Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies

Abstract

This paper is a methodological response to the challenge of decolonizing geographical knowledge. It mobilizes 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 toward 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.