Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

The degeneration of tropical geography'

Power, M.; Sidaway, J.D.

Authors

J.D. Sidaway



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.

Citation

Power, M., & Sidaway, J. (2004). The degeneration of tropical geography'. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(3), 585-601. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2004.00415.x

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date 2004-09
Deposit Date Nov 7, 2006
Journal Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Print ISSN 0004-5608
Electronic ISSN 1467-8306
Publisher Association of American Geographers (AAG)
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 94
Issue 3
Pages 585-601
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2004.00415.x
Keywords Development geography, Decolonization, Keith Buchanan, Tropics.