Planetary postcolonialism

James D. Sidaway,
1
Chih Yuan Woon
1
and Jane M. Jacobs
2
1
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore
2
Social 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 ve pathways for postcolonial geography: (i) narrating the
planetary (which then congures 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 ve paths that follow are
offered as invitations to scholarly reection and empirically informed research.
Keywords: postcolonial, imperialism, comparative, indigenous, empire, planetary
Introduction: advancing postcolonial geographies
Ali Hashemi the mullah (the protagonist of Roy Mottahedehs 1985 novel on religion
and 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 students
decades 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 rst, but then difculties befell.
(Mottahedeh, 1985: 361)
When it comes to advancing postcolonial geographies, we discern no easy paths. Rather
like Ahmed (and Hafez before him), we have come to realize that what at rst seems so
compelling, even easy, is full of challenges. The contributors in this special issue of the
Singapore 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 rst presented at a February
2013 symposium held at the National University of Singapore (NUS). That event came
just over a decade after an earlier NUS workshop that similarly yielded an SJTG special
issue on geography and postcolonialism (Sidaway et al., 2003).
We embarked on organizing the symposium knowing that postcolonial perspectives
had lost some vigor, especially within the context of geographys 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 what
follows we offer ve speculative pathways for postcolonial geography: (i) narrating the
planetary, (ii) acknowledging other postcolonialisms, (iii) planetary indigeneity, (iv)
seeing like an empire and (v) problematizing translations. Clearly these intersect and
none are exhaustive. Each path that follows invites further scholarly reection and
empirically informed work. They frequently track alongside themes raised in the other
papers herewhich we comment on briey along the way. But we are also mindful of
further undertakings and different alliances for postcolonial geography.
bs_bs_banner
doi:10.1111/sjtg.12049
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (2014) 421
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 planetary
A global perspective of one kind or another has always been central to the postcolonial
project, responding as it must to the conditions that brought it into being such as
transnational imperialisms, geopolitical relations, analytical and everyday compara-
tivisms and, of course, globalization. In recent years the social sciences (including
human geography) tended to approach the worldwide through reference to
globalizationthough there are claims that geographers have missed opportunities to
shape globalization literatures (Dicken, 2004) and periodic calls for geography to recon-
nect with a (lost?) World Discipline role (Bonnett, 2003). More recently, literary
studies and other humanities have suggested planetary as a richer entry point to
apprehend the worldwide. For example, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak proposes the
planet . . . 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)
Spivaks observation encourages us (again) to step back from the taken-for-
grantedness of the global and engage in its genealogy, one in which colonialism has
played such a central, conguring role. As work on the history of globalization has
specied, 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 a
whole, both in thought and in practice, which makes possible the spatial extension of
economic, political, and cultural phenomena across the surface of the globe. Moreover,
the very notion of a globe/globalization internalizes Western thought, through what
Elden (2005: 8) diagnoses as: a particular way of grasping place . . . as something
extensible and calculable, extended in three dimensions and grounded on the geometric
point. Globalization assumes a divisible space. This conception coincides with the rise of
a modern-Western episteme.
In a parallel way we might consider how imperialism has always been an ecological
project, in which humans, plants and other species were shifted around the earth in
schemes for colonization/conservation (Crosby, 1986; Grove, 1995; Beinart & Hughes,
2007; Huggan & Tifn, 2010; DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011). The concept of the present
as the Anthropocene, recently popularized by the Nobel-prize winning atmospheric
chemist Paul Crutzen, acknowledges human activity as the dominant, universal cat-
egory and agent of planetary change. As such, the concept internalizes an apprehension
of 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). Mark
Jacksons (2014) paper here takes up this theme and recognizes that, despite the implied
postcolonial intent of the anthropocenic imagination, the imperial has an enduring aura
that partitions it into nations and races. As Chakrabarty (2012: 14) reminds us, the crisis
of climate change will be routed through our anthropological differences. No matter
how anthropogenic the current global warming may be in its origins, in terms of
solutions, 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 and
the 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 unsettles
some of the taken-for-granted aspects of religion, which is pertinent to charting a
postcolonial path for the recently reinvigorated geographical interest in religion. In the
twentieth century comparative religion categorized people and places as belonging to
one of an array of faiths. Everyone belonged to a religion, or had none. Indeed some
introductory classes and textbooks in world regional geography will map these religious/
culture areas and much work in human geography has traced their intermingling at
other scales of resolution. Tracing the history of these religious classications, Tomoko
Masuzawa (2005: 6) notes how they became entangled with racialized notions of ethnic
difference. While race has been challenged as a social construct, the assumption that the
world is divided into religious/cultural hearths which have yielded a dozen or so
religions has been persistent. She notes, for example, how Judaism, Christianity and
Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism and Confucianism, Taoism and
Shinto are supplemented with newer faiths, such as Bahai, as well as juxtaposed with
a variety of shamanisms and animisms. Masuzawa, however, joins other critics of
classication 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 of
this 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 utterly
ubiquitous categories religion and religious are neither innocent nor cross-cultural
universals that are somehow ontologically given, John Thatamanil (2011: 242) points
to 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 origin
in the West but has come to be applied universally . . . to peoples and traditions that did
not themselves order their lives by appeal to those notions prior to the colonial project
(2011: 2423). Furthermore, a hierarchy was put in place, based on a distinction
between those few putatively world religions who have a written sacred scripture and
the rest, that are seen as local or minor. Yet once these distinctions are securely in place
and taken for granted, it is so easy to characterize traditions that do not recognize and
abide by our distinctions as fundamentalist in character (2011: 243).
That the urge to classify and compare has also been a founding feature of geography
and remains a point of departure for the discipline ought to give us pause for reection
here. For example, new models of comparative urbanism have looked past its role in
discerning abstract universals (Robinson, 2011; Jacobs, 2012; OCallaghan, 2012). We
would urge further reection on the origins and fortunes of comparison. A foundational
part 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 this
challenge. 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-rst 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 postcolonialisms
Postcolonial geography in the past routinely drew on other variants of postcolonial
thought, most notably those generated through literary criticism. The consideration of
the category of religion in the preceding section serves to remind us that there exist
many other productive engagements with postcolonialism. One such engagement
comes to us by way of postcolonial theology, which has gone largely unnoticed by
geographers. This strikes us as a missed opportunity. Taking the example of Christian
theology, 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 brings
into view the omnipresent empires that ll the Torah and Bible, but also the legitimizing
realities of many ongoing Christian practices. We might think here of the colonial
framing of Christian evangelizing. For example, a theologically attuned postcolonial
geography might better comprehend any number of contemporary imperial narratives,
including those of the George W. Bush presidency. Similarly, it might be better attuned
to the theological drive behind various anticolonial movements, be they enacted in the
names of freedom, liberation or reconciliation.
Segovia sees a postcolonial perspective as having no choice but to see itself and
represent itself as unus inter pares (one amongst equals). We might prefer to see it as a
primus inter pares (rst amongst equals) or to be more Orthodox and adopt the equiva-
lent Greek terms

(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 of
the colonized and the children of the colonizer.
Postcolonial theology is but one of a range of other engagements with postcolonial
theory that should be of interest to geographers. We might think also of those coming
from alternate national traditions of scholarship. Amongst these, has been work
from/on the Netherlands (Oostindie, 2010) and Portugal (Pimenta et al., 2007). But it is
the Irish material that is perhaps the most thought-provoking. Writing about the ways
in which many (but not all) British geographers have appropriated postcolonial theory
in 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, in
particular those in which Britain is still involved, symptomatically the relationship
between Britain and Ireland. In her paper here Ruth Craggs (2014: 39) agrees that
postcolonial geographies have tended to favour studies of long-ago high imperialism
as 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 such
instances. That time in Ireland was shaped by both the high imperialism (of the
nineteenth and early twentieth century) and (according to certain nationalist narra-
tives) ongoing colonialism. Gilmartin and Berg (2007) draw attention to a wealth of
historical and political writing on Ireland and empire that has been passed over in
postcolonial geography. As arguably the rst 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 Trioblid/
The Troubles is another reminder that intellectual discussion of postcolonialism takes
place beside backdrops of force and counterforce, blood, ags, boundaries, victors and
defeats.
Irelands experience of partition is not singular. Many other places are shaped by the
geographies of partition, best understood through a postcolonial perspective. Kumar
(1997: xv) has noted in the context of Bosnia that contemporary partition often draws
on structures of ethnonational negotiation . . . developed under colonialism. Here we
would support Vazira Fazila-Yacoobalis (2007) call, in regard of the lengthiest of these
partitions, for alternative regional histories to make other forms of belonging and
politics available to the rhetoric and memory of Partitionand thus [to] shift the very
possibilities 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 of
Karachi became a Muhajir city, dened by the diverse population to migrate there as
a result of Partition. As Anwar notes, this status and the intra-refugee tensions it
generated continue to dene the fate of Karachi, a city that lives with a long aftermath
of violence bequeathed by Partition.
Planetary indigeneity
The 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 the
postcolonial political aspirations of indigenous people.
The imperial imaginations that drove the colonization of territories and peoples
were underscored by racial hierarchies that positioned indigenous people as lesser
humans. Kay Andersons sustained arc of engagement with geographically articulated
racialization processes attends to this history, working specically through the instance
of humanist engagements with Australian Aborigines (Anderson, 2001; 2007; 2008).
Her voice adds to the scholarship on the violations arising from racialized thinking
under imperialism, and through which indigenous people were labelled savages, a
categorization that justied 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 been
subject to intellectual/political shifts in recent decades, as Veracini (2013) charts. In
settler contexts, across the course of the twentieth century such violations have given
way to avowedly postcolonial models of race relations. In Australia, for example, this
has resulted in the emergence of various political formats of recognition, such as
indigenous rights and joint land management (Lane, 2003; Jackson, 2008; Porter, 2010;
Barry & Porter, 2011). Beth Povinelli (2002) has argued that such recognition can be
cunning. On the one hand it brings indigenous people in (to citizenship, to beneting
from 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 the
other hand, these structures of recognition often pre-script reied subject positions from
which indigenous people must speak in their efforts to attain both cultural and material
recognition: 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 that
those who lost the most under colonialism may be the very ones who cannot re-gain
ground in this climate of recognition. And as if violation knows no end, in certain
contexts in which indigenous rights and contemporary needs have been recognized
there has arisen a signicant backlash from those not enjoying similar provisions. So
here we see the long history and geography of violation, that has occurred within what
Nancy Fraser (2000: 107) calls the idiom of recognition.
The unifying power of rights, politically speaking, has been clearly evident in the
global indigenous rights movement, a now decades-old network of transnational alli-
ances between indigenous people of many kinds and with many histories. These
alliances have realized what Merlan (2009: 303) dubs an international indigeneity.
Indigenous peoples from liberal democraciessettler colonies and Scandinavian
countriesplayed a key role in establishing these networks of common interest. Given
the maturity of these alliances it is sobering to recall that it was only in 2007 that the
United Nations passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: a declaration
that was opposed by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, those very
countries 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 political
alliance between conventionally understood indigenous people and those strategically
adopting the identity in relation to emergent origin-based political struggles associated
with certain nationalist and homeland movements. There is also, as Merlan notes, a
growing diversity as well as a mobile (and mobilizing) inclusiveness with respect to the
term indigeneity. Settler descendants are themselves even claiming that they are, in
their own way, also indigenous. Who or what are indigenous people and what exactly
makes them so is a question that recently has been preoccupying anthropology (Kuper,
2003; Barnard, 2006). Of course anthropology, like geography, is a discipline historically
implicated in imperial classication systems, but is also at the forefront of postcolonial
critiques of those very same systems. In this debate Kuper (2003) has asserted that the
term indigenous peoples is a concept that has been cultivated as much by global
institutions 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 indigenous
people. Others, including indigenous people themselves, counter that the concept is
meaningful and, because now enshrined in certain instruments of recognition, neces-
sary (Barnard, 2006).
The translation of rst-ness into a compensatory sovereignty is at the very heart of
the argument for sustaining the category indigenous peoples. But so too is a notion of
radical alterity with respect to the relationship to nature/land. Such alternative ways
of being in the world have inspired critiques of the extractive and enclosing logics of
capitalism 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 afliations that are historical and located and for the unique cultural
identities that continue to nd 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 indigenous
intercultural universities in Latin America have emphasized knowledge and learning as
dialogue between those planetary or avowedly universal discourses and locally embed-
ded knowledge and learning that makes more modest claims. The paper by Julie
Cupples and Kevin Glynn (2014) examines the Universidad de las Regiones Autnomas
de la Costa Caribe Nicaragense or the University of the Autonomous Regions of the
Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast. They connect the role of this community and grassroots
university with wider discussions about modernity, colonization and decoloniality.
The latter concept has been read into debates about indigenous education far beyond its
Latin American origins. Cupples and Glynns paper also references issues in Aotearoa/
New Zealand and the notion of decolonial goals that have recently been taken up in
Australian debates about pedagogies for indigenous studies (Nakata et al., 2012).
Indigenous ways of being also offer resources for an emergent politics concerned
about climate change and environmental futures. Spivak has noted (2003: 73) how this
politics draws on planet-thought which embraces everything from aboriginal
animism to spectral white mythology of postrational science. We see a new political
interest 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 the
precapitalist cultures of the planet. Coombs et al. (2012) argue that indigenous ways of
life 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 variation
of planetary indigeniety. In the older international order of rights-based alliances,
indigenous people were independently formed agents in a global alliance. Now through
the collective global agency of human impact on climate, they have become, like all of
us, planetary subjects. This new attention to indigenous ways of being may well be a
resource of hope for a new planetary consciousness. But what kinds of opportunities
and threats does it pose for indigenous struggles to have their rights recognized with
respect to country, culture and economic well-being? For a start, those struggles are not
neatly held in some complete alterity, for as we know indigenous ways of being are in
capitalism, casinos, mines, cities and law courts. Amidst these, indigeneity is malleable,
leading Byrd and Rothberg (2011) to investigate the interfaces between subalternity
and indigeneity, Niezen (2003) to negotiate international indigenism and Fiona
McCormack (2011) to reect 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 ensuring
those rights might well result in the curtailment of certain once assumed freedoms. For
Jackson (2014), in this special issue, the contradictions in Spivaks embrace of indig-
enous and planetary rhetoric merit further reections. For us too, a series of questions
arise. Earlier in this paper, we quoted from Spivaks 2003 statement about the planet
being a necessary species of alterity. She completes that sentence by observing that
with 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 that
conrms responsibilities of care or offers new pretexts for not caring about the history
of indigenous dispossession?
Seeing like an empire
Critical appraisals have reconsidered the role and status of area studies within geogra-
phy and cognate disciplines (Gibson-Graham, 2004; Roy, 2009; Sidaway, 2013). As they
point out, the history of area studies is intimately bound with the geopolitics of
knowledge, arising out of colonial imperatives to compile detailed information about
places and regions for the classication and ordering of the world. There has been a
rethinking of area studies such that the emphasis is no longer on trait geographies but
on 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 current
maps for area studies are not permanent geographical facts. They are problematic
heuristic devices for the study of global geographic and cultural processes. This
approach not only goes beyond the global/local divide that has encapsulated many
debates related to area studies, transnationalism and globalization, but it also eschews
the (imperially-driven) hierarchization of societies and economies by highlighting the
potentialities of learning from other worlds (Briggs & Sharp, 2004; Jazeel & McFarlane,
2010).
The area attracting most attention recently is Asia, and specically its ascendancy
to 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 Raghuram
et 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.
Chinas current status requires us to rethink the logics of imperialism and Empire. That
China often stands for Asia on the rise is hardly surprising. There is an impressive list of
economic growth credentials,
1
not to mention the sheer advantage of size in both area
and population.
The emphatic economic indicators have been supplemented by more debatable
narratives about its civilizational destiny, as we show below. Already there has been
extensive discussion amongst Western scholars as to whether China is set to become the
next global hegemon with imperialist ambitions (Agnew, 2012; Luttwak, 2012), includ-
ing Chinas role in the Pacic and South China Sea. But a longer preoccupation has been
with Chinas ventures in Africa. Despite calls for fuller understandings of the historical
and institutional genealogies that shape Sino-African relations (see Mawdsley, 2007;
Mohan & Power, 2008), claims abound about a Chinese scramble for Africa as a new
form of Empire. As some scholars note, there is a need to place Chinas role in Africa in
a comparative framework vis--vis other global players. For example, Curtis (2013)
argues that, contrary to narratives stressing the distinctiveness of Chinas role in Africa,
Chinese interests have increasingly coincided with evolving Western interests in
support of stabilization and market-driven economic activities. Moreover, it is sobering
to compare the Chinese presence in Africa to the expanded US military there since the
1990s (see Turse, 2013), as well as the ongoing presence of European troops serving in
UN 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 daily
preoccupations of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) or the Quai dOrsay.
Of course the idea of a Chinese empire does not emerge purely out of Western
geopolitical imaginations. China too has its ownvisions of its destiny withrespect to a new
world 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 prominent
philosopher based at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been especially
inuential in this respect. His views are of interest not only because of their popularity in
China, but because they express a Chinese view about its ability to model world power
different in kind to modern western powers. In 2005, Zhao published 7-
|T|='| (The Tianxia system: a philosophy for the world institution) to describe a
Chinese model of world order that is claimed to be universally valid. It immediately
became a best-seller in China (including being picked up by Chinese leaders) because it
caught a wave of interest in Chinese-style solutions to world problems. According to
Zhao, the current world chaos is not merely a political or economic problem, it is a
conceptual one: To order the world we need to rst create newworld concepts whichwill
lead to new world structures (Zhao, 2005: 21, our translation). And because he suggests
that Western concepts are responsible for this world disorder, he states that only the
Chinese concept of (Tianxia)literally translated as All under Heavencan do the
conceptual work necessary for a stable world. Throughout Zhaos discussion, he presents
Tianxia as inclusive of all peoples by citing Chinese classical passages such as
(Tianxia is one family) and `(Tianxia belongs to all). He claims that in comparison
to other historical empire systems, the Tianxia system is the most appropriate empire for
the twenty-rst century (Zhao, 2005: 102109) because it is the only system that thinks
through the world as opposed to through the lens of a specic nation-state and its values
or needs. The concept of Tianxia ties in closely with evocations of the world (|T) rather
than of the planet ()). While the former Chinese term hints at the complex global
social relations, the latter refers literally to Earth as part of the galactic system(with some
similarities to Spivaks 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 a
hierarchy of civilizational types, and one that is out of step with much contemporary
western thinking. Worldly interactions and relationships, according to Zhao, are forged
on the basis of imperial Chinas tribute system of concentric circles with the civilized
imperial capital at the centre owing out to embrace the various barbaric peoples at the
periphery. Hence, rather than criticizing imperial Chinas civilizational barbarism dis-
tinction (9,)), he upholds that it is still useful, with barbaric lands and tributary
states serving as benecial contrasts for Chinese civilization. In this sense, Tianxia is a
hierarchical system that puts China at the top to prescribe appropriate strategies to
alleviate worldly problems. The theoretical and ethical problems of Zhaos thesis are
beyond the scope of this paper (see Callahan, 2011 for a critique of Zhaos work) but it
can be seen that perspectives do exist within China that seek to universalize Chinese
worldviews for planetary application. Indeed, as Callahan (2011: 111) notes, Zhao is not
an isolated example but the sign of a broader trend where Chinas imperial mode of
governance is increasingly revived for the twenty-rst century.
Much of the geography of Chinas new place in the worldbe that as an economic
power, a geopolitical agent or imaginative fontremains to be written. But also over-
looked by geographers has been Chinas past geopolitical identities. We might think of
the 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 two
quickly inuential syntheses). Relevant too is Chinas own colonial experiences and
how postcolonial consciousness affects contemporary China (Wang, 2008; 2012). We
might think, by way of example, of how Chinese elites nowadays draw on Chinas
collective memory of past humiliation (l1) at the hands of foreign powers. China
adeptly redeploys this experience in relation to its current geopolitical imperatives, both
external and internal. For example, it uses this past to remind audiences worldwide that
it too knows what it is like to be subjected to the tyranny of colonization and will not
itself reproduce such effects. At the same time, this historical humiliation now also fuels
a postcolonial desire for recognition and respect of Chinas sovereign space, both by
foreigners as well as minorities located within Chinas territories (see Wang et al., 1999;
Zhao, 2000; Zhu, 2009). William Callahan (2009; 2010) calls this a cartography of
national humiliation and shows how historic and contemporary instances of humilia-
tion are routinely invoked (see also Wang, 2012). Callahan (2009: 145) demonstrates
that these humiliation-maps have played an important role in the imaginative geogra-
phy of Chinas transition from premodern unbounded understandings of space and
territory () to modern, twentieth-century bounded understandings of sovereign
territory (|) (see also Zarrow, 2012).
The contemporary Chinese geobody emerges out of the interplay between otherwise
contradictory cartographic conventions of imperial domain space and sovereign terri-
torial space. As Callahan notes, this geobody is still neither stable nor hegemonic even
after a century of crafting, and faces resistances on multiple fronts. For example, the
longstanding conicts between Taiwanthe renegade province, the seat of the Repub-
lic in exile since 1949and Beijing reects the increasingly separate identity of Taiwan
and the refusal of Beijing to entertain any ideas to do with the de jure independence of
Taiwan, a sovereignty struggle in which cartographic imaginations continue to play a
part (Agnew, 2012). Although as Callahan argues, it is inaccurate to claim that con-
temporary China has irredentist and expansionist geopolitical ambitions, given that it is
more concerned with the challenges posed by ssures within its sovereign space
(notably Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwans status). Care is needed not to oversimplify and
essentialize Chinese narratives (Chong, 2013).
Even this brief survey indicates that Chinas contemporary geopolitics poses chal-
lenges to many of the empirical and conceptual assumptions upon which postcolonial
theory 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 Western
phenomenon. As the case of China indicates, when that corrective is made to the focus
of scholarship, some novel variants of imperialism, colonialism and postcolonialism
emerge. In this respect geographers might learn from the comparative scholarship of
historians which for some time has attended to the implications of comparing empires
adding Ottomans, Tsar and Qing to the European seaborne empires and contemporary
American 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, has
argued that both China and India might usefully be conceptualized as forms of Post-
colonial Informal Empire (PIE). Both these republics inherited (albeit not with contest
and ssures) the space of prior imperial polities. For Anand (2012: 75), PIE is a political
entity based on a defensive denial of the charge of imperialism. Its identity is formed
around a sense of being a victim of Western imperialism . . . hence an avowed identity
as 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 an
afrmation of stories of historical greatness and long-existing pre-Westernized
civilizational-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 [dened as secessionist] (2012: 83). Their imperial
status is not dened by expansion, but more to do with these internal forms of
domination 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 Anands arguments remind us of the potential of considering
a range of geopolities and crossings of empire (Doyle, 2010). Anands analysis has
suggestive resonances with the Russian empire (Sahni, 1997) and post-Soviet spaces
(the subject of a growing literature signalled in Sidaway, 2000, but considered since by
Kandiyoti, 2002 and Adams, 2008) as well as Southeast Asia (Baird, 2011). Further
reckoning 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 our
knowledge of the world by extending an invitation to know it from outside the
categories of western thought.
Problematizing translations
Over two decades ago, Ketu Katrak (1992: 7) argued that a postcolonial critics position
is highly mediatedin particular, the conuence of geography with language a dialectic
of space and speech, poses new challenges to be negotiated in terms of ones audience,
identity and sense of belonging. But running through all the points here are the specic
problems and opportunity of translation. These might be also registered in movements
and circulations that yield cultures, economies and places. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2011:
32) notes how words that feature in both ordinary language and analytical prose are
always caught up in the strife-ridden nature of the world that exists outside the
classroom. This seemingly banal point however demands an analytical reorientation
recognizing the ways that terms like labour, land and capital are translated across
colonially-related differences makes them both an analytical tool as well as a piece of
technology of power (2011: 31).
Chakrabarty studies some inuential recent texts on history and political economy
suggesting how their assumptions skirt around rather than give such translations their
due. Categories such as labour efciency that might appear in a contemporary Inter-
national Monetary Fund or World Bank Report for example were long caught up with
colonial judgments about sloth, laziness and opportunity. But in terms of translation, he
draws attention to land, noting how, it was central to many indigenous ways of being
but seldom expressed in their languages as a reied, objectied and abstract category of
land. . . . Yet European colonisation proceeded on the basis of an imagination that
took 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 is
also a contested category.
That naming/translations are often adjuncts to violent transformation connects with
an example from closer to (our) home. Near our ofces, two of us regularly pass a sign
at a brand new building at NUS, indicating the way to a meeting room named Sepoy
Lines (Figure 1). Yet we also know that almost a century ago, very near to the current
location of NUS, the Indian nationalist Ghdar (Rebellion) party had led what the colonial
authorities 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 entente
powers (and Japans) war with the Ottoman Empire and wider Mittelmchte (central
powers) and mobilizations by Irish, Indians and others seeking national-liberation.
According to Tim Harper (2013: 1782) it was a key event for border crossing patriotic
and anarchist movements in the early twentieth century world that would be a bridge
between earlier rebellions and later liberation movements amidst a struggle for the
intertwined futures of the imperial regimes that spanned the continent: Russia, the
Ottomans, 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 in
India and within a few decades an Indian National Army would be recruited partly
from Malaya and Singapore to ght with Japan. Sepoy Lines may designate a space in
a new building (constructed by Bengali migrant labourers over the last two years), near
to where we write these words. But Sepoy carries multiple imperial resonances, from
the original Persian (sipa h) term for infantry in the Mughal empire, as well as into
diverse European languages such as Portuguese, Romanian and Russian to refer to
armed forces or (in the Portuguese case until their empire collapsed in 1974) a local
colonial police. The circulation of terms, categories, artifacts and people is always also
one of translations. Tariq Jazeels (2014: 8889) paper in this special issue is concerned
with the languages, concepts, categories, imagery of thought and the systems of rep-
resentation that our disciplinary community routinely deploy . . . which, like any
ideological deployment, unwittingly stabilize particular forms of power. A similar
commitment, to uncover the geohistorical conditions of knowledge production ani-
mates Ananya Roys (2014: 146) paper. But whilst Jazeels primary focus is on uneven
scholarly 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 nd it fruitful to return to one of the
papers from the SJTGs 2003 special issue on geography and postcolonialism. Citing the
pioneering Indonesian nationalist thinker Tan Malakas (18971949) rantau (travels to
gain knowledge) to Europe, China and through late-colonial Southeast Asia, Abidin
Kusno (2003: 327) described how Tan Malaka found himself in Shanghai in January
1932 then governed by a colonial condominium that was soon swept away by Japanese
imperialism and then revolution. Modern Shanghai had been constructed, in the decade
before Tan Malakas arrival, along the waterfront Bund (another originally Persian
word, 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 then
quickly becoming one of the worlds 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 western
gunboats and commerce. Tan Malakas anti-imperialism was deeply shaped by his
experiences in Shanghais streets, which he later projected on his understanding of
mid-1940s Indonesia, at a conjuncture when Dutch imperialism had been displaced by
the Japanese (194145), Independence declared, atas nama bangsa Indonesia (in the
name of the Indonesian nation), but the Dutch were seeking to return, assisted by
Japans sudden (atomic-enforced) collapse and British imperial troops. Tan Malaka may
have sensed that Shanghais subjection to multiple imperial powers (including a rising
American dominion) anticipated new forms of empire.
The Bund is now mirrored by Pudong, across the Huangpu River (Figure 3). Pudong
was designated as one of Chinas Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in 1993. The SEZs
quickly became key axes of vast and much debated commercial recongurations of
planetary power. As we write, the worlds second highest skyscraper (second that is to
the Burj Khalifa in Dubai) is being nished where, during Tan Malakas days in Shanghai,
there were only elds and warehouses. These remained until the 1990s. Half a world
away, Europes tallest building (Londons Shard) is owned by a consortium in the hands
of 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 of
the planets known natural gas reserves. Four fths of Qatars population are migrant
workers without right of permanent residence. Circulating labour, commodities, ideas
and capital are being translated into a variety of post/neocolonial/imperial landscapes in
ways that Tan Malakas merantau foreshadowed, but could not have readily anticipated.
To the extent that power, ecologies and people intersect in new congurations 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 SJTGs 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 FCLs Scientic Director Stephen Cairns and the Dean of FASS Brenda Yeoh both took
time out of busy schedules, offering opening reections that usefully set the event in motion and
ve 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 rst 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 Chinas trade volume
increased seventy times between 1978 and 2005 (Zhao, 2006; Breslin, 2007).
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