Singularity: A Manifesto for Incomparable Geographies | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2019-02-11

Singularity: A Manifesto for Incomparable Geographies was a seminar given by Dr Tariq Jazeel (University College London) on 22 January 2019 at the Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London. Find out more at http://bit.ly/2BvD0CG
This paper is a methodological response to the challenge of decolonising geographical knowledge. It mobilises post- and de-colonial critiques of geographical knowledge production and conceptual work, suggesting how such work unwittingly disfigures the precise contours of the places and socio-spatial formations on which geographers work, drawing them into implicit and reductive forms of comparison. Drawing on research and sources from South Asia, the paper moves instead toward more uncertain engagements with, and dispositions to, the production of geographical knowledge - ones attuned to the poetics of planetary difference. The paper speculates on five intellectual and methodological resources, or tactics, aimed at producing geographical scholarship attuned to the tableaux of heterogeneous and incomparable singularities at large across the world: theory and reading; friction and fragments; translation/untranslatability; abiding by; and poetics.

Tariq Jazeel teaches Human Geography at University College London. His research interests are positioned at the intersections of critical geography, postcolonial theory and South Asian Studies, and his work focuses on aesthetic and cultural constitutions of space and the political, as well as the postcolonial politics of geographical knowledge production.