Postcolonial geographies and colonialism's mutations: The Geo-Graphing of South Asia

Abstract

This article builds on postcolonial geography’s concepts of imaginative geographies, worlding, and subaltern geopolitics by applying them to an examination of South Asia’s regional formation in the mid-twentieth century. Following a review of debates in postcolonial geography, I analyze the mutations of colonialism as they shaped the dynamics of South Asia in the wake of formal decolonization. First, the Indian subcontinent’s partition inscribed colonial knowledge onto the imaginative geographies of postcolonial nation-states. Second, South Asia was symptomatic of the Cold War’s process of worlding, as reflected in the division of global space and the forms of knowledge generated by American area studies. Third, decolonization and postcolonial migrations provided subaltern geopolitical configurations of the region in tension with the nation-state. This analysis emphasizes postcolonial geography’s value in tracking colonialism’s shifts across networks of empire and in the passage from anti-colonial movements to post-colonial state territorialization.