 OK. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to this week's Development Studies Seminar Series, and thank you in advance again for your patience. So we're delighted to have joining us tonight Dr Tariq Jazeel, who's a reader in human geography at UCL, prior to which he worked at Royal Holloway University, the Open University, and the University of Sheffield. His research interests lie in the crossroads between critical geography, post-colonial theory, and South Asian studies, and his work focuses on aesthetic and cultural constitutions of space and the political, as well as the post-colonial politics of geographical knowledge production. He's editor of the journal Antipode on the editorial collective of social text and co-founded and co-directs UCL's Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. He's co-authored, or authored, over 30 journal articles, the most recent of which include the paper that he's presenting this evening, as well as urban theory with an outside and mainstreaming geographies decolonial imperative. Also joining us, we're delighted to have Raoul Rao, who is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies here at SOAS. Prior to this, he was a fellow and Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. His research interests lie in international relations theory, the international relations of South Asia, comparative political thought and gender and sexuality. He's currently working on a book on queer post-colonial temporality and his first book, Third World Protest, Between Home and the World, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2010, explored the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in a post-colonial protest movement. If you wish to tweet this evening during the seminar, we encourage you to do so, and the hashtags are SOAS, Dev Studies and ESRC. So with that, preamble out of the way. I'll hand over to Tariq, who'll begin by introducing his talk. Thanks very much. Can you hear me? Thank you for the invitation. It's great to get a round of applause before doing anything. It's fantastic. Thank you so much for the invitation to come and present here. It's real thrilled for me to be here. So thank you, Faisie. Thank you, Raoul, for the advance and thank you, Joe. So, I want to start with a brief moment from the Sudanese author, Tayyb Saleh's 1969 novel, Season of Migration to the North. Excuse me, and I confess that this reading isn't my own. I'm leaning quite heavily here on Amir Mufti's rather brilliant 2005 article on what he refers to as global comparativism. For those who haven't read it, Season of Migration to the North is a kind of inversion of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The novel's Kurtz figure is Mustafa Said, a Sudanese man who finds himself in London in the 1950s and sets about seducing then driving to suicide a series of English women who harbor Orientalist fantasies about him. Narratively speaking, Said's actions are the colonial counterpoint to Kurtz's decline into madness in Heart of Darkness and his obsession to exterminate all the brutes. In Season of Migration to the North, after a prison term in England, our Sudanese protagonist, Said, returns to Sudan and settles in a village on the banks of the River Nile where he meets and tells his story to the novel's narrator who himself has just returned from England with a PhD in English poetry. And it's a moment towards the end of the novel that Amir Mufti focuses on in his reading that I want to draw out here. It's a moment when the narrator enters a room in Said's house that's always been kept locked, a room that's always been kept locked. And in an image as cultural as I think it is political economic, it turns out that the room is a replica of an English study with Victorian chairs covered in silk around table with notebooks on it, a fireplace, oil portraits on the wall and photographs of Said arranged on a shelf but most of all books, books which line the walls everywhere, books that sit on chairs, books on tables, books on the floor and A to Z of books covering topics from astronomy through zoology, philosophers from more through Wittgenstein, four volumes by Mustafa Said himself, even the Quran and Bible in English. I'm not going to read through this extensive quote but the point I want to make is there wasn't a single Arabic book in that library. So for the narrator, the room is at once a prison, a huge joke, a treasure chamber. Now my paper this evening set against this backdrop, against the backdrop of Mustafa Said's Anglophonic and Allegorical Library and it's a paper that attempts to push at that kind of jocular ambiguity that makes it difficult I think for us to decide whether this is a library that's bountiful with the promise of intellectual treasure or in fact a prison. And in doing so I want to respond quite directly to the challenge of decolonising knowledge, specifically coming from my own discipline decolonising geographical knowledge I guess and specifically by thinking about what that task of opening geography to the world might entail or opening social science to the world might entail. I want to do this by suggesting that as a discipline a methodological disposition towards singularity might well facilitate the decolonisation of geographical knowledge and its production. So instead of trusting that we can build an adequate critical imagination for our reading publics for our students and for ourselves with the resources that Said's library offers us I want to argue that the particular, the singular offers us compelling ways of moving our critical imaginations towards alterity. I want to propose the singular as an ethical imperative if you like poise to mitigate the possibility of research on southern subalton or indigenous context becoming a kind of kind of empirical conscript to a theoretical modernity that remains firmly located in the Euro-American Academy. So the singular in this sense I think offers us a direction of travel that can puncture the conceit of Said's library. And it's bountiful but intensely Eurocentric promise of utopian worldiness in the light of the fact that as Amir Mufti extrapolates from his reading of Mustafa Said's library, we're all Eurocentric now. I've used the word manifesto to describe the task of making this argument and I'm aware that it's a rather bombastic and imperfect trope really for what I want to do principally because it's central to my argument today that there is no and there can be no formulaic access to the singular. Instead by using the word manifesto I think what I mean to do is mark out a few methodological resources and watch words germane to that task of decolonising geographical knowledge via an orientation, its orientation toward the singular. But let me stress that the idea of a manifesto for incomparable geographies intentionally gestures to the work in urban studies that's emerged in recent years particularly around comparativeism, comparative urbanism. Urban geographers, people working in urban studies have over the last 10, 15 years or so been acutely aware of the values and the pitfalls of comparative methods for urban research. So the field has seen a proliferation of work that first critically points to the implicit comparisons when global south cities are framed by an archive of urban theory and largely emerged from research conducted on a few key cities that become paradigmatic or superlative. So Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris for example, these are the examples of the cities from which urban theory tends to be generated. And comparative urbanists recently have been drawing attention to that kind of Eurocentrism or Euro Americanism I should say of urban studies knowledge production historically speaking. And second, urban studies has steadily since this kind of critique it's steadily built a new repertoire of urban knowledge by comparing diverse cities across and between global north and south rejecting the integrationist modes of comparison that consciously or unconsciously pull all cities into urban studies in a history of categorisation and developmentalism. And my subtitle should make it clear that singularity speaks in relation to that work. In other words, even though this isn't an urban paper per se it's in the context of urban studies turned towards comparison and comparativism that it makes sense I think to emphasise singularity as an ethical imperative for decolonising geographical knowledge production. Sorry, I think I'm slightly behind myself on my slide set but never mind. But let me be clear that a manifesto for incomparable geographies isn't a manifesto against comparison. Indeed some of the work on urban comparison some of the best work on urban comparison I think is aimed precisely to bring us face to face with the incomparable. So Colin McFarlane for example has been quite clear that the integration of comparison in urban studies moves towards quoting him one possible route through which alternative theories of the urban might emerge. And likewise my colleague over in the geography department at UCL, Jenny Robinson has been consistent and insistent that comparative urbanism at its most useful should lead urban studies towards conceptual revision and experimentation. And some of Jenny's most recent work has mobilised delusional notions of singularity precisely as a way of interrogating how urban case studies might productively generate a revisable and ultimately more global urban studies. But I remain deeply surprised that these debates and these questions haven't had a wider impact in my discipline more generally, in geography that is beyond its urban domains. Because part of what I'm arguing today is that I think we should cultivate a certain kind of ambivalence a disciplinary ambivalence to our extant ideas. And in fact an openness towards singularity I think demands this kind of ambivalence. To this extent then I think we might push the implications of urban comparativism much further actually particularly in terms of that very notion of revisability because it seems to me that heuristically at least interrogate the way that those commitments to revisable urban theory in the service of a more global urban studies tend to first prescribe that new theorisation or concept work will inevitably reconstillate around the urban as a universal taken as given knowledge object. And secondly I also want to query how the very notion of a more global urban studies unwittingly actually leaves untended the conceptualisation of the global or worldly and comparative thought which is what I want to turn to now. So if part of my aim is to interrogate global claims or the worldly aspirations contained within Mustafa Said's Anglophonic Library then it's worth ascertaining that as much as the world is a material thingly biophysical entity one that we can see, right? It's also a figure, it's a concept that has deep historical roots in the European metaphysical tradition from Kant's engagement with the Copernican Revolution onwards. Sean Gaston's book, 2013 book The Concepts of World from Kant to Derrida is I think a wonderful exposition of this tradition and what I want to emphasise is simply that it's this philosophical and hermeneutic tradition that tethers the concept of world and by implication the ever more worldly that decolonisation moves towards to what Gaston refers to as the all too ready acceptance of a seemingly unavoidable logic of containment that has its roots in the classical tradition. Now in a move that seems to build on this critique of this containment Amir Mufti's most recent book which is a critique of the category of world literature has drawn our attention to the ways that the adjectival prefix of world in world literature functions as a plane of equivalence a set of categorical grids and networks that seek first of all to render legible as literature a vast range of writing practices from across the world and across millennia so as to be able second to make them available for comparison, classification and evaluation quoting Mufti there. So what he stresses is how the premise of a particular worldly or cosmopolitan imagination actually flattens difference turning it into the comfortable coordinates of diversity because of the sticky particularity of that universal vision. Now interrogating this problematic notion of global diversity is of course very relevant for thinking through a geography of difference in the comparative imagination. Indeed this is the kind of algorithmic and computational geographical imagination that Gadri Spivak critiques through her methodological trope of planetarity which she proposes to overwrite the globe. So the globe and globalisation for Spivak imply the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere. There an extension of that containing sense of world in the classical tradition. The globe and globalisation for Spivak present us with an abstract ball covered in the lines of longitude, latitude and other computed lines of measurement and classification through which we can easily compare. So the globe is that which GIS and the graticule present to us for immediate comprehensibility. But Spivak's point is that immediate comprehensibility is antithetical to actually existing singularity. For Spivak it's the planet that offers us a way around these reductive comparisons and into the ethico-consectual space of singularity. The planet is that which slips from the grip of algorithmic or computational logic. It's that which can't be fixed by the messianic gaze of one system of measurement with universal pretensions. The planet, as she puts it, is in the species of alterity. It means such different things to different groups located discontinuously across its surface that it continually flings us away. Because alterity, as opposed to mere diversity, is underrived from us. It's that for which we do not yet have the language. I think the key thing to draw out here is that if there will always be the kind of planetary difference that resists being known and therefore contained theoretically and conceptually, then planetary difference is a methodological challenge actually. It's an imperative woven into decolonisation that should steer us toward the effort required to grasp differences on terms true to the singularity of those differences. So planetary is thus a disposition to knowledge. And as Spivak writes, we must persistently educate ourselves into this particular mindset. Another point that I want to make with regards to planetary is simply that it implicates geography as Earth writing. It asserts the always already multitudinous textualisations of multiple worlds. Educating ourselves into the mindset of planetarity, therefore, means developing literacies. Literacies that enable us to read the planet's many and discontinuous textual fabrics. In other words, and unsurprisingly given that Spivak and Mufti are literary theorists, the world or planet for them is textual. It's written. However, and this is a point I think that's sometimes been lost in recent debates in my discipline at least, that is those concerning geography's materialist terms, the planet isn't always written in English. So what I'm concerned with is how to be able to read to discern the outlines of the other story. How methodologically as researchers can we make that move into the text of the other. So in this sense, I think it's important to stress that the singularities I'm evoking in this paper are spatial and historical, not temporal as such. In other words, they're positioned in geographically relational ways to the cutting edge of social science knowledge production. So the conferences in which we present our work are top peer review journals, seminar spaces like this for example, so on and so forth. Now these singularities that I'm referring to are of course historical insofar as they have their own relational histories, but they're simultaneous with us in the here and now. And this is an important point to make because I want to be careful to position the kind of singularity that I'm mobilising in relation to delusional patterns of repetition and difference, which reduces a singularity that delus opposes to representation, which is a move that I don't want to make. So when delus writes of repetition as a singularity opposed to the general and when it explicitly states that the theatre of repetition is opposed to the theatre of representation just as movement is opposed to the concept and to representation. It's important to recognise the temporalising movement forward that he seems to be evoking and furthermore the espaciality of that temporal movement. So delusional singularity seems to me to be not the natural movement into quite other spatial contexts where our literacy fails us. Delusional singularity isn't the movement out of the quite particular anglophonic epistemic space of Mestaphysaides library and into the space that surrounds, so to speak. It's a temporalising movement forward that pushes beyond our extant representational capacity. My point, however, is that singularities are simultaneous with one another. They're relational too, but they're discontinuous with our conceptual systems. That's what makes them singular and incomparable in the concept worlds we inhabit. That said, I think delus is central to the aesthetic regarding the essence of repetition is a useful one insofar as, in his words, the problem is a question of knowing why repetition can't be explained by the form of identity in concepts or representations. And as Jenny Robinson has written in her far more astute reading of delusional singularity than my own, she writes how delusional singularity draws us into a proliferation of revisable ideas and infinite learning, already intimately connected with many other concepts and experiences, but amongst which there is no original model, original or copy. For my purposes, this is incredibly useful, but only I think insofar as we can think that revisability across space, across space that's contiguous with us, but at the same time epistemically discontinuous. So it's the necessary temporal toniaty and spatial contiguity of this notion of the revisable idea that should prevent what, in research between global north and south, would, I think, be the easy option of reaching for the non-representational, where we simply do not yet understand. Now, to this extent, I think it's worth thinking with the imperative of decolonialism a little more concertedly, and I want to do this in relation to the decolonial literature that's been emerging out of Latin American studies over the last couple of decades. So the modernity, coloniality, decoloniality research programme emerging from scholars like Annabelle Kehanau, Maria Lugones, Walter Minyola and others who point to the European conquest of Latin America as that which precipitated the constitution of a new world order that half a century later has resulted in a form of power covering more or less the whole globe. What they refer to, of course, is coloniality. So in this analysis, academic knowledge production, even in its critical leftist incarnations, results in what Minyola refers to as a geopolitics of knowledge, wherein even critical leftist knowledge production is inseparable from the kind of coloniality that they diagnose. So in Minyola's words, the planetary expansion of the social sciences implies that intellectual colonisation remains in place, even if such colonisation is well intended comes from the left and supports decolonisation. And what this puts to us is the very tricky double bind of paraphrasing Audrey Lord dismantling the master's house with the master's tools. So what decolonial scholarship proposes then is a project of delinking knowledge production from the academy rather than the scholarly transformation within sorry, rather than scholarly transformation within the academy. So it looks to indigenous southern thinkers for epistemic perspectives who here too for obscured by the Eurocentric rationality of Mustafa Said's library. Just as it urges us to interrogate the coloniality of the ways that terms like indigenous southern and subaltern we might have to say fix and contain those subjects and spatialities. So it suggests the very impossibility of decolonising the academy from within when the academy itself is the harbing of coloniality. So in other words for decolonialists are attempts as academicians to decolonise social science knowledge are akin to tinkering while Rome burns. As necessary as this position is there are I think some serious problems with it. So first as Kiran Asher has pointed out Minolo and others seem to persistently fall into the trap of equating their political aims with theory. That is to say a kind of theoretical orthodoxy has emerged around the modernity, decoloniality, coloniality programme such that we end up with the intellectual object of so-called decolonial practice as theory. In other words the argument about delinking decolonial knowledge production from the academy can't itself be delinked from the academy and thus has problems resisting the kind of commodification complicit with coloniality that they diagnose in the first place. Second and more over in my opinion if the modernity, decoloniality, coloniality programmes insistence on delinking is to be successful we end up mitigating against the entry of subalton indigenous or southern thinkers into the formation of disciplinary thought or indeed public life. In fact as the literary critic Jean Franco has observed the eventual disintegration of the Latin American subalton studies collective in part due to that very tension between the Latin American subalton's potentially generative public role and disagreements amongst the collective about that obstinate position of not representing the subalton within the US academy. So what this raises I think is the problem not of displacing the academy as such but how to transform it. How to transform the shape of the knowledge produced within the academy. How to bring the singularity of indigenous, southern or subalton narratives into our imagination in ways that first pluralise the very we in here and second do so in order to reproduce the academy as a more open heterogeneous epistemic community. What Richard Nagar refers to as an anti-definitional analytical space. A space wherein those other voices aren't translated out into any form of recognition such that they conform to our disciplinary theoretical and conceptual protocols. This I think is the challenge that singularity poses and in the last half of the paper what I want to do I want to turn to singularity a little more directly evoking a few methodological strategies and their potentials if you like that might routinely move us as researchers towards singularity and its potential. So I want to talk through five brief strategies or tactics if you will for moving towards singularity that we might think about. These aren't meant as a kind of step by step guide in any sense rather I guess in talking through them I hope to be able to suggest something of what singularity itself offers in relation to the task of bringing difference and different kinds of knowledge into representation in the Anglophone social sciences so they are in turn theory and reading friction and fragments translatability and untranslatability abiding by and poetic so I'll talk through these and I hope it's clear by now that the work I want the singular to do is ostensibly to pull us back from an intellectual culture of subsumption reduces examples and cases to exchangeable instances or conceptual givens for the benefits of a disciplinary theory culture located here so to speak which brings me to my first point on theory and reading. The very question of theory actually in geography but more generally in the social sciences I would say which have well debated use and locatedness of theory indeed in my own field feminist geographers in particular have over the years sought to interrogate the masculinity and hegemony of theory culture within the academy which has precipitated an ongoing and healthy suspicion amongst geographers of what Saïd referred to as theory's bad infinity. At the same time however I think we can tend to take the theoretical for granted and what I want to stress certainly in geography we rarely stop to consider what exactly constitutes a theoretical text. In other words to what do we refer when we talk about theory? What is it that distinguishes theory from data or narrative? In fact I think our unthinking tendency to separate and intuitively no theory from method is something that I think we've inherited from the positivist scientific method. Now the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chawi regards this unthinking approach to theoretical knowledge objects as a form of authoritarian thought where she says frees itself from the disturbing need to confront that which has not yet been thought. Now this kind of authoritarian thought she stresses is incapable of thinking difference and my point here is not an anti theoretical one but I do want to suggest that we might retreat a little bit a little bit from simple bifocations of the theoretical from the empirical. From truth claims made in the absence of particular fields and contexts the more important question when we're building more global theoretical repertoire is what exactly is theory for of what use is it and how can it be mobilised for political intellectual ends? Not how can we theorise better but why theorise better? The so what of theory as it were and in so far as I think these are important I think these questions are important I think these are questions that need to be directed to problem spaces located in our field context so in this respect singularities demand a relatively undisciplined kind of disciplinary knowledge production in the sense of work per se but in the sense of a careful and active work that quoting Richard Nagar again places question marks on the utility and logic of neat positions and categories given that those very positions and categories reflect the epistemic hierarchies the logic and investments of our own locations as Euro-American geographers or social scientists so singularities demand to be read in their specificity and that requires attention to historical difference the imperative here is to think what we can learn from literary, testimonial or ethnographic narratives in and of themselves and how that learning may in fact precipitate a useful kind of unlearning actually an unlearning of the theoretical orthodoxies with which we're familiar and through which we transact in the academy and I use that word transact deliberately because I think it signifies nicely the accrule of value that accompanies correct theoretical practice or innovative theoretical practice so further how might we contextualize those narratives historically, socially and culturally such that we can read from them what Raymond Williams referred to as the structures of feeling to which they point and this I think is the work of close reading that's both radically empirical and its attention to particular and singular narratives but at once also theoretical insofar as it enables a kind of correct and contextualized vision so for example in my own work on Buddhism and the aesthetic production of ethnicizing space and political geography in Sri Lanka this isn't held a conscious decision if you like to stand at something of a remove from the literature in my field in my discipline on the geographies of religion and post or infrasecularism which I would argue ends up holding the enlightenment concept of religion and the sacred secular binary woven into it intact and in the Sri Lankan context notwithstanding the colonial history of world religion scholarship and a late 19th century history of Protestant Buddhism that produced and institutionalized the presence of Buddhism and its ethnicizing singular power today fragments from my field work revealed how Buddhist metaphysics also exist aesthetically in ways that aren't reducible to the concept of religion that is to say Buddhism exists as an environmental structure of feeling consolidated in and through certain kinds of spatialities and told to me in terms idioms and allegories incomparable with categorical understandings of religion of the sacred secular binary around which disciplinary debates in geography tend to circulate what that briefest of examples reveals I hope is not singularities that exist in some kind of pristinae impossible vacuum I don't want to essentialize the singular instead I guess what I want to point to is what Anna Sing refers to as the grip of global encounter or friction which for Sing is the traction of universals as they're lived so in my context it's been useful to think about how Buddhism thought as an institutional presence a discourse and colonially contrived world religion in other words a category how it's negated as it's lived from its inside out aesthetically intuitively people who were at the same time claimed to be secular and thus modern so looking for those points of friction entails in Sing's words turning away from formal abstractions to see how universals are used she points for example to Celia Lowe's work on the species collection activities of a conservation organisation in the indonesian Toghian islands where she found that English-speaking volunteers refused to learn the indonesian names for the species that they found so they believed their task to instead be one of directly matching organisms found with their internationally recorded Latin species names and their indonesian hosts tended to juggle local national and Latin species names but in their reports only the Latin names tended to count it was only the Latin names that had value and what Sing is interested in here is this moment of friction where biological material biological material is purified of its own spatial contextual and singular histories so friction allows her a way into following the articulative process dipping into the cultural resources and clues she finds increasing their meanings closer to the ground than to their global resonances so to this extent Sing's friction reveals itself in what I think we can refer to as fragments empirical shards that reveal themselves in fields and archives excuse me be they material or textual and the fragment is just as useful trope to think with I think in the context of singularity we can influence here by some of Colin McFarlane's recent work in which he's been trying to think about what fragments reveal about urbanism and in doing so he methodologically mobilises a longer history of subaltern studies writings on the fragment I think are really useful with respect to singularity so fragments he reminds us have been fundamental to the subaltern studies project because they present tantalising clues to their histories and to new forms of conceptualisation and methodology often hinted at in archival research but speaking to a different way of conceiving some of the basic categories of historical investigation so far as fragments attest to empirical variation they evidence new vantage points and in our own work as social scientists we might think about fragments as those traces found in field or archival worker a scrap of speech a tract of text a narrative a material thing found or alluded to by a research participant perhaps so fragments don't quite make sense to our well-trained ethnographic eyes or historical gazes fragment is thus an evidence of some other whole thing but evidence of what we're not yet quite sure and drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarti the fragment McFarlane writes is a provocation that demands recognition that the world is so plural as to be impossible of description in any one system of representation so the fragment in this analysis is a lure an invitation to pause and stay with difference or as McFarlane has put it elsewhere drawing on the anthropologist Brian Larkin's work it leads us towards a language to be learned so if the fragment leads us towards a language to be learned it necessitates translational work there's a lot to say of course about translation and decolonisation but what I want to touch on here is how singularity might usher us into linguistic and ethnographic spaces of translation and importantly also spaces of untranslatability so for Walter Benjamin the task of the translator is always to find an echo of the original in the language into which something is being translated but for Benjamin the implication of this is that technically possible even technically perfect linguistic translation is never enough it's the incomprehensible the secret, the poetic that good translation must fear towards in this respect I think it can be useful to think of ethnographic and historical workers itself an act of translation insofar as it always involves learning the poetics of another form of life and as much as I I guess as much as I want to hold on to this it's important to remember that translation is also about the hard work of language it's about textuality it's about idiom translation is what Spivak refers to as the most intimate act of reading a literal act of surrendering to the text of the other I mentioned Spivak because she's not just a literary critic of course but a translator, it's one of the most famously perhaps of Deridars of Gramatology but she's also translated the Indian Bengali fiction writer Mahaswata Davy whose fiction helped to bring the exploitation and neglect of Indian tribals of its Adavasi communities into representation and though Davy published over 100 novels and 20 collections of short stories in Bengali her renown in the English speaking world has arguably been very much due to Spivak's translation of three of her books in the one publication and it's Davy's story Teridactyl Purinsahaean Pyrta in the that book Imaginary Maps that I want to focus on here and the main protagonist of that story is I'm sure many people in this room might have come across it already the main protagonist is a journalist and cast Hindu Purinsahae who travels to the fictional Pyrta block in Madhya Pradesh home to an Adavasi community of some 80,000 people whose land has been destroyed devastated by the fallout from the Bhopal gas disaster in the mid 1980s now on the map Pyrta block is shaped like some extinct forgotten animal the Teridactyl no less and the community are suffering drought compounded by a contaminated water table coupled with neglect as well as ill-informed and piecemeal development initiatives that prove no practical use in the face of the hunger and the local epidemic of enteric fever that's decimating the community in Pyrta block Purinsahae's guide is an old friend a block development officer called Harish Haran who introduces him to representatives from the tribal community including a man called Shankar and a boy called Bikya and Bikya communicates with a Teridactyl like creature that in the story embodies the soul of the community's ancestors which has come back to mourn the destruction and disfiguration of their land and indeed of the tribal community now I'll come back to the poetics of the Teridactyl in a short while but for now I want to dwell on one passage in the story where Shankar the tribal representative is explaining to Purinsahae and Harish Haran the plight of his community he says Shankar goes on talking with his eyes closed alas he speaks Hindi Purin and Harish Haran also speak Hindi but how can one touch the other Shankar says his say in Hindi but the experience is a million moons old when they didn't speak Hindi Purin thinks he doesn't know what language Shankar's people spoke what they speak there are no words in their language to explain the daily experience of the tribal in today's India Pashupati Johnco with the Ho tribe in Singbham a native Ho speaker had said with humble amazement translating Bersamunda's life into the whole language there are no words for exploitation or deprivation in the whole language there's an explosion in Purin's head that day Bersamunda was a freedom fighter and tribal folk hero in the late 19th century now as a story and documentarian of Adavasi experience what are clearly important to Davi are moments of untranslatability so it's not just that this short passage reveals exploitation and deprivation to be not endemic to tribal society in those terms it's also that Shankar's narrative his testimonial is incomprehensible to Purin and Harisharan even as Shankar speaks in Hindi which is Purin and Harisharan's language because there are no words in their language Hindi to explain the daily experience of the tribal in today's India in other words in Hindi the ordinary contours of tribal life are unfathomable yet for Purin it's precisely in that unfathomability in his inability to grasp the tribal experience that he sees something of the difference that he feels something of the difference it's in that fragment in other words it's in that fragment of uncommunication that an experience is actually communicated later in the story the pterodactyl comes to stand for this difference for the poetics of this incommunicable experience as Purin says to his friend Harisharan the block development officer after himself having come face to face with the pterodactyl there's no communication point between us and the pterodactyl we belong to two worlds and there's no communication point there was a message in the pterodactyl whether it was fact or not and we couldn't grasp it, we missed it we suffered a great loss yet we couldn't know it so Davy shows I think how moments of untranslatability can in fact be immensely productive encounters where incommensurable differences encounter one another and the literary theorist Emily Acta has recently pointed to the political potential of as she writes, activating untranslatability as a theoretical ffocrum for work across the social sciences and humanities that can ethically and practically stand in opposition to what she refers to as the gargantuan scale of the anglophonic globalisation of social sciences and knowledge production singularities I would suggest can reveal themselves in moments of translation failure that we need to hold on to as Davy skillfully does and Spivax I would also add that Spivax translation of pterodactyl does this because it retains in italicised text all words that appear in English in the original text so in other words all those words that Davy can't translate can't translate from English to Bengali are retained as material traces of colonialism and it's also a brief postscript to pterodactyl in which Davy writes I'd merely tried to express my estimation born of experience of Indian tribal society through the myth of the pterodactyl and what I want to tease out from this briefest of statements is simply the time the effort, the patience that Davy's spent on the tribal issue through her literary career a singularity I think demands this kind of sticking with of attending to and thus making oneself part of a particular problem space located in one's field so this is about cultivating an orientation and responsibility to the demands of a field site or area studies community and also of treating that space fully formed intellectual community not simply a data reservoir and in his work on Sri Lankan literary fiction and civil conflict the literary critic Khadri Ismar refers to this as a process of abiding by abiding by the places on which we work which entails the injunction to quoting him to wait, stay pause, delay, tarry over remain after others have gone continue, sojourn, dwell stand firm by hold to remain true to endure and counten with stand or sustain and finally to suffer even and my point here is is not that as researchers we don't already try our hardest to do this but it's to query how compatible that kind of patient attention to the singular is where not much may change over long stretches of time how compatible that is with the temporality and scale of large grant funded research projects that promotion and reputation are increasingly dependent upon in the corporate university today and also wonder how comparative research might negotiate this kind of dilemma my final point is in fact something that I guess I've been gesturing towards throughout this paper and that is poetics really as a vehicle for moving us towards the singular towards the unverifiable the statistically insignificant I've already indicated how Walter Benjamin emphasised that the task of the translator is to move readers to what he refers to as the poetic and it's in this notion of the poetic image that the singular I think reveals itself as something but of course the thing about poetry is that the social sciences too often pathologises it literally if we take pathologise to mean treating something as abnormal so the poetic is in many senses the opposite of the statistical sorry of the statistical the conceptual or indeed the democratic majority in other words poetics comprise the manifold narratives of the minority the otherwise excluded or the forgotten which are precisely what I want to activate by inviting the singular into our disciplinary domain but also precisely what the social sciences so often legislates against in its enumerative mode throughout the paper I've drawn extensively on literature and literary theory for some good reasons I think literature tells stories I think we need to remember that part of our tasks as geographers certainly is to listen effectively to stories not just to listen actually but to learn how to read stories and to be sure our task is also to tell the stories that our work yields in non-reductive ways as Richard Nagar has written stories are a medium through which fragmented truth claims emerge gets interwoven and reworked to eventually lead us to forms of epistemic wholeness in this sense and following Edward Glison in his book The Poetics of Relation poetic thought and safeguards the particular it affords us the power to experience the shock of the elsewhere and I think this kind of cerebral electric shock is exactly what decoloniality requires for Audrey Lord another writer I mentioned earlier who celebrates the potential of the poetic image in intellectual work poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought of so my point in relation to the literary is that the poetic image the figure that the singular offers us before any theoretical disfiguration the pterodactyl in Mahaswetha Davies pterodactyl Puransahe is exactly such a figure it's the ungaspable other the nameless that emerges into thought from the Davies poetic image a Spivak writes in her afterwards to the collection for the modern Indian the pterodactyl is an empirical impossibility for the modern tribal Indian the pterodactyl is the soul of the ancestors a fiction doesn't judge between the registers of truth and exactitude it simply stages them in separate spaces this is not science fiction and the pterodactyl is not a symbol so what I think as I read pterodactyl Puransahe and pterodactyl is that there's probably no better text with which to teach underdevelopment and tribal issues in northern India and it's very singularity the text can become a valuable theoretical results okay so the paper has been a beginning of a manifesto for sorts there are no doubt more many more methodological strategies that one might want to discuss is in the service of singularity but I hope that by discussing just a few I've demonstrated something of the potential for the task of something of its potential for the task of intellectual and disciplinary decolonisation in a social science context I don't really have a conclusion to the paper but rather something like a last point to make and that is that singularity is in many ways opposed to the corporate university and para university context today it's opposed to the gargantuan scale and global ambition of many of our institutions thus it is difficult in this sense I think it necessitates what Stefano Harnie and Fred Moten refer to as a fugitive relationship to the university it might even necessitate what they refer to as a certain kind of abuse of the university's hospitality as a way of bringing an uncanny meaning an unholy quality to the university of defamiliarising it and if our university institutions are indeed serious about decolonisation I think they'll tolerate this kind of fugitivity and embrace the imminent prospect of their own defamiliarisation but it's important also that we persist in our fugitivity as well Thanks for that fascinating talk Terry so I'll hand over to you Raoul for some comments that would be fantastic Thank you This is not a word I use for academic papers often so I really encourage you to actually read the text of the paper It's I have three questions and I'm just going to ask them one after the other in the interest of getting the discussion going The word manifesto is an interesting one to use for this paper Of course manifesto is usually conjured up the same image of a list of things to be done a programme, a path to move forward and what this really is is I read this paper the kind of portfolio of sensibilities an inventory of orientations of ways to be towards the world if you were interested in the project of decolonising knowledge production so it's not so much a toolkit as a set of orientations and sensibilities When I'm giving advice to graduate students I often struggle with what form that should take so while I share almost in its entirety the aspiration towards this kind of sensibility I think there's always the struggle of let me put it quite bluntly a graduate student who follows the advice in this paper will have great difficulty in timing a job Think about what you say under the heading of biding, take your time over projects This is really very difficult to do It's much easier for those of us with some degree of security to advocate these kinds of orientations but I find it quite difficult to do it with a straight face when I'm confronting a PhD student or somebody who hasn't yet got that security I want to make a world in which it is possible to give this kind of advice but in the interim before we get there it feels quite difficult to have this kind of conversation so I'd be interested in how you think about that and my last question also relates to that My second question is about singularity which is in some ways the most interesting word in the whole paper and it's one you keep returning to and I'd like to prove a little bit what singularity means and what it commits us to In particular I'm wondering why we must think of alterity or why we must orient ourselves towards alterity as singularity when very often things that look singular to us may conceive of themselves as universals and this is knowledge that is to say I think to insist on calling the other singular runs the risk of provincialising the already provincialised and perhaps denying its aspiration to a universalising No doubt some alterities do want to remain minor and explicitly do not want to become major because they know what it is to be major they've been at the receiving end of it and do not wish to perpetrate it or perpetuate it but on the other hand I think a lot of things that might look singular to us do have an aspiration to universality so that what we might be confronting is not a distinction between a universal and a particular but a distinction between a triumphant universal and a defeated universal and I'd be interested in whether and how that might enter into the sensibility that you're urging us to think about I also think that so related to that point the whole orientation of the paper is making singular as intelligible to us where this us is a sort of imperial centre that you call disciplinary geography so I understand that that's that's what you're trying to do in the paper and I think that's an entirely legitimate objective but I think if that's the only question on the table then we might be missing the ways in which singulars are actually relatable to commensurable with translatable to other singulars which is to say that while who may not be translatable into Hindi it might be much more easily translatable into Naga or Mizo or Santallio or some other language that comes out of the life world that has had similar experiences and can therefore understand the kinds of concepts that are being gestured towards one book that's made me think about this is Ravi Shalim's Black Pacific which is the story of the encounter between Rastafari and Maori it's a complicated story of how that encounter happens in New Zealand but one of the things that becomes evident in that story is that when these singularities encounter each other they actually do find a language in which to articulate what is a universal experience for them so Pakeha supremacy and Babylon which is the opponent in their respective world views become equated to one another in a way that becomes possible because both have been at the receiving end of white supremacy so all of that to speak to the question of singularity and how singularities might actually be universals that we just don't get but to insist on seeing them as singulars I think continues to possibly miss that and the final question is about fugitivity which you hinted at at the end and this is really interesting particularly for us up through us so I'm going to very quickly read our two sentences from the end of the paper where you say referencing Carney and Morton and the advocacy of fugitivity in relation to the university they advocate a fugitive relationship to the university might even necessitate what they refer to as a certain kind of abuse of the university's hospitality as a way of bringing an uncanny quality to the university or de-familiarising it and then you say if our university institutions are indeed serious about decolonisation they will tolerate the fugitivity and embrace the imminent prospect of their own de-familiarisation in some ways this is happening at SWAT the administration has embraced the decolonisation agenda made it its own champion that tried to think about ways in which to mainstream it and this has led to suspicion among some of us that we might be co-opted in this moment but it's very difficult to know whether we are being co-opted or whether an argument has been won and I'm curious about that distinction and how one knows which side of that line one is on and I think you're very attentive to that because you talk about persisting in our fugitivity even if that's happened but what is that saying are you saying that the frontier must constantly be pushed no matter where it falls or are you saying that we should always be suspicious even of success especially of success in this context fantastic thought provoking questions there so I'll give you a chance to respond and then we can open up to the floor for a broader discussion thank you yeah should be all right now fantastic thank you certainly not going to do justice to those fantastically provocative and productive comments and questions I guess one of the things that might be useful to say and I should have said this when I started really is that this paper was written for a geography conference originally it's written for the RGS IBG conference the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geography's conference in late 2017 the theme of which was geographical knowledge so there was a particular and quite specific provocation to which it was responding and it was responding to that provocation really by way of taking on a quite particular I'm not going to say orthodoxy but a set of writings that had emerged in the discipline that have emerged in the discipline mentioned which is the comparative urban scholarship or the urban comparativism scholarship which has emerged and gained a lot of traction and it always I think it sort of left me feeling a little bit I've written elsewhere about this but it always much as I take from that work it always leaves me a little bit dissatisfied in so far as to find the urban studies and urban geography and community to not want to go that one step further and undo what that particular concept of the city or the urban or urbanization and that's something of where to contextualize this paper I guess I mean yeah I'm trying to think about where to start actually that you're first in your last points about fugitivity what that looks like and how one can how one can actually actualize that in the context of a university context that demands so much from us still and still continues to kind of take from us in many ways I'm glad you pointed out the last line gone back to the title slide now last line which is we must persist in our fugitivity because I think that's really important but you're absolutely right to point out to what extent so when do we say well that battle's been won whatever but I think that maybe I don't really have any answers in a I don't think there really are any answers in the register of the general to that question because I think these are about political battles they're about knowing what political battles one needs to fight in one's institution or within the context of the university as a whole and a lot of this stuff that we're pushing back against as academics is is so embedded that it becomes difficult to think about how conditions can change I've been thinking about this a lot recently in the context of my own editorial work as you mentioned I edit a journal called Antipode which is a journal a radical journal of geography but we're still published by a commercial academic publisher whose bottom line is financial bottom line so you know how does one negotiate radicality or inverted commons with market and these are very kind of pressing questions how does one negotiate then how does one negotiate how that impinges upon one's editorial sensibilities how one reads actually and that's a real question that I ask myself because I think a lot of what I'm talking about is a reflection on a particular kind of governmentalisation of us and the way that we as academics go about our jobs and the relationship between the politics of what we do and the kind of passion as well the way that we derive a certain kind of enjoyment actually a kind of fulfilment in the work we do and that we progress in terms of taking that step from graduate student to first academic post or getting promoted within the academy etc I don't know that I necessarily share all of your pessimism I think that certainly on kind of panel selection interview panels I've been on in the past that one of the things that without exception actually that we've been looking for in those panels panels are the intellectual trajectories of scholars what questions people are working on the so what of those questions so I do think there are then of course you get all the other things that kick in about kind of refability and is this person likely to pull in grant income and all those kinds of horrible considerations but I do think that at the same time most of the people that I've kind of communicated with about those kinds of decisions want to know about a person's intellectual and political trajectory how what they're working on matters and where it takes a department or a collective in terms of what they do so I think there are kind of seeds of hope in that respect but I absolutely understand that I feel that as well that kind of advising of graduate students about the necessity of doing this, that and the other playing the game etc so I don't that's a kind of fluff really in terms of an answer to that question your second point around what singularity means and what it commits us to I think you're absolutely right and one of the things that it probably should commit us to is solidarities actually and that maybe connects your second and your third question actually but I think this sort of sense of clearing space giving giving, not giving but working hard to create space for communities of practice communities of thought communities to bring themselves into representation on their own terms is also about the potential for building solidarities and I think that's a really important thing to emphasise so I don't want to this is not the work of this paper the orientation that I'm suggesting through the course of this paper is not about preserving essentialising the singular it is about building solidarities I would say actually I was at a conference in the weekend at the weekend where the relationship to the testimony environment were on the table for discussion and I think testimony is a really important kind of word to mention in this context right so that there is a sort of in some senses this paper is about the politics of representation it's about a kind of set of orientations that might clear space for difference in the academy there's a lot more that you mentioned which I kind of will no doubt sort of think about at three in the morning and they're oh I wish I'd said something but I mean that's the point of responding is that you've given me such a lot to think about opening it up why don't we open it up to the floor then we'd like to ask a question have we got some mics that might be floating around to aid you with your audibility do you want to hello, thank you very much for that talk I found it particularly exciting as someone who is actually located in the geography department of Ritburg Beck and I think the kinds of discussions which are going on very belatedly around ecolonizing geography are absolutely essential and need to draw on the kinds of things you've raised I was very struck when you started with that metaphor from seasons of migration which I must admit I haven't read so I'm going by your account of it I was very struck by the fact that the room the library was a closed secret room and then you said that then there was the rest of Sudan and in contrast to that in a way the outside and I mean I wondered how we then addressed the whole questions of the porousness in fact of those boundaries and I suppose that sort of led me on to the question which I'm sure you've thought about because it's not in any way a new question which is how then when we use notions like singularity we avoid and we recommend our research students and so on to adopt them how we then avoid the whole it becoming a kind of a search for authenticity and kind of untainted which of course then reinscribes power in the centres of academia and so on and the other thing I was wondering about really was how within this framework we address what happens when subltern and oppressed groups in fact embrace and kind of reorient certain ideas around modernity and I'm thinking for example of Dalit groups in India at the moment Ambedkar I'm thinking and so on which is very much counterposed to the kind of the hit the right and their kind of ideas about all of this and even in fact when we think of the left because we tend to think of the left as something you know located at the global north but in for example where I work in Bihar the left is so very embedded in the local and in those particular spaces that you know telling those activists in those places that they're in fact you know using western discourses and so on is clearly a pitfall but I'm sure it's something you've thought about so I just wanted to get your thoughts on that Okay great we've got another question just behind you and then one at the front Thank you for your talk it's really interesting and thank you for your responses I was actually wanting to pick up just quickly on something you said about the decolonising process and so on actually and I'm definitely from my perspective a lot of people in groups like decolonising our minds there would be sort of no hesitation to say that it's been very superficially co-opted by the institution in a way that we have a very much re-orient decolonisation decolonial theory around knowledge production and attaches it from the material inequalities and conditions that exist within the university so I thought maybe if you could pick up on some of those issues of like the material implications of decoloniality and how singularity plays into that and the other thing that I kind of would like to hear a bit more from just to clarify the concept in my own mind is that when I've been trying to engage in some decolonial theory I've come across plurality and plurality in quite a lot of people's works and I was wondering what how singularity is in dialogue with those concepts as well Great, more and more here Thanks a lot for the talk I've tried to put down a question but I guess I'm still in the process of taking in some of the concepts some of the pups engage with the geography that instead is materialist and might reproduce some of the sort of narratives that indeed we need to challenge I wonder though how through the concept of singularity we can capture issues of injustice and inequality because when we talk about geographies that's only part of the story if we don't put power in the context, these are geographies of inequality, these are geographies of oppression, so I wonder how does the notion that you use actually speak to these concepts that re-inbett power in the type of sort of tropes but also in the maps we aim to draw across the world I guess it speaks a little bit about Raúl's second question so I understand you saying that it's a matter of creating space but it's not just about representation it's also about fighting oppression so how do we actually do that in practice through the concept you're proposing Thanks Sure Not sure I can adequately respond to the excellent questions but maybe that last question connects a bit to the first part of the first question insofar as there's a question I guess that arises with this notion of the singular or singularity around essentialism and you know there's certainly not my intention to mention in response to Raúl's questions certainly not my intention to suggest that the singular should exist as a singular in some kind of pristine vacuum or something like that I want to pose it as a methodological disposition I think one of the words the phrases that you use Raúl's there's a sort of the paper's about cultivating an orientation and I think that's kind of what I would that's a great way of putting it I think it's certainly what I think it's a really good description for this paper perhaps a better one than I could have come up with so I would like to see this as a way of cultivating perhaps an orientation not about somehow you know trying to grab hold of or claim to authentically be able to represent singular narratives right but it's about I do think it is about clearing the space for people to feel able to represent themselves on their own terms on terms true to the singularity of those differences it's one of the phrases used in the paper absolutely one must part of what we do in the academy must be about speaking truth to power so it must be about confronting injustice and absolutely so I think you know there's a kind of there's an old debate here about where a deconstructive or a post structural mode of analysis opens a door to a certain kind of relativism right and I don't want to sort of fall into that so I think that kind of solidarity building is really important in this work again as I mentioned in response to Raoul so you know if we're able to listen if we're able to to provide a space where narratives can emerge in ways that aren't that aren't disfigured by the hegemony of a theory culture that is part of the material conditions of the existence of the university coming to the second question right then maybe we have the chance to build solidarities so I would say that a political strategy is hugely important I mean postcolonial theory for me has always been about intervening about providing ways of intervening so I think that's a hugely important part of of thinking about what it is that we do as academics so I guess that would be something like a kind of an answer to the first part of the first question and the last question as well the first question also made me think about you know I think I've thought about this a lot when you refer to the relationship between the closed library and the Sudanese space that surrounds you know one of the fixes that geography has one of the fixes that geography has and other social sciences has sought to kind of remedy that for the last 200 years or so is field work so I've thought about that a lot after writing this paper actually that you know don't geographers always just say that that's what we do anyway we go out into the field anthropologists as well and any number of others we go out into the field and use that knowledge in the field to update what's in the library you know the library motif is a motif it's imperfect in many ways but I think it kind of provides a nice way into that relationship between theory and narrative really or theory and data which is a really complicated relationship and I wouldn't necessarily claim to have nailed that at all I think it's something that really kind of necessitates that we think hard about it that we think hard about what is it that we think we're mobilising when we talk about theory what is it that distinguishes a theoretical text from an empirical text and I think when we teach as well certainly in geography we tend to replicate that kind of intuitive distinction by teaching for example theoretical issues in the discipline and then data collection as if the two don't sort of well as if the two can easily be separated like that and that's always really puzzled me actually so I think a lot of this is about sort of the orientation that the paper is cultivating is turning those kinds of critical lenses back onto ourselves and that maybe is a way of playing into the second question which is this is all part of the material conditions of the production of knowledge in the university and the para university context again I think Riles comments hinted or pushed towards this it's bigger than the university itself it's the market for the kinds of knowledge that are produced in the university it's impact, why is teaching not impact surely one of the most impactful things that I can hope to do as an academic is teach encouraging students to maybe think critically or think differently the mechanisms the tools with which we measure impact for example so I think it's all of these questions and again I don't the danger I guess we write in one of these kinds of papers I think you're right to say it's about cultivating orientation it's really not about solving anything great are there any more questions that anybody had because if not we've got a drinks reception that's about to start in the senior common room so we could go and continue the discussion there but I just want to see if there's any more burning questions we've got one at the back oh sorry so I would have to say that my knowledge of the of that literature Escobar and so forth is is not what it should be but I think that I mean the idea of the polar reversal seems to me to be hinged around this notion that there are many different universals right so it's the point you raised actually and yeah absolutely I mean we absolutely and it's a really it's thank you for reminding me because it's a really important point because it also encourages us to provincialise ourselves it also reminds us to provincialise the decolonial postcolonial as a perspective as one approach, as one strategy as one methodology and it's really important to remember I go back to Gatryspivak's writings quite a lot and it's really important for me at least to remember that one of the I guess her most important books was which is sort of often thought about as one of the sort of handbooks postcolonial studies is titled a critique of postcolonial reason right so it's an attempt to Eurasia it's an attempt at least to kind of provincialising the professionalisation of a particular disciplinary formation and I think that is a kind of ongoing task right I think you know knowledge production is like a a conversation for me in the sense that and a conversation is always involves three processes right it's speaking, listening but also being moved so it's iterative it always seeks out new positions so yeah I guess can I just I think some of those questions about the material circumstances and the university might have been also directed to all those comments as well so I don't know you'd probably have far more coherent things to say about it than me a drink is necessary okay excellent well please join me in thanking both our speaker and discussant this evening