Kearns, Gerry (2021) Topple the racists 2: decolonising the space and the institutional memory of geography. Geography, 106 (1). pp. 4-15. ISSN 0016-7487

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Cite as: Gerry Kearns (2021) Topple the racists 2: decolonising the space and the institutional memory of geography, Geography, 106:1, 4-15, DOI: 10.1080/00167487.2020.1862575
Keywords:	colonial legacy; racist; colonialism; Black lives;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography
Item ID:	17661
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1080/00167487.2020.1862575
Depositing User:	Gerry Kearns
Date Deposited:	12 Oct 2023 08:04
Journal or Publication Title:	Geography
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis online
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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