On assemblage and articulation

Abstract

This commentary explores how assemblage thinking might reconfigure understandings of the spatial constitution of articulation. The first section critiques the accounts of the relationalities of political activity associated with site ontology. This argument is illustrated by a brief discussion of the role of West African and Caribbean seafarers in shaping translocal anti-colonial networks in the 1930s. The second section uses assemblage thinking to inform a processual, relational reworking of articulation as bearing on the negotiation of multiple political trajectories. I conclude that this involves dislocating some key ways of theorising both assemblage and articulation. © 2011 The Author. Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).