirically informed work. They frequently track alongside themes raised in the otherpapers here—which we comment on briefly along the way. But we are also mindful offurther undertakings and different alliances for postcolonial geography.

bs_bs_banner

doi:10.1111/sjtg.12049

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (2014) 4–21

© 2014 The Authors

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography © 2014 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and

Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Five postcolonial geographies

Narrating the planetaryA global perspective of one kind or another has always been central to the postcolonialproject, responding as it must to the conditions that brought it into being such astransnational imperialisms, geopolitical relations, analytical and everyday compara-tivisms and, of course, globalization. In recent years the social sciences (includinghuman geography) tended to approach the worldwide through reference toglobalization—though there are claims that geographers have missed opportunities toshape globalization literatures (Dicken, 2004) and periodic calls for geography to recon-nect with a (lost?) ‘World Discipline’ role (Bonnett, 2003). More recently, literarystudies and other humanities have suggested ‘planetary’ as a richer entry point toapprehend the worldwide. For example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak proposes ‘theplanet . . . overwrite the globe’, for:

Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere. In the gridwork of

electronic capital, we achieve that abstract ball covered in latitudes and longitudes, cut by

virtual lines. . . . The globe is on our computers. The planet is the species of alterity, belonging

to another system. . . . (Spivak, 2003: 72)

Spivak’s observation encourages us (again) to step back from the taken-for-grantedness of the global and engage in its genealogy, one in which colonialism hasplayed such a central, configuring role. As work on the history of globalization hasspecified, it is inseparable from imperial power, as well as reactions and challenges to it.As Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (2009: 25) note, ‘it is prior grasping of the world as awhole, both in thought and in practice, which makes possible the spatial extension ofeconomic, political, and cultural phenomena across the surface of the globe’. Moreover,the very notion of a globe/globalization internalizes Western thought, through whatElden (2005: 8) diagnoses as: ‘a particular way of grasping place . . . as somethingextensible and calculable, extended in three dimensions and grounded on the geometricpoint’. Globalization assumes a divisible space. This conception coincides with the rise ofa modern-Western episteme.

In a parallel way we might consider how imperialism has always been an ecologicalproject, in which humans, plants and other species were shifted around the earth inschemes for colonization/conservation (Crosby, 1986; Grove, 1995; Beinart & Hughes,2007; Huggan & Tiffin, 2010; DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011). The concept of the presentas the Anthropocene, recently popularized by the Nobel-prize winning atmosphericchemist Paul Crutzen, acknowledges human activity as the dominant, universal cat-egory and agent of planetary change. As such, the concept internalizes an apprehensionof the globe and nature that is measured and dated in science whose origins are in,and which expresses the power of, a Western weltanschauung (world-outlook). MarkJackson’s (2014) paper here takes up this theme and recognizes that, despite the impliedpostcolonial intent of the anthropocenic imagination, the imperial has an enduring aurathat partitions it into nations and races. As Chakrabarty (2012: 14) reminds us, ‘the crisisof climate change will be routed through our “anthropological differences” ’. No matterhow anthropogenic the current global warming may be in its origins, in terms ofsolutions, Chakrabarty continues, ‘there is no corresponding straightforward “human-ity” that in its oneness can act as a political agent’.

The universalist assumptions that underwrite thinking about both globalization andthe anthropocene also bear structural similarities with the ways that the category of

Planetary postcolonialism 5

‘religion’ has operated since the late nineteenth century. That this is the case unsettlessome of the taken-for-granted aspects of religion, which is pertinent to charting apostcolonial path for the recently reinvigorated geographical interest in religion. In thetwentieth century comparative religion categorized people and places as belonging toone of an array of faiths. Everyone belonged to a religion, or had none. Indeed someintroductory classes and textbooks in world regional geography will map these religious/culture areas and much work in human geography has traced their intermingling atother scales of resolution. Tracing the history of these religious classifications, TomokoMasuzawa (2005: 6) notes how they became entangled with racialized notions of ethnicdifference. While race has been challenged as a social construct, the assumption that theworld is divided into religious/cultural hearths which have yielded a dozen or soreligions has been persistent. She notes, for example, how Judaism, Christianity andIslam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism and Confucianism, Taoism andShinto are supplemented with newer faiths, such as Baha’i, as well as juxtaposed witha variety of shamanisms and animisms. Masuzawa, however, joins other critics ofclassification in pointing to how it internalizes and then universalizes a western category(religion) attributing a wide variety of social practices to one or other manifestation ofthis supposed universal. Thus:

. . . maps, tables, and lists lend immediate facticity to the subject matter through sheer

repetition and proliferation, and thus implicitly endorse as empirical and true what is in reality

a particular way of conceptualizing the world . . . (Masuzawa, 2005: 6)

Drawing on Masuzawa and others ‘who are now demonstrating that the utterlyubiquitous categories ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ are neither innocent nor cross-culturaluniversals that are somehow ontologically given’, John Thatamanil (2011: 242) pointsto a literature that shows how such categories ‘have a complex and determinate history’with a number of consequences. First, the ‘category of “religion” has a provincial originin the West but has come to be applied universally . . . to peoples and traditions that didnot themselves order their lives by appeal to those notions prior to the colonial project’(2011: 242–3). Furthermore, a hierarchy was put in place, based on a distinctionbetween those few putatively world religions who have a written sacred scripture andthe rest, that are seen as local or minor. Yet ‘once these distinctions are securely in placeand taken for granted, it is so easy to characterize traditions that do not recognize andabide by our distinctions as “fundamentalist” in character’ (2011: 243).

That the urge to classify and compare has also been a founding feature of geographyand remains a point of departure for the discipline ought to give us pause for reflectionhere. For example, new models of comparative urbanism have looked past its role indiscerning abstract universals (Robinson, 2011; Jacobs, 2012; O’Callaghan, 2012). Wewould urge further reflection on the origins and fortunes of comparison. A foundationalpart of the postcolonial project is to continue the work of producing grounded gene-alogies of the uneven co-production of categories, sites and landscapes (see Mohammad& Sidaway, 2012). The paper here by Garth Myers (2014) speaks most directly to thischallenge. He wishes to retain comparisons, but change the sites and angles of com-parison. For Myers (2014: 115):

. . . the key lies more in placing cities on a level analytical plain in comparative studies. While

there may be a need for new terminology for discussing new ideas of urbanism in the

twenty-first century world which might lead to a retirement of the term postcolonialism, it

nonetheless remains the case that the drive for that level analytical plain in comparative

urbanism originates from the postcolonial critique.

6 James D. Sidaway, Chih Yuan Woon and Jane M. Jacobs

Acknowledging other postcolonialismsPostcolonial geography in the past routinely drew on other variants of postcolonialthought, most notably those generated through literary criticism. The consideration ofthe category of ‘religion’ in the preceding section serves to remind us that there existmany other productive engagements with postcolonialism. One such engagementcomes to us by way of postcolonial theology, which has gone largely unnoticed bygeographers. This strikes us as a missed opportunity. Taking the example of Christiantheology, Joeg Rieger (2007: 1) notes how:

From the very beginning, our images of Jesus Christ have developed in the context of Empire.

Jesus was born under the rule of the Roman Emperor Augustus, lived [and was executed]

under the auspices of the Roman Empire. . . . Empire has been the context in which some of

the most important later images of Christ developed. . . . Christ victorious was proclaimed in

neocolonialist circumstances and even the cosmic Christ is tied to another empire. Yet the

images of Christ of empire have not managed to block out alternative visions of Christ

completely. Christ continues to assert a different reality.

Fernando Segovia (2006) argues that a postcolonial optic, as he calls it, not only bringsinto view the omnipresent empires that fill the Torah and Bible, but also the legitimizingrealities of many ongoing Christian practices. We might think here of the colonialframing of Christian evangelizing. For example, a theologically attuned postcolonialgeography might better comprehend any number of contemporary imperial narratives,including those of the George W. Bush presidency. Similarly, it might be better attunedto the theological drive behind various anticolonial movements, be they enacted in thenames of freedom, liberation or reconciliation.

Segovia sees a postcolonial perspective as having no choice but to ‘see itself andrepresent itself as unus inter pares’ (one amongst equals). We might prefer to see it as aprimus inter pares (first amongst equals) or to be more Orthodox and adopt the equiva-lent Greek terms Πρωτος μεταξυ ι� σων (protos metaxy ison). But for Segovia (2006: 42)this optic reminds us:

that the discipline of biblical criticism as we know it and have known it must be seen and

analyzed, like all other discourses of modernity, against the much broader geopolitical context

of Western imperialism and colonialism.

For Segovia this task is crucial, and not merely about more historically accurate theo-logical exegesis. The goal is one of postcolonial transformation of ‘us all, the children ofthe colonized and the children of the colonizer’.

Postcolonial theology is but one of a range of other engagements with postcolonialtheory that should be of interest to geographers. We might think also of those comingfrom alternate national traditions of scholarship. Amongst these, has been workfrom/on the Netherlands (Oostindie, 2010) and Portugal (Pimenta et al., 2007). But it isthe Irish material that is perhaps the most thought-provoking. Writing about the waysin which ‘many (but not all) British geographers have appropriated postcolonial theoryin the construction of “postcolonial geographies” ’, Gilmartin and Berg (2007: 120)comment on a tendency to focus on critiquing long-ago and far-away colonial geogra-phies at the expense of their aftermaths and contemporary colonial situations, inparticular those in which Britain is still involved, symptomatically the relationshipbetween Britain and Ireland. In her paper here Ruth Craggs (2014: 39) agrees thatpostcolonial geographies have tended to ‘favour’ studies of long-ago high imperialismas well as present-day colonialisms. She urges geographers to turn to the era of the

Planetary postcolonialism 7

mid-twentieth century, ‘during which people, institutions and states negotiated, per-formed and experienced becoming postcolonial’.

The case of mid-twentieth century Ireland is illustrative of the value of suchinstances. That time in Ireland was shaped by both the high imperialism (of thenineteenth and early twentieth century) and (according to certain nationalist narra-tives) ongoing colonialism. Gilmartin and Berg (2007) draw attention to a wealth ofhistorical and political writing on Ireland and empire that has been passed over inpostcolonial geography. As arguably the first and amongst the last of British colonies,debates on/from Ireland are ‘paradigmatic of colonial and postcolonial patterns’ (Howe,2000: 146). The acceleration of these debates since the late 1960s onset of Na Trioblóidí/The Troubles is another reminder that intellectual discussion of postcolonialism takesplace beside backdrops of force and counterforce, blood, flags, boundaries, victors anddefeats.

Ireland’s experience of partition is not singular. Many other places are shaped by thegeographies of partition, best understood through a postcolonial perspective. Kumar(1997: xv) has noted in the context of Bosnia that contemporary partition often ‘drawson structures of ethnonational negotiation . . . developed under colonialism’. Here wewould support Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali’s (2007) call, in regard of the lengthiest of thesepartitions, for ‘alternative regional histories to make other forms of belonging andpolitics available to the rhetoric and memory of Partition—and thus [to] shift the verypossibilities of how its future unfolds.’ In her study here of Karachi, Nausheen Anwar(2014) contributes to the postcolonial rewriting of partition, noting that the city ofKarachi became a ‘Muhajir city’, defined by the diverse population to migrate there asa result of Partition. As Anwar notes, this status and the intra-refugee tensions itgenerated continue to define the fate of Karachi, a city that lives with a long aftermathof violence bequeathed by Partition.

Planetary indigeneityThe postcolonial and the indigenous are in a special relationship. That special relation-ship is as much the product of colonial ideologies about indigenous people, as it is thepostcolonial political aspirations of indigenous people.

The imperial imaginations that drove the colonization of territories and peopleswere underscored by racial hierarchies that positioned indigenous people as lesserhumans. Kay Anderson’s sustained arc of engagement with geographically articulatedracialization processes attends to this history, working specifically through the instanceof humanist engagements with Australian Aborigines (Anderson, 2001; 2007; 2008).Her voice adds to the scholarship on the violations arising from racialized thinkingunder imperialism, and through which indigenous people were labelled savages, acategorization that justified displacement, exclusion and even massacre.

Such violations were evident in many colonial contexts. This was especially so in‘settler colonialism’, itself a concept whose connections with imperialism have beensubject to intellectual/political shifts in recent decades, as Veracini (2013) charts. Insettler contexts, across the course of the twentieth century such violations have givenway to avowedly postcolonial models of race relations. In Australia, for example, thishas resulted in the emergence of various political formats of recognition, such asindigenous rights and joint land management (Lane, 2003; Jackson, 2008; Porter, 2010;Barry & Porter, 2011). Beth Povinelli (2002) has argued that such recognition can becunning. On the one hand it brings indigenous people ‘in’ (to citizenship, to benefitingfrom resources that have been enclosed by capitalism, to legitimated politics) from the

8 James D. Sidaway, Chih Yuan Woon and Jane M. Jacobs

thorough dispossession and deep marginalization that colonization delivered. On theother hand, these structures of recognition often pre-script reified subject positions fromwhich indigenous people must speak in their efforts to attain both cultural and materialrecognition: ‘traditional custodian’, ‘customary owner’ and so on (see Bhandar, 2011).As such, some indigenous people can fare well, others not. And the great injustice is thatthose who lost the most under colonialism may be the very ones who cannot re-gainground in this climate of recognition. And as if violation knows no end, in certaincontexts in which indigenous rights and contemporary needs have been recognizedthere has arisen a significant backlash from those not ‘enjoying’ similar provisions. Sohere we see the long history and geography of violation, that has occurred within whatNancy Fraser (2000: 107) calls the ‘idiom of recognition’.

The unifying power of ‘rights’, politically speaking, has been clearly evident in theglobal indigenous rights movement, a now decades-old network of transnational alli-ances between indigenous people of many kinds and with many histories. Thesealliances have realized what Merlan (2009: 303) dubs an ‘international indigeneity’.Indigenous peoples from liberal democracies—settler colonies and Scandinaviancountries—played a key role in establishing these networks of common interest. Giventhe maturity of these alliances it is sobering to recall that it was only in 2007 that theUnited Nations passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: a declarationthat was opposed by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, ‘those verycountries whose liberal democratic culture stimulated the growth of the geocultural“indigenous”’ (Merlan, 2009: 304). There are many histories and geographies of ‘inter-national indigeneity’ that remain undocumented. This includes new variants of politicalalliance between conventionally understood indigenous people and those strategicallyadopting the identity in relation to emergent origin-based political struggles associatedwith certain nationalist and homeland movements. There is also, as Merlan notes, agrowing diversity as well as a mobile (and mobilizing) inclusiveness with respect to theterm indigeneity. Settler descendants are themselves even claiming that they are, intheir own way, also indigenous. Who or what are ‘indigenous people’ and what exactlymakes them so is a question that recently has been preoccupying anthropology (Kuper,2003; Barnard, 2006). Of course anthropology, like geography, is a discipline historicallyimplicated in imperial classification systems, but is also at the forefront of postcolonialcritiques of those very same systems. In this debate Kuper (2003) has asserted that theterm ‘indigenous peoples’ is a concept that has been cultivated as much by globalinstitutions like the UN and the World Bank as it has by indigenous people themselves.Furthermore, it enshrines an outdated, history defying, anthropological notion of the‘primitive’ which may have unanticipated negative political effects for indigenouspeople. Others, including indigenous people themselves, counter that the concept ismeaningful and, because now enshrined in certain instruments of recognition, neces-sary (Barnard, 2006).

The translation of ‘first-ness’ into a compensatory sovereignty is at the very heart ofthe argument for sustaining the category ‘indigenous peoples’. But so too is a notion ofradical alterity with respect to the relationship to nature/land. Such alternative waysof being in the world have inspired critiques of the extractive and enclosing logics ofcapitalism and state-sovereignty as Barker (2005), Bruyneel (2007) and Shadian (2010)document. Barker (2005: 26) in particular notes how:

Sovereignty carries the horrible stench of colonialism . . . But it has also been rearticulated

to mean altogether different things by indigenous peoples. In its links to concepts of self-

Planetary postcolonialism 9

determination and self-government, it insists on the recognition of inherent rights to the

respect for political affiliations that are historical and located and for the unique cultural

identities that continue to find meaning in those histories and relations.

In similar terms, indigenous movements are informing alternative conceptions of‘development’, for example in the Buen Vivir approach in Andean South America(Villalba, 2013) and intercultural education. In negotiation with the universalizing/global/planetary aspirations of most universities, a recently established set of indigenousintercultural universities in Latin America have emphasized knowledge and learning asdialogue between those planetary or avowedly universal discourses and locally embed-ded knowledge and learning that makes more modest claims. The paper by JulieCupples and Kevin Glynn (2014) examines the Universidad de las Regiones Autónomasde la Costa Caribe Nicaragüense or the University of the Autonomous Regions of theNicaraguan Caribbean Coast. They connect the role of this ‘community and grassrootsuniversity’ with wider discussions about modernity, colonization and ‘decoloniality’.The latter concept has been read into debates about indigenous education far beyond itsLatin American origins. Cupples and Glynn’s paper also references issues in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the notion of ‘decolonial goals’ that have recently been taken up inAustralian debates about pedagogies for indigenous studies (Nakata et al., 2012).

Indigenous ways of being also offer resources for an emergent politics concernedabout climate change and environmental futures. Spivak has noted (2003: 73) how thispolitics draws on ‘planet-thought’ which embraces everything from ‘aboriginalanimism’ to ‘spectral white mythology of postrational science’. We see a new politicalinterest in and sense of solidarity with the indigenous. As Spivak (2003: 101) puts it,‘[t]he planetary of which I have been speaking . . . is perhaps best imagined from theprecapitalist cultures of the planet’. Coombs et al. (2012) argue that indigenous ways oflife are often positioned at the forefront of the search for alternatives in a relational,nature-centred ethic of care. It is important to pause on the logic of this new variationof planetary indigeniety. In the older international order of rights-based alliances,indigenous people were independently formed agents in a global alliance. Now throughthe collective global agency of human impact on climate, they have become, like all ofus, planetary subjects. This new attention to indigenous ways of being may well be aresource of hope for a new planetary consciousness. But what kinds of opportunitiesand threats does it pose for indigenous struggles to have their rights recognized withrespect to country, culture and economic well-being? For a start, those struggles are notneatly held in some complete alterity, for as we know indigenous ways of being are incapitalism, casinos, mines, cities and law courts. Amidst these, indigeneity is malleable,leading Byrd and Rothberg (2011) to investigate the interfaces ‘between subalternityand indigeneity’, Niezen (2003) to negotiate ‘international indigenism’ and FionaMcCormack (2011) to reflect on ‘levels of indigeneity’. Again Spivak (2003: 102)reminds us that planetary thinking may well restructure much of our political ground,forcing forward the idea that ‘collective responsibility’ is a ‘right’, and that ensuringthose rights might well result in the curtailment of certain once assumed freedoms. ForJackson (2014), in this special issue, the contradictions in Spivak’s embrace of indig-enous and planetary rhetoric merit further reflections. For us too, a series of questionsarise. Earlier in this paper, we quoted from Spivak’s 2003 statement about the planetbeing a necessary ‘species of alterity’. She completes that sentence by observing thatwith respect to the planet ‘we inhabit it, on loan’ (2003: 72). What might the conse-quences be for the sovereignty struggles of indigenous people within an anthropocenic

10 James D. Sidaway, Chih Yuan Woon and Jane M. Jacobs

political consciousness that understands the planet to be merely ‘on loan’ to humans?Is this something that endorses or threatens indigenous aspirations? Is it something thatconfirms responsibilities of care or offers new pretexts for not caring about the historyof indigenous dispossession?

Seeing like an empireCritical appraisals have reconsidered the role and status of area studies within geogra-phy and cognate disciplines (Gibson-Graham, 2004; Roy, 2009; Sidaway, 2013). As theypoint out, the history of area studies is intimately bound with the geopolitics ofknowledge, arising out of colonial imperatives to compile detailed information aboutplaces and regions for the classification and ordering of the world. There has been arethinking of area studies such that the emphasis is no longer on ‘trait geographies’ buton ‘process geographies’ (Appadurai, 2000): in other words, on the forms of movement,encounters and exchanges that confound the idea of bounded world-regions of immu-table traits. As Olds (2001: 129) notes, ‘the large regions which dominate the currentmaps for area studies are not permanent geographical facts. They are problematicheuristic devices for the study of global geographic and cultural processes’. Thisapproach not only goes beyond the global/local divide that has encapsulated manydebates related to area studies, transnationalism and globalization, but it also eschewsthe (imperially-driven) hierarchization of societies and economies by highlighting thepotentialities of learning from ‘other’ worlds (Briggs & Sharp, 2004; Jazeel & McFarlane,2010).

The area attracting most attention recently is ‘Asia’, and specifically its ascendancyto the world stage. The discourse of ‘emerging Asia’ (or what some term as ‘Rising Asia’)features two key players, India and China. A critical postcolonial reading of the emerg-ing Asia notion that also repositions India in the world-picture is offered by Raghuramet al. (2014) in this special issue. We would like to take the opportunity in this intro-ductory essay to speak of the case of China, not addressed in the papers to follow.China’s current status requires us to rethink the logics of imperialism and Empire. ThatChina often stands for Asia on the rise is hardly surprising. There is an impressive list ofeconomic growth credentials,1 not to mention the sheer advantage of size in both areaand population.

The emphatic economic indicators have been supplemented by more debatablenarratives about its civilizational destiny, as we show below. Already there has beenextensive discussion amongst Western scholars as to whether China is set to become thenext global hegemon with imperialist ambitions (Agnew, 2012; Luttwak, 2012), includ-ing China’s role in the Pacific and South China Sea. But a longer preoccupation has beenwith China’s ventures in Africa. Despite calls for fuller understandings of the historicaland institutional genealogies that shape Sino-African relations (see Mawdsley, 2007;Mohan & Power, 2008), claims abound about a Chinese ‘scramble for Africa’ as a newform of Empire. As some scholars note, there is a need to place China’s role in Africa ina comparative framework vis-à-vis other global players. For example, Curtis (2013)argues that, contrary to narratives stressing the distinctiveness of China’s role in Africa,‘Chinese interests have increasingly coincided with evolving Western interests insupport of stabilization and market-driven economic activities’. Moreover, it is soberingto compare the Chinese presence in Africa to the expanded US military there since the1990s (see Turse, 2013), as well as the ongoing presence of European troops serving inUN missions or NATO forces. The Chinese presence in UN Africa deployments and

Planetary postcolonialism 11

occasional reports of cooperation with the Zimbabwean military are nothing to the dailypreoccupations of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) or the Quai d’Orsay.

Of course the idea of a Chinese empire does not emerge purely out of Westerngeopolitical imaginations. China too has its own visions of its destiny with respect to a newworld order, and these are not always expressed in economic terms (see for example, Qin,2005; Zhao, 2005; 2011). For example, the work of Zhao Tingyang, a prominentphilosopher based at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been especiallyinfluential in this respect. His views are of interest not only because of their popularity inChina, but because they express a Chinese view about its ability to model world powerdifferent in kind to modern western powers. In 2005, Zhao published 天下体系：世界制度哲学导论 (The Tianxia system: a philosophy for the world institution) to describe aChinese model of world order that is claimed to be universally valid. It immediatelybecame a best-seller in China (including being picked up by Chinese leaders) because itcaught a wave of interest in Chinese-style solutions to world problems. According toZhao, the current world chaos is not merely a political or economic problem, it is aconceptual one: ‘To order the world we need to first create new world concepts which willlead to new world structures’ (Zhao, 2005: 21, our translation). And because he suggeststhat Western concepts are responsible for this world disorder, he states that only theChinese concept of天下(Tianxia)—literally translated as ‘All under Heaven’—can do theconceptual work necessary for a stable world. Throughout Zhao’s discussion, he presentsTianxia as inclusive of ‘all peoples’ by citing Chinese classical passages such as天下一家(Tianxia is one family) and天下为公 (Tianxia belongs to all). He claims that in comparisonto other historical empire systems, the Tianxia system is ‘the most appropriate empire forthe twenty-first century’ (Zhao, 2005: 102–109) because it is the only system that thinksthrough the world as opposed to through the lens of a specific nation-state and its valuesor needs. The concept of Tianxia ties in closely with evocations of the world (世界) ratherthan of the ‘planet’ (地球). While the former Chinese term hints at the complex globalsocial relations, the latter refers literally to Earth as part of the galactic system (with somesimilarities to Spivak’s idea of the planet as, a species of alterity, as on loan to us). As such,Tianxia represents a particular worldview as seen from the perspective of the Chinese.

The inclusive vision of alternate Chinese world system, nonetheless also embeds ahierarchy of civilizational types, and one that is out of step with much contemporarywestern thinking. Worldly interactions and relationships, according to Zhao, are forgedon the basis of imperial China’s ‘tribute system’ of concentric circles with the civilizedimperial capital at the centre flowing out to embrace the various ‘barbaric’ peoples at theperiphery. Hence, rather than criticizing imperial China’s ‘civilizational barbarism dis-tinction’ (华夷之辨), he upholds that it is still useful, with barbaric lands and tributarystates serving as beneficial contrasts for Chinese civilization. In this sense, Tianxia is ahierarchical system that puts China at the top to prescribe appropriate strategies toalleviate worldly problems. The theoretical and ethical problems of Zhao’s thesis arebeyond the scope of this paper (see Callahan, 2011 for a critique of Zhao’s work) but itcan be seen that perspectives do exist within China that seek to universalize Chineseworldviews for planetary application. Indeed, as Callahan (2011: 111) notes, Zhao is not‘an isolated example but the sign of a broader trend where China’s imperial mode ofgovernance is increasingly revived for the twenty-first century’.

Much of the geography of China’s new ‘place in the world’—be that as an economicpower, a geopolitical agent or imaginative font—remains to be written. But also over-looked by geographers has been China’s past geopolitical identities. We might think ofthe valuable scholarship on Sino-Japanese relations and the emerging comparative

12 James D. Sidaway, Chih Yuan Woon and Jane M. Jacobs

historiographies of imperialism (see for example Bickers, 2011 and Mitter, 2013 for twoquickly influential syntheses). Relevant too is China’s own colonial experiences andhow postcolonial consciousness affects contemporary China (Wang, 2008; 2012). Wemight think, by way of example, of how Chinese elites nowadays draw on China’scollective memory of past humiliation (国耻) at the hands of foreign powers. Chinaadeptly redeploys this experience in relation to its current geopolitical imperatives, bothexternal and internal. For example, it uses this past to remind audiences worldwide thatit too knows what it is like to be subjected to the tyranny of colonization and will notitself reproduce such effects. At the same time, this historical humiliation now also fuelsa postcolonial desire for recognition and respect of China’s sovereign space, both byforeigners as well as minorities located within China’s territories (see Wang et al., 1999;Zhao, 2000; Zhu, 2009). William Callahan (2009; 2010) calls this a ‘cartography ofnational humiliation’ and shows how historic and contemporary instances of humilia-tion are routinely invoked (see also Wang, 2012). Callahan (2009: 145) demonstratesthat these humiliation-maps have played an important role in the imaginative geogra-phy of China’s transition from premodern unbounded understandings of space andterritory (疆域) to modern, twentieth-century bounded understandings of sovereignterritory (主权领土) (see also Zarrow, 2012).

The contemporary Chinese geobody emerges out of the interplay between otherwisecontradictory cartographic conventions of imperial domain space and sovereign terri-torial space. As Callahan notes, this geobody is still neither stable nor hegemonic evenafter a century of crafting, and faces resistances on multiple fronts. For example, thelongstanding conflicts between Taiwan—the ‘renegade province’, the seat of the Repub-lic ‘in exile’ since 1949—and Beijing reflects the increasingly separate identity of Taiwanand the refusal of Beijing to entertain any ideas to do with the de jure independence ofTaiwan, a sovereignty struggle in which cartographic imaginations continue to play apart (Agnew, 2012). Although as Callahan argues, it is inaccurate to claim that con-temporary China has irredentist and expansionist geopolitical ambitions, given that it ismore concerned with the challenges posed by fissures within its sovereign space(notably Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan’s status). Care is needed not to oversimplify andessentialize Chinese narratives (Chong, 2013).

Even this brief survey indicates that China’s contemporary geopolitics poses chal-lenges to many of the empirical and conceptual assumptions upon which postcolonialtheory has been built. It is a decade since Chinese historian Emma Jinhua Teng (2004:7) called for a corrective to the assumption that imperialism was ‘essentially a Westernphenomenon’. As the case of China indicates, when that corrective is made to the focusof scholarship, some novel variants of imperialism, colonialism and postcolonialismemerge. In this respect geographers might learn from the comparative scholarship ofhistorians which for some time has attended to the implications of comparing empires—adding Ottomans, Tsar and Qing to the European seaborne empires and contemporaryAmerican imperialism that have tended to dominate conceptions of imperial geography(Lieberman, 1997; Adas 1998, Cooper, 2005; Burbank & Cooper, 2011). For example,Dibyesh Anand (2012), writing from the perspective of international relations, hasargued that both China and India might usefully be conceptualized as forms of ‘Post-colonial Informal Empire’ (PIE). Both these republics inherited (albeit not with contestand fissures) the space of prior imperial polities. For Anand (2012: 75), PIE ‘is a politicalentity based on a defensive denial of the charge of imperialism. Its identity is formedaround a sense of being a victim of Western imperialism . . . hence an avowed identityas a postcolonial state’ but it critically appropriates ‘ideas and technologies such as

Planetary postcolonialism 13

sovereignty and nationalism . . . to build the multinational state and combine it with anaffirmation of stories of historical greatness and long-existing pre-Westernizedcivilizational-national culture’ (2012: 68). However, within their sovereign space (espe-cially near its contested peripheries) they act imperially, ‘acknowledging cultural differ-ence, but erasing political identities [defined as secessionist]’ (2012: 83). Their imperialstatus is not defined by expansion, but more to do with these internal forms ofdomination and consolidation, which ‘makes the multiethnic states postcolonial infor-mal empires while instilling a constant anxiety about the precariousness of the imperial/state project’ (2012: 83).

The case of China and Anand’s arguments remind us of the potential of consideringa range of geopolities and ‘crossings of empire’ (Doyle, 2010). Anand’s analysis hassuggestive resonances with the Russian empire (Sahni, 1997) and post-Soviet spaces(the subject of a growing literature signalled in Sidaway, 2000, but considered since byKandiyoti, 2002 and Adams, 2008) as well as Southeast Asia (Baird, 2011). Furtherreckoning with this wider geography of empirical instances is part of what Jazeel (2011:88) signals when he remarks that ‘[p]lanetarity poses the challenge to decolonize ourknowledge of the world by extending an invitation to know it from outside thecategories of western thought’.

Problematizing translationsOver two decades ago, Ketu Katrak (1992: 7) argued that a ‘postcolonial critic’s positionis highly mediated—in particular, the confluence of geography with language a dialecticof space and speech, poses new challenges to be negotiated in terms of one’s audience,identity and sense of belonging’. But running through all the points here are the specificproblems and opportunity of translation. These might be also registered in movementsand circulations that yield cultures, economies and places. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2011:32) notes how ‘words that feature in both ordinary language and analytical prose arealways caught up in the strife-ridden nature of the world that exists outside theclassroom’. This seemingly banal point however demands an analytical reorientationrecognizing the ways that terms like labour, land and capital are translated acrosscolonially-related differences makes them ‘both an analytical tool as well as a piece oftechnology of power’ (2011: 31).

Chakrabarty studies some influential recent texts on history and political economysuggesting how their assumptions skirt around rather than give such translations theirdue. Categories such as ‘labour efficiency’ that might appear in a contemporary Inter-national Monetary Fund or World Bank Report for example were long caught up withcolonial judgments about sloth, laziness and opportunity. But in terms of translation, hedraws attention to ‘land’, noting how, it was central to many indigenous ‘ways of being’but seldom expressed in their languages ‘as a reified, objectified and abstract category of“land”. . . . Yet European colonisation proceeded on the basis of an imagination thattook the political-economic category of “land” for granted’ (2011: 31). Eventually ‘land’becomes the basis of struggle and counter-claims connected with these ways that it isalso ‘a contested category’.

That naming/translations are often adjuncts to violent transformation connects withan example from closer to (our) home. Near our offices, two of us regularly pass a signat a brand new building at NUS, indicating the way to a meeting room named ‘SepoyLines’ (Figure 1). Yet we also know that almost a century ago, very near to the currentlocation of NUS, the Indian nationalist Ghdar (Rebellion) party had led what the colonialauthorities deemed a ‘Sepoy Rebellion’. In the midst of the First World War, dozens

14 James D. Sidaway, Chih Yuan Woon and Jane M. Jacobs

were killed on both sides. Public executions ensued. This took place during the ententepowers (and Japan’s) war with the Ottoman Empire and wider Mittelmächte (centralpowers) and mobilizations by Irish, Indians and others seeking national-liberation.According to Tim Harper (2013: 1782) it was a key event for ‘border crossing patrioticand anarchist movements in the early twentieth century world’ that would be a bridgebetween earlier rebellions and later liberation movements amidst ‘a struggle for theintertwined futures of the imperial regimes that spanned the continent: Russia, theOttomans, the Qing, and the great arc of the British Raj from Cairo to Kowloon’ (Harper,2013: 1786). The 1915 Singapore rebellion came just over half a century after 1857 inIndia and within a few decades an ‘Indian National Army’ would be recruited partlyfrom Malaya and Singapore to fight with Japan. Sepoy Lines may designate a space ina new building (constructed by Bengali migrant labourers over the last two years), nearto where we write these words. But Sepoy carries multiple imperial resonances, fromthe original Persian (sipah) term for infantry in the Mughal empire, as well as intodiverse ‘European’ languages such as Portuguese, Romanian and Russian to refer toarmed forces or (in the Portuguese case until their empire collapsed in 1974) a localcolonial police. The circulation of terms, categories, artifacts and people is always alsoone of translations. Tariq Jazeel’s (2014: 88–89) paper in this special issue is concernedwith ‘the languages, concepts, categories, imagery of thought and the systems of rep-resentation that our disciplinary community routinely deploy . . . which, like anyideological deployment, unwittingly stabilize particular forms of power’. A similarcommitment, ‘to uncover the geohistorical conditions of knowledge production’ ani-mates Ananya Roy’s (2014: 146) paper. But whilst Jazeel’s primary focus is on unevenscholarly circulations, Roy is concerned with the circulation of urban policies between‘Asia’ and the USA amidst the shadows of overseas European empires.

In regard of such circulations/translations, we find it fruitful to return to one of thepapers from the SJTG’s 2003 special issue on geography and postcolonialism. Citing thepioneering Indonesian nationalist thinker Tan Malaka’s (1897–1949) rantau (travels togain knowledge) to Europe, China and through late-colonial Southeast Asia, AbidinKusno (2003: 327) described how Tan Malaka ‘found himself in Shanghai in January1932’ then governed by a colonial condominium that was soon swept away by Japaneseimperialism and then revolution. Modern Shanghai had been constructed, in the decadebefore Tan Malaka’s arrival, along the waterfront Bund (another originally Persianword, which spread, via India, into wider colonial spheres) (Figure 2). As Jeremy E.Taylor (2002: 125) notes, the Bund (like similar bunds elsewhere in East Asia) was thenquickly becoming ‘one of the world’s most recognizable skylines’, but it also was the

Figure 1. NUS campus signage indicating directions to the ‘Sepoy Lines’ meeting room. Photograph by Chih

Yuan Woon.

Planetary postcolonialism 15

embodiment of ‘an entire social system and lifestyle that came to East Asia’ via westerngunboats and commerce. Tan Malaka’s anti-imperialism was deeply shaped by hisexperiences in Shanghai’s streets, which he later projected on his understanding ofmid-1940s Indonesia, at a conjuncture when Dutch imperialism had been displaced bythe Japanese (1941–45), Independence declared, atas nama bangsa Indonesia (in thename of the Indonesian nation), but the Dutch were seeking to return, assisted byJapan’s sudden (atomic-enforced) collapse and British imperial troops. Tan Malaka mayhave sensed that Shanghai’s subjection to multiple imperial powers (including a risingAmerican dominion) anticipated new forms of empire.

The Bund is now mirrored by Pudong, across the Huangpu River (Figure 3). Pudongwas designated as one of China’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in 1993. The SEZsquickly became key axes of vast and much debated commercial reconfigurations ofplanetary power. As we write, the world’s second highest skyscraper (second that is tothe Burj Khalifa in Dubai) is being finished where, during Tan Malaka’s days in Shanghai,there were only fields and warehouses. These remained until the 1990s. Half a worldaway, Europe’s tallest building (London’s Shard) is owned by a consortium in the handsof the ruling al-Thani family of Qatar, whose sultanate emerged from Ottoman(Anscombe, 1997) and British (Onley, 2007) imperial protection and sits on a seventh ofthe planet’s known natural gas reserves. Four fifths of Qatar’s population are migrantworkers without right of permanent residence. Circulating labour, commodities, ideasand capital are being translated into a variety of post/neocolonial/imperial landscapes inways that Tan Malaka’s merantau foreshadowed, but could not have readily anticipated.To the extent that power, ecologies and people intersect in new configurations of‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner & Schmid, 2012), they do so on imperial ground.

Acknowledgements

The advancing postcolonial geographies symposium that has yielded this special issue was funded

by a National University of Singapore, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) grant (number

R-109-000-143-112) and the SJTG. We would like to thank the SJTG’s editors and editorial board

for their support and Soh Gek Han who greatly assisted with the smooth running of the symposium

Figure 2. The Bund, Shanghai, 2013. Photograph by James D. Sidaway.

16 James D. Sidaway, Chih Yuan Woon and Jane M. Jacobs

and marshalling the papers that follow into this special issue. In addition we thank the Future Cities

Laboratory (FCL), Singapore-ETH Centre (http://www.futurecities.ethz.ch/) for hosting the sym-

posium. The FCL’s Scientific Director Stephen Cairns and the Dean of FASS Brenda Yeoh both took

time out of busy schedules, offering opening reflections that usefully set the event in motion and

five discussants (Itty Abraham, Tim Bunnell, Daniel Goh, Elaine Ho and Monica Smith) helpfully

summed up, reviewed and connected the papers. Some of the ideas in this paper were first aired

at the Second International Conference in Cultural Geography, University of Minho held in 2008.

We are grateful to our Portuguese hosts for that opportunity and to Tim Bunnell and an anony-

mous referee for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.

Endnote

1 The Chinese economy has grown more than 10 per cent a year for three decades; the country

overtook the USA in 2002 as the single biggest recipient of FDI, and China’s trade volume

increased seventy times between 1978 and 2005 (Zhao, 2006; Breslin, 2007).

References

Adams L (2008) Can we apply postcolonial theory to Central Eurasia? Central Eurasian Studies

Review 7 (1), 2–7.

Adas M (1998) Imperialism and colonialism in comparative perspective. The International History

Review 20 (2), 371–88.

Agnew J (2012) Looking back to looking forward: Chinese geopolitical narratives and China’s past.

Eurasian Geography and Economics 53 (3), 301–14.

Anand D (2012) China and India: Postcolonial informal empires in the emerging global order.

Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 24 (1), 68–86.

Anderson K (2001) The nature of race. In Castree N, Braun B (eds) Social Nature: Theory, Practice and

Politics, 64–83. Blackwell, Oxford.

Anderson K (2007) Race and the Crisis of Humanism. Routledge, London & New York.

Anderson K (2008) Race in post-universalist perspective. Cultural Geographies 15 (2), 155–71.

Anscombe FF (1997) The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Columbia

University Press, New York.

Figure 3. Pudong, 2013. Photograph by James D. Sidaway.

Planetary postcolonialism 17

Anwar N (2014) The postcolonial city in South Asia. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1),23–39.

Appadurai A (2000) Grassroots globalization and research imaginations. Public Culture 12 (1),1–19.

Baird IG (2011) Questioning the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial in the context of the Brao

of Southern Laos and Northeastern Cambodia. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical

Geographies 10 (1), 48–57.

Barker J (2005) For whom sovereignty matters. In Barker J (ed) Sovereignty Matters: Locations of

Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-determination, 1–31. University of

Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London.

Barnard A (2006) Kalahari revisionism, Vienna and the ‘indigenous people’s’ debate. Social Anthro-

pology 14 (1), 1–16.

Barry J, Porter L (2011) Indigenous recognition in state-based planning systems: understanding

textual mediation in the contact zone. Planning Theory 11 (2), 170–87.

Beinart W, Hughes L (2007) Environment and Empire. Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York.

Bhandar B (2011) Plasticity and postcolonial recognition: owning, knowing and being. Law and

Critique 22 (3), 227–49.

Bickers R (2011) The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914. Allen Lane, New

York.

Bonnett A (2003) Geography as the world discipline: connecting popular and academic geographi-

cal imaginations. Area 35 (1), 55–63.

Brenner N, Elden S (2009) Introduction—State, space, world: Lefebvre and the survival of capi-

talism. In Brenner N, Elden S (eds) State, Space, World: Selected Essays Henri Lefebvre, 1–48.

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London.

Brenner N, Schmid C (2012) Planetary urbanization. In Gandy M (ed) Urban Constellations, 10–13.

Jovis, Berlin.

Breslin S (2007) China and the Global Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke & New

York.

Briggs J, Sharp J (2004) Indigenous knowledges and development: a postcolonial caution. Third

World Quarterly 25 (4), 661–76.

Bruyneel K (2007) The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations.

University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota MN.

Burbank J, Cooper F (2011) Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton

University Press, Princeton NJ.

Byrd J A, Rothberg M (2011) Introduction—Between subalternity and indigenity: critical

categories for postcolonial studies. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13 (1),1–12.

Callahan W (2009) The cartography of national humiliation and the emergence of China’s

geobody. Public Culture 21 (1), 141–73.

Callahan W (2010) China: The Pessoptimist Nation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Callahan W (2011) Tianxia, empire and the world: Chinese visions of world order for the twenty-

first century. In Callahan C, Barabantseva E (eds) China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power

and Foreign Policy, 91–117. Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, Washington DC.

Chakrabarty D (2011) Can political economy be postcolonial? In Pollard J, McEwan C, Hughes A

(eds) Postcolonial Economies, 23–35. Zed, London & New York.

Chakrabarty D (2012) Postcolonial studies and the challenge of climate change. New Literary History

43 (1), 1–18.

Chong J-I (2013) Popular narratives versus Chinese history: implications for understanding an

emergent China. European Journal of International Relations, in press, doi: 10.1177/

1354066113503480.

Coombs B, Johnson JT, Howitt R (2012) Indigenous geographies II: The aspirational spaces in

postcolonial politics—recognition, belonging and social provision. Progress in Human Geography

37 (5), 691–700.

18 James D. Sidaway, Chih Yuan Woon and Jane M. Jacobs

Cooper F (2005) Colonialism in Questions: Theory, Knowledge, History. University of California Press,

Berkeley CA.

Craggs R (2014) Postcolonial geographies, decolonization and the performance of geopolitics at the

Commonwealth Conference. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1), 40–56.

Crosby A (1986) Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge.

Cupples J, Glynn K (2014) Indigenizing and decolonizing higher education in Nicaragua’s Atlantic

coast. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1), 57–72.

Curtis D (2013) China and the insecurity of development in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

(DRC). International Peacekeeping 20 (5), 551–69.

DeLoughrey E, Handley GB (2011) Introduction: Towards an aesthetics of the earth. In

DeLoughrey E, Handley GB (eds) Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, 3–42.

Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York.

Dicken P (2004) Geographers and ‘globalization’: (yet) another missed boat? Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers 29 (1), 5–26.

Doyle L (2010) Notes toward a dialectical method: modernity, modernisms, and the crossings of

empire. Literature Compass 7 (3), 195–203.

Elden S (2005) Missing the point: globalization, deterritorialization and the space of the world.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (1), 8–19.

Fazila-Yacoobali Z (2007) The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries,

Histories. Columbia University Press, New York.

Fraser N (2000) Rethinking recognition. New Left Review 3, 107–20.

Gibson-Graham JK (2004) Area studies after poststructuralism. Environment and Planning D: Society

and Space 36 (3), 405–19.

Gilmartin M, Berg LD (2007) Commentary: Locating postcolonialism. Area 39 (1), 120–4.

Grove R (1995) Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environ-

mentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Harper T (2013) Singapore, 1915, and the birth of an Asian underground. Modern Asian Studies

47 (6), 1782–811.

Howe S (2000) Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture. Oxford University

Press, Oxford.

Huggan G, Tiffin H (2010) Postcolonial Ecocriticisms: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge,

Abingdon & New York.

Jackson M (2014) Composing postcolonial geographies: Postconstructivism, ecology and the limits

of critique. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1), 73–88.

Jackson S (2008) Recognition of indigenous interests in Australian water resource management,

with particular reference to environmental flow assessment. Geography Compass 2 (3), 874–98.

Jacobs JM (2012) Commentary—comparing comparative urbanism. Urban Geography 33 (6), 904–

14.

Jazeel T (2011) Spatializing difference beyond cosmopolitanism: rethinking planetary futures.

Theory, Culture and Society 28 (5), 75–97.

Jazeel T (2014) Subaltern geographies: geographical knowledge and postcolonial strategy. Singapore

Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1), 89–104.

Jazeel T, McFarlane C (2010) The limits of responsibility: a postcolonial politics of academic

knowledge production. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 (1), 109–24.

Katrak K (1992) Language and geography: the postcolonial critic. Contributions in Black Studies 9,180–6.

Kandiyoti D (2002) Post-colonialism compared: Potentials and limitations in the Middle East and

Central Asia. International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2), 279–97.

Kumar R (1997) Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition. Verso, London & New York.

Kuper A (2003) The return of the native. Current Anthropology 44 (3), 389–95.

Kusno A (2003) From city to city: Tan Melaka, Shanghai and the politics of geographical imagining.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24 (3), 327–39.

Planetary postcolonialism 19

Lane M (2003) Participation, decentralization, and civil society: indigenous rights and democracy

in environmental planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research 22 (4), 360–73.

Lieberman V (1997) Transcending East-West dichotomies: state and culture formation in six

ostensibly disparate areas. Modern Asian Studies 31 (3), 463–546.

Luttwak EW (2012) The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Sovereignty. The Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, Cambridge MA & London.

Masuzawa T (2005) The Invention of World Religions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Mawdsley E (2007) China and Africa: emerging challenges to the geographies of power. Geography

Compass 1 (3), 405–21.

McCormack F (2011) Levels of indigenity: the Maori and neoliberalism. Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute NS17 (2), 281–300.

Merlan F (2009) Indigeneity: global and local. Current Anthropology 50 (3), 303–33.

Mitter R (2013) Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston

MA.

Mohammad R, Sidaway JD (2012) Spectacular urbanization amidst variegated geographies of

globalization: Learning from Abu Dhabi’s trajectory through the lives of South Asian men.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (3), 606–27.

Mohan G, Power M (2008) New African choices? The politics of Chinese engagement. Review of

African Political Economy 35 (1), 23–42.

Mottahedeh R (1985) The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran. Penguin,

Harmondsworth.

Myers G (2014) From expected to unexpected comparisons: changing the flows of ideas about cities

in a postcolonial urban world. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1), 105–19.

Nakata NM, Nakata V, Keech S, Bolt R (2012) Decolonial goals and pedagogies for indigenous

studies. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1 (1), 120–40.

Niezen R (2003) The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. University of

California Press, Berkeley CA.

O’Callaghan C (2012) Contrapuntal urbanisms: Towards a postcolonial relational geography.

Environment and Planning A 44 (8), 1930–50.

Olds K (2001) Practices for ‘process geographies’: A view from within and outside the periphery.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (2), 127–36.

Onley J (2007) The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth

Century Gulf. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Oostindie G (2010) Postkoloniaal Nederland: Vijfenzestig jaar vergeten, herdenken, verdringen [Postcolo-

nial Netherlands: sixty-five years of forgetting, commemorating, displacing]. Bert Bakker,

Amsterdam.

Pimenta JR, Sarmento J, Azevedo AF (2007) Geografias Pós-coloniais. Ensaios de Geografia Cultural

[Postcolonial geographies: essays in cultural geography]. Figueirinhas, Porto.

Porter L (2010) Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning. Ashgate, Aldershot.

Povinelli E (2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multi-

culturalism. Duke University Press Books, Durham.

Qin YQ (2005) Guoji zhengzhi lilun de hexin wenti yu Zhongguo xuepai de shengcheng [The core problem

of international relations theory and the emergence of the Chinese school]. Zhongguo shehui

kexue 3, 165–76.

Raghuram P, Noxolo P, Madge C (2014) Rising Asia and postcolonial geography. Singapore Journal

of Tropical Geography 35 (1), 120–36.

Rieger J (2007) Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times. Fortress Press, Minneapolis MN.

Robinson J (2011) Comparisons: Colonial or cosmopolitan? Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

32 (2), 125–40.

Roy A (2009) The 21st-century metropolis: New geographies of theory. Regional Studies 43 (6),819–30.

Roy A (2014) Slum-free cities of the Asian Century: postcolonial government and the project of

inclusive growth. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (1), 137–51.

20 James D. Sidaway, Chih Yuan Woon and Jane M. Jacobs

Sahni K (1997) Crucifying the Orient: Russian Orientalism and the Colonization of the Caucasus and Central

Asia. White Orchid Press, Bangkok and Oslo.

Segovia F (2006) Biblical criticism and postcolonial studies: toward a postcolonial optic. In

Sugirtharajah RS (ed) The Postcolonial Biblical Reader, 33–44. Blackwell Publishing, Malden

MA.

Shadian J (2010) From states to polities: reconceptualizing sovereignty through Inuit governance.

European Journal of International Relations 16 (3), 485–510.

Sidaway JD (2000) Postcolonial geographies: an exploratory essay. Progress in Human Geography

24 (4), 591–612.

Sidaway JD (2013) Geography, globalization, and the problematic of area studies. Annals of the

Association of American Geographers 103 (4), 984–1002.

Sidaway JD, Bunnell T, Yeoh BSA (2003) Editor’ introduction: Geography and postcolonialism.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24 (3), 269–72.

Spivak GC (2003) Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press, New York.

Taylor JE (2002) The bund: littoral space of empire in the treaty ports of East Asia. Social History

27 (2), 125–42.

Teng EJ (2004) Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895.

Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Thatamanil JJ (2011) Comparative theology after ‘religion’. In Moore S, Rivera M (eds) Planetary

Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality and Theology, 238–57. Fordham University Press, New York.

Turse N (2013) Tomgram: Nick Turse, AFRICOM’s Gigantic “Small Footprint”. 5 September.

Available at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175743 (accessed 11 November).

Veracini L (2013) ‘Settler Colonialism’: career of a concept. The Journal of Imperial and Common-

wealth History 41 (2), 313–33.

Villalba U (2013) Buen Vivir vs Development: A paradigm shift in the Andes? Third World Quarterly

34 (8), 1427–42.

Wang XD, Fang N, Song Q (1999) Quanqiuhua yinxiang xiade Zhongguo zhi lu [China’s road under the

shadow of globalization]. Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, Beijing.

Wang Z (2008) National humiliation, history education, and the politics of historical memory:

Patriotic education campaign in China. International Studies Quarterly 52 (4), 783–806.

Wang Z (2012) Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign

Relations. Columbia University Press, New York.

Young RC (2012) Postcolonial remains. New Literary History 43 (1), 19–42.

Zarrow P (2012) After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924. Stanford

University Press, Stanford CA.

Zhao DC (2000) Shiji qipan zuguo tongyi [A century of anticipating the unification of the

motherland]. Ditu 2, 39–44.

Zhao M (2006) External liberalization and the evolution of China’s exchange system: An empirical

approach. World Bank China Research Paper 4, 1–41.

Zhao TY (2005) Tianxia Tixi: Shijie Zhidu Zhexue Daolun [The Tianxia system: a philosophy for the

world institution]. Jiangsu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, Nanjing.

Zhao TY (2011) Rethinking empire from the Chinese concept “All-under-Heaven” (Tianxia). In

Callahan W, Barabantseva E (eds) China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy,

21–36. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington D.C.

Zhu YM (2009) Wuwang guochi, zhengxing zhongguo [Do not forget the national humiliation,

restore the greatness of China). Zhongguo Minbing 6, 11–2.

Planetary postcolonialism 21