Topple the racists 2: decolonising the space and the institutional memory of geography

ABSTRACT

In this, the second of two linked articles, I move from efforts to address the colonial legacy of our public spaces to consider the colonial marking of the spaces and institutional memory of the discipline of geography. I use the work and legacy of Halford Mackinder as exemplary of some of these colonial affiliations. By the standards of his time, Mackinder was an enthusiastic imperialist and a resolute racist. He believed that humanity comprised superior and inferior peoples and that the best of the former should use force to defend its global hegemony. When Mackinder’s intellectual legacy is invoked it is all too often in order to promote a similarly bellicose colonialism as with the geopolitical imagination of Robert Kaplan. In his own practice of geographical adventuring, Mackinder himself set Black lives far below his own pursuit of geographical glory and those who vaunt his reputation in the spaces of the academy, burnish a glory that was most cruelly won.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Danny Dorling, Ian Klinke, Linda McDowell and Gillian Rose of the School of Geography at the University of Oxford and Olivia Durand and Paula Larsson of Uncomfortable Oxford for an invitation to speak on Mackinder in what was then the Mackinder Lecture Theatre. I want to thank Ian Klinke, John Morrissey, David Nally, Simon Reid-Henry, Karen Till, Gerard Toal, and Andy Tucker for their careful reading of these two essays. Of course, they are not responsible for the views expressed but they have saved me from a few errors and further questionable interpretations. I want to thank also the Maynooth Geography Writing Group for support at a time when it was otherwise difficult to concentrate upon academic writing. Thanks also to Steven Puttick for the encouragement to write these pieces, to the referees for Geography for directing my attention to the politics of citation, to Diane Rolfe for careful editing and to Bryan Ledgard for the striking design.

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Gerry Kearns

Professor Gerry Kearns is Head of the Geography Department at Maynooth University, County Kildare, Ireland (email: [email protected]; Twitter: @geogturn; Web: https://geographicalturn.wordpress.com).