Patricia Noxolo

Conceptualizing international education : from international student to international study

In a rapidly changing transnational eduscape, it is timely to consider how best to conceptualize international education. Here we argue for a conceptual relocation from international student to international study as a means to bridge the diverse literatures on international education. International study also enables recognition of the multiple contributions (and resistances) of international students as agents of knowledge formation; it facilitates consideration of the mobility of students in terms of circulations of knowledge; and it is a means to acknowledge the complex spatialities of international education, in which students and educators are emotionally and politically networked together through knowledge contributions.

‘Geography is Pregnant’ and ‘Geography's Milk is Flowing’: Metaphors for a Postcolonial Discipline?:

This paper attempts to mobilise the metaphors of pregnancy and lactation to address the imperatives arising from British academic geographys postcolonial position. We embed our argument in our readings of extracts from two consciously postcolonial fictional texts. In the first part of the paper we consider geography as a discipline that is pregnant but ‘in trouble’ to illustrate the paradoxical struggle of the discipline to be a global discipline whilst at the same time marginalising the voices and perspectives that make it global. In the second part of the paper we consider geography as a discipline whose ‘milk is flowing’ to suggest ways that the discipline can acknowledge its global interconnectedness to produce a mutually responsible academic agency.

Towards an embodied securityscape: Brian Chikwava's Harare North and the asylum seeking body as site of articulation

This article introduces the concept of an embodied securityscape, arguing that asylum seekers embody a point of articulation between two differently located security nexuses: security-migration and security-development. Drawing on Brian Chikwavas novel Harare North, the article illustrates this articulation, not only in the thematic development of the embodied experiences of the narrator, but also in the way the novel articulates differently located conventions of form. Ultimately, the article argues that this embodied securityscape, as illustrated through this novel, produces an alternative narrative space for the messy politics of asylum.

Postcolonial Imaginations: Approaching a “Fictionable” World through the Novels of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris

Postcolonial geographers’ calls for greater multivocality in geographical knowledge can be approached through a deeper and more explicit engagement with postcolonial literature. The article draws from postcolonial studies and literary theorists to argue that an exploration of literature tends to reenvisage the world as “fictionable”; that is, open to multiple interpretations and perspectives. A brief review of geographical approaches to texts and to literature highlights the notion of the “text event,” in which writers, texts, and readers jointly create meaning. This notion of “text event” is then explored through the “geographies of disorientation” of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris, including close readings of extracts from “La Colonie du Nouveau Monde” and “Jonestown.” Using postcolonial literature to help establish the world as fictionable opens up experiences of not only reading but of being read by the “other” and warns that this opening to difference, although necessary, can be painfully disturbing.

MOVING MATTER: Language in Caribbean Literature as Translation between Dynamic Forms of Matter

This essay brings Maryse Condés Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem (1986) and Wilson Harriss Palace of the Peacock (1985) into dialogue through the flexibility and dynamism of their shared engagement with language and materiality. Through this dialogue the essay argues that, in Caribbean literature, language can be conceived as a ‘zone of translation’ between different forms of matter. The essay begins with the argument that Caribbean postcolonial literature is heavily concerned with materiality, and argues that the essays and novels of both Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris display a particularly flexible and dynamic view of materiality, allowing an intense engagement with the potential as well as the limits of language, not only in representing materiality, but also in translating between materials. The second half of the essay focuses down on the two chosen novels as offering particularly clear illustrations of the capacity and limits of this form of translation. A brief conclusion explores the implications of this notion of ‘translation’ between different forms of matter for a postcolonial politics that engages materiality critically.

Provocations beyond one’s own presence: towards cultural geographies of development?

Cultural geography sometimes appears to be an esoteric and exclusive sub-discipline of a blinkered and exclusive Euro-American discipline, focused on advancing the careers of the already privileged through theories that are largely based on the cultural experiences of the economically satiated.1 This might seem a harsh assessment (it is an assessment that is after all meant to provoke), but from the points of view of the world’s poorest and of the development geographers who research them (with no implication that the two share one point of view of course) it might seem all too true.2 In a western academy in which publication, in high quality journals, of articles about ever more esoteric critical theory, makes careers, cultural geographers can be judged to have become increasingly detached from anyone’s real world problems, not least those of the world’s poorest. In response to this provocation, this article asks what interventions cultural geographers could actually make in the everyday struggle against global poverty. It draws on a geographical reading of a cultural text, based on the content, form and geographies of reading (or ‘located hermeneutics’ Livingstone) surrounding the prologue and epilogue of a novel by a Nigerian writer, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani (2009) I Do Not Come to You By Chance. This novel engages with the stories behind the so-called 401 email scams, the emails from the ‘former president of Nigeria’, or from the ‘widow of a Nigerian diplomat’, or from the ‘rich sufferer of an incurable disease’, that ask the recipient (their ‘dear friend’) to look after a large amount of money, with the incentive of a generous commission for themselves. The novel’s main character, Kingsley, returns to Nigeria with a degree from overseas, but he cannot find work. Eventually he is forced to take part in the 401 industry and becomes successful in it. The novel can be read as a sharp critique of highly uneven processes of globalization that produce these industrial-sized, thoroughly organized email scams. Facilitated by increasing access to electronic media, and fuelled by the unequal global distribution of resources, these emails really do not come to us by chance. The novel’s critical take on the global presence of 401 emails makes a fascinating case study for cultural geography, and the provocation will end with a set of implications of how cultural geography might engage with development.

Locating Caribbean Studies in unending conversation

This essay works through how seeing Caribbean Studies from my singular location – a Caribbean diaspora human geographer based in the UK but interested in the Caribbean as an area of study – leads to ‘conversations’ with a range of differently located academics, and locates Caribbean Studies in very particular ways. The particular concept of conversation comes through Hall’s (1993) Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture, published as ‘Negotiating Caribbean Identities’ in New Left Review. This routing leads to two critiques of defining one’s own cultural and disciplinary identity through Caribbean Studies, and also points to a renewal of Caribbean Studies, through unending conversations in and with the region.

A shape which represents an eternity of riddles: fractals and scale in the work of Wilson Harris

This article undertakes a geographical investigation of the potential application of the concept of fractals to Wilson Harris’ understanding of the relationships between language and landscape. Alan Riach, briefly describing a fractal as ‘an irregular action or shape, such as a cloud or a coastline . . .’, has famously argued that Harris’ poetry and prose (his work notoriously blurs this boundary) ‘. . . is caught up by the shifting fractals of political energy on a global stage . . .’ Retracing this essentially metaphorical use of the term fractal back through its physical geography routes, the article begins by briefly exploring the complex meanings of the term as it is used to describe dynamic geomorphological processes, particularly the changing shapes of coastlines and rivers. Bringing this into relationship with Wilson Harris’ most recent work The Ghost of Memory, as well as his own commentaries on his work as a whole, the article argues that the application of the adjective ‘fractal’ specifically to landscape as it is described in Harris’ work is not purely metaphorical, but usefully describes the conditions for the relationships between language and landscape that Harris has spent a lifetime expressing. This tentative and contested geographical understanding of natural features of the environment as in this way not static but ‘in constant motion and unfinished’ can therefore form the beginning of an understanding of Harris’ critique of environmental degradation as disconnection. The article will end by briefly exploring the potential value of Harris’ work in relation to literature and spatiality.

Flat Out! Dancing the city at a time of austerity

This paper reflects on and challenges existing paradigms around movement and mobilisation in and with the city. This focus is provoked by a community arts project called ‘Flat Out’, in which the researcher collaborated with the Drum Intercultural Arts Centre and Birmingham Royal Ballet, on a dance project with members of the community in the Lozells and Newtown areas of the city. The paper pushes for more deeply embodied and more highly politicised versions of place ballet and urban vortex, introducing a concept of choreography that comes from dance practice, and working through decolonial and postcolonial theories. A brief auto-ethnography of the author’s Birmingham childhood illustrates that movement repertoires are diverse, historically and spatially conditioned, and, in the case of Birmingham, located within an ongoing ‘decolonial churn’.

Postcolonial Approaches to Development

This chapter works towards a notion of postcolonial and development theories as locked in negotiation one with another around the relative importance of poverty and inequality. Prioritising global inequality, broadly speaking, postcolonial theory has incited and responded to changes in development theory, arguing repeatedly for shifts in its foci (from a focus on development agents and agency to a focus on subalterns and subalternity), its constructs (in particular constructs of teleological or linear histories) and its disciplinary centres (from a methodological focus on political and economic geographies to a methodological focus on cultural geographies). Ultimately, the chapter concludes that this negotiation is not a contest but a co-operation: postcolonial theory and development theory are each concerned with both poverty and inequality, and they negotiate to fundamentally address the latter, whilst not ignoring the reality of the former.