‘The shadow of her wings’: Respectability politics and the self-narration of geography

Abstract

In engagement with Natalie Oswin’s essay, ‘An Other Geography’, I argue that despite the Southern turn in urban studies, the epistemologies and methodologies of inquiry remain more or less untouched by forms of knowledge designated as the ‘other’ of dominant Theory. Indeed, these other traditions of thought, be it postcolonial critique or Black geographies, are often assimilated and integrated into the self-narration of disciplines, including geography, a process I describe as citationary alibi. Following Oswin, I am interested in not only how such assimilation can be rejected and ruptured, but also how solidarity can be built across different modes of difference. This requires, I argue, a radical break with respectability politics and its citationary practice. It also requires ontologies of subversion in the global universities of the North Atlantic.