Representing the Economic Geographies of ‘Others’: Reconsidering the Global South

Abstract

This essay examines how undergraduate economic geography courses in Anglo-American institutions traditionally frame economic activities in developing regions and asserts that mainstream approaches have devalued the complexity and diversity of economic geographies in the Global South. Focusing on developmentalism as a commonly used heuristic frame, it is argued that teachers and textbooks may provide only a partial representation of economic activities in the developing world and that this can lead to the marginalization of the Global South as a context for economic geography study and research. The essay concludes with ideas about how teachers might subvert these tendencies.

Keywords:

• Representation
• developing regions
• developmentalism
• economic geography

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the journal editors and reviewers for helpful and constructive feedback on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Sincere thanks also to Henry Yeung, Neil Coe and the participants in the AAG Annual Meeting (2005) panels on teaching economic geography. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

¹ This essay offers a broad contrast to Yeung and Liu's (this issue) discussion of how local context shapes priorities and challenges in the classroom. The ‘remoteness’ of Anglo-American economic geographies to students in Singapore and China is not unlike that of American students striving to understand the spatial dimensions of markets, economies and industries in Africa or Latin America. Despite the challenges, this essay argues that we need to find ways to transcend the familiar or local in order to give our students a greater sense of the diverse geographies that constitute the world economy while simultaneously using inter-regional commonalities to help debunk excessively negative stereotypes about economic activities in the Global South.

² Walker (this issue) notes how there has been a significant shift in the geographical emphasis of courses as once-peripheral economic regions (e.g. East Asia and Latin America) have rapidly grown and developed globally integrated industrial sectors. While he notes that there has been increasing convergence between development studies and economic geography, my concern is that significant gaps still remain and that we need to be more proactive in using course materials that address economic activities in regions that have not yet ‘emerged’.

³ Credit for the term ‘theorizing back’ goes to Henry Yeung.

⁴ Credit for the term ‘other two-thirds’ goes to Mytelka (1993).