IN THE SHADOW OF ‘THE CITY’ YET TO COME: Auroville, Developmentalism and the Social Effects of Cityness

This article focuses on the planned community of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India, founded in 1968. Building on critical readings of the settlement that have drawn attention to the power imbalance in its relationships with surrounding villages, the article delineates the ways that a geographical imagination of cityness has been a key component of the settlement’s development and the forms of neo-coloniality in which it has been implicated. Drawing on archival and published sources as well as ethnographic research, the article discusses three ways in which the settlement performs a sense of its own ‘cityness-to-come’: first, the architectural discourse and planning rationality central to Auroville’s identity; second, its agonistic public sphere vis-à-vis architecture and planning, and third, its ethos of learning and evolution, and the settlement’s developmental teleology. In so doing, the article shows how ‘the city’ conceived as a textual and spatial promise, as well as a utopian aspiration, works ideologically to constitute the settlement itself, but also to precipitate social effects and uneven power relationships with village communities in this region. To sum up, this article develops an argument about the neo-colonial social work done by ‘the city’ conceived as text

'Nature', nationhood and the poetics of meaning in Ruhuna (Yala) National Park, Sri Lanka

Ruhuna, or Yala as it is more commonly known, is Sri Lanka’s most famous national park, attracting hundreds of thousands of nature lovers annually. Included in the wealth of attractions that Ruhuna offers its visitors are transcendent landscape experiences amidst what is popularly considered to be its sacred and premodern ‘nature’. This paper traces the powerful connections between this popular poetics of landscape experience and the creation of racialized difference and political enmity, in the context of a modern nation-state that has only just seen the end of a fiercely contested civil war between a Sinhalese Buddhist majority and Tamil separatists. It suggests that movement through Ruhuna’s space variously fosters senses of belonging, attachment and exclusion in relation to Sri Lankan soil. The paper begins with the history of the reinscription of meaning in this former colonial game reserve. It then proceeds to show how the park’s contemporary and sacred meanings shape experiences in the present, mapping subjects’ bodies with historical, religious and territorial discourses that configure Tamils as ‘invaders’ and ‘interlopers’ in national space that has become Sinhalese and Buddhist by ‘nature’. Ruhuna emerges as a powerful tool whose Sinhala history and Buddhist ‘nature’ are not merely palimpsests of a primordial and premodern antiquity, but map and signify Sri Lanka’s exclusive topographies in the present

The 'City' As Text

This commentary develops a postcolonial critique of urban studies, which it distinguishes and delineates from postcolonial urban studies. To do so it mobilizes tools from postcolonial literary theory, regional and area studies, and an older tradition of thinking in the new cultural geography from which the invocation of ‘the city as text’ stands as a methodological guidepost

Introduction: geographical encounters with the Indian Ocean tsunami

Published without an abstract

'Scratching the surface of the taken as given, as a process of unsettling':an interview with Tariq Jazeel about his book <i>Postcolonialism </i>(2019)

This interview with Tariq Jazeel, concerning his 2019 book Postcolonialism, was orchestrated by Dan Clayton in 2021 in his capacity (then) as co-editor of the SGJ. The interview is a frequently used medium in postcolonial studies, but one that is much underused in geography, which is maybe strange given critical human geography’s core commitment to appraising context and dialogue, and its attentiveness to agency, voice and exclusion, and promotion of new forms of cultural production and knowledge exchange. Dan drafted a set of questions for Tariq to respond to in writing, and this written dialogue was then used as a springboard for an hour-long recorded conversation over Microsoft Teams. These two forms and stages of interview generate a suite of reflections, ideas, and provocations about the postcolonial (and the decolonial and anti-colonial too). The work of unsettling the lingering effects of colonialism in the present – scratching the surface of the taken as given – and how it fosters critique, points to new forms of cultural production, and how the work of unsettling is braided around our own personal and political lives, emerged as a central postcolonial thread through the course of this conversation.<br/

Unlearning 'Landscape'

10.1080/24694452.2016.1230414Annals of the American Association of Geographers107114-2

‘Scratching the surface of the taken as given, as a process of unsettling’: an interview with Tariq Jazeel about his book Postcolonialism (2019)

This interview with Tariq Jazeel, concerning his 2019 book Postcolonialism, was orchestrated by Dan Clayton in 2021 in his capacity (then) as co-editor of the SGJ. The interview is a frequently used medium in postcolonial studies, but one that is much underused in geography, which is maybe strange given critical human geography’s core commitment to appraising context and dialogue, and its attentiveness to agency, voice and exclusion, and promotion of new forms of cultural production and knowledge exchange. Dan drafted a set of questions for Tariq to respond to in writing, and this written dialogue was then used as a springboard for an hour-long recorded conversation over Microsoft Teams. These two forms and stages of interview generate a suite of reflections, ideas, and provocations about the postcolonial (and the decolonial and anti-colonial too). The work of unsettling the lingering effects of colonialism in the present – scratching the surface of the taken as given – and how it fosters critique, points to new forms of cultural production, and how the work of unsettling is braided around our own personal and political lives, emerged as a central postcolonial thread through the course of this conversation