Subaltern geographies

Inspired by works of Antonio Gramsci and launched by Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies Collective (SSC) in the early 1980s to investigate histories of South Asia from the standpoint of the colonised, the notion of ‘subalternity’ was addressed quite late by geographers. They embrace this concept using definitions such as ‘subaltern spaces’, ‘subaltern geopolitics’, and ‘subaltern geographies’, whose plurality and complexity is excellently exposed in this collective book edited by Jazeel and Legg. In their introduction, the editors trace a link between the tradition of postcolonial geographies coming back to the 1990s and their own endeavour in exploring ‘the relationships between subaltern studies and geography’ (p. 4). Highlighting the spatial nature of both colonialism and its critiques, Jazeel and Legg match current decolonial scholarship by arguing that the production of knowledge ‘from the South’ should not merely fill lacunas in the archive. It should instead foster an ‘epistemological disruption . . . to reword the conceptual frameworks and methodology’ (p. 4) generally affecting Eurocentric academies