Tariq Jazeel
Biographic Data
| ID | 127606 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tariq Jazeel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tariq |
| FAMILY NAME | Jazeel |
| SIGNATURE | JAZEEL T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1018-6123 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 655 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Sound Carries
This article introduces the special issue of Social Text titled "Sound Carries," which hears how sound carries across geographies, histories, and disciplines-carries meanings, struggles, and creative ways of being and knowing. The editors of this special issue stress that, both politically and poetically, sound and space cannot easily be parsed, and they argue for the value of thinking sound and space together in order to make sense of the worlds…
This Is Not the Sound of the Asian Underground
This article reconstructs a recent historical geography of the late 1990s genre of British Asian dance music that became known as "New Asian Kool" or Asian Underground. Most synonymous with the musician Talvin Singh, whose album OK won the Mercury Music Prize in 1999, this music genre is identified as deeply contested from its very inception by an emergent seam of second-generation British Asian musicians and bands, such as Joi, Nitin Sawhney, Fu…
Anokha emerging: The Asian Underground, new ethnicities, and diversity conservatism
This article tracks the relationship between Britain’s ‘Asian Underground’ music scene and reconfigurations of Britishness in the mid- to late-1990s, through to the more contemporary tightening of border regimes and draconian policies around immigration in the United Kingdom. It examines the role that a small, British-Asian weekly London club night, Anokha, played in the precipitation of an ‘emergent structure of feeling’ that would ultimately sh…
In the Shadow of ‘The City’ Yet to Come: Auroville, Developmentalism and the Social Effects of Cityness
This article focuses on the planned community of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India, founded in 1968. Building on critical readings of the settlement that have drawn attention to the power imbalance in its relationships with surrounding villages, the article delineates the ways that a geographical imagination of cityness has been a key component of the settlement's development and the forms of neo‐coloniality in which it has been implicated. Drawing …
Geography Matters! [Audio podcast episode]
Full of Power
Knowledge and politics can be produced in a wide variety of places: a car, football terraces, picket lines, council estates. Doreen Massey was dedicated to popular education. In this introductory episode, we discuss the importance of intellectual spaces beyond the university
‘Scratching the surface of the taken as given, as a process of unsettling’: An interview with Tariq Jazeel about his book Postcolonialism (2019)
This interview with Tariq Jazeel, concerning his 2019 book Postcolonialism, was orchestrated by Dan Clayton in 2021 in his capacity (then) as co-editor of the SGJ. The interview is a frequently used medium in postcolonial studies, but one that is much underused in geography, which is maybe strange given critical human geography’s core commitment to appraising context and dialogue, and its attentiveness to agency, voice and exclusion, and promotio…
Decolonising spaces of geographical knowledge production: ‘Thinking geographically’ with undergraduate geographers in the RGS‐IBG at Kensington Gore
This commentary is a response to the Area commentary by Mark Griffiths and Kate Baker, which draws focus on the problematic prominence of colonial material histories at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)'s Lowther Lodge site. We outline an undergraduate field trip – run collaboratively by University College London (UCL) and the RGS‐IBG since 2018 – for first‐year UCL geography students that aims to make them both aware of geography's probl…
Manifesting Democracy? Urban Protests and the Politics of Representation in Brazil Post-2013
The 'City' as Text
This commentary develops a postcolonial critique of urban studies, which it distinguishes and delineates from postcolonial urban studies. To do so it mobilizes tools from postcolonial literary theory, regional and area studies, and an older tradition of thinking in the new cultural geography from which the invocation of 'the city as text' stands as a methodological guidepost
Subaltern Geographies
Subaltern Studies, Space, and the Geographical Imagination
Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode At 50
Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism is a book that examines the influence of postcolonial theory in critical geographical thought and scholarship. Aimed at advanced-level students and researchers, the book is a lively, stimulating and relevant introduction to 'postcolonial geography' that elaborates on the critical interventions in social, cultural and political life this important subfield is poised to make. The book is structured around three intersecting parts – …
Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies
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, …
Urban theory with an outside
This paper critically engages planetary urbanization's claim that it generates 'Urban Theory Without an Outside'. It argues planetary urbanization is part of the broader ideological terrain of urban studies whose textual field reifies the city, the urban and urbanization as objects and processes of analyses through a kind of 'methodological urbanization'. The paper argues the conceptual and political value of delineating views from outside urban …
Mainstreaming geography's decolonial imperative
This commentary makes three points in relation to the theme of ‘decolonising geographical knowledge’. First, it highlights the potential that the theme has in terms of widening the imperative to decolonise geographical knowledge; second, drawing on decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory, it stresses the structural difficulty of decolonisation efforts that are conceived within extant disciplinary infrastructures; and third, it argues that dec…
Interventions in the political geographies of 'area
"Unlearning "Landscape
Landscape is a key concept in geography, one that has been critically engaged with by geography's subdisciplines using various conceptual and methodological approaches. Thus, landscape should be a key foundation with which to engage intradisciplinarity within geography. From a variety of strands within geography, however, the definitions that have emerged around landscape can still exclude a range of other voices and perspectives that can usefull…
Utopian urbanism and representational city-ness: On the Dholera before Dholera smart city
This commentary responds to Ayona Datta’s critique of India’s smart city agenda by emphasizing the representational work that urban futures require. In the context of Dholera smart city, I draw attention to the discursive terrains – around city-ness and utopianism in particular – mobilized by the state in order to normalize the inevitability of exclusionary urban planning and imaginations. I suggest these representational fields are key battlegro…
Between area and discipline: Progress, knowledge production and the geographies of Geography
This paper explores tensions that emerge from the injunction to make progress in geographical knowledge production in the globalizing landscape of higher education and research. The paper identifies gaps that emerge between disciplinary geographical knowledge production and area studies knowledge production, particularly connections to non-western areas on which many geographers work. It suggests these gaps are symptomatic and productive of the d…
Aesthetics, politics, conflict
This special issue brings together an anthropologically
Subaltern geographies: Geographical knowledge and postcolonial strategy
In recent years a small but rich geographical literature has engaged with S ubaltern S tudies to explore the geographical and geopolitical imaginations of subaltern subjects and groups. Such writings have deployed subalternity to designate a substantive subject or group marginalized in the face of power. Departing from this, the paper instead treats subalternity more figuratively, as a word able to evoke spatialities occluded by the E uro- A meri…
Dissimulated Landscapes: Postcolonial Method and the Politics of Space in Southern Sri Lanka
This paper puts forward a broadly postcolonial method for engaging with landscapes in South Asia, in this case southern Sri Lanka. It argues that, as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they…
Kicking Off in Brazil: Manifesting Democracy
On 6 June, nine days before the Confederations Cup was due to kick off in Brasília, the first of a series of public protests – ‘manifestações’ – began in São Paulo. They quickly swept across Brazil, rippling through at least 70 cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Belem, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and Brasília. The largest protests that the country, and indeed Latin America, has witnessed in more than twenty years, the manifestações have received wide…
Mainstreaming geography's decolonial imperative
This commentary makes three points in relation to the theme of ‘decolonising geographical knowledge’. First, it highlights the potential that the theme has in terms of widening the imperative to decolonise geographical knowledge; second, drawing on decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory, it stresses the structural difficulty of decolonisation efforts that are conceived within extant disciplinary infrastructures; and third, it argues that dec…
The limits of responsibility: A postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production
A range of recent debates in geography have considered responsibility and/or critical practice, including the connections between knowledge production, ethics and politics. Taking our cue from these debates, this paper explores the question and limits of responsibility in research across a global North–South divide. Emerging from reflections on our own research projects, we interrogate a central challenge of postcolonial knowledge production by e…
Urban theory with an outside
This paper critically engages planetary urbanization's claim that it generates 'Urban Theory Without an Outside'. It argues planetary urbanization is part of the broader ideological terrain of urban studies whose textual field reifies the city, the urban and urbanization as objects and processes of analyses through a kind of 'methodological urbanization'. The paper argues the conceptual and political value of delineating views from outside urban …
Subaltern geographies: Geographical knowledge and postcolonial strategy
In recent years a small but rich geographical literature has engaged with S ubaltern S tudies to explore the geographical and geopolitical imaginations of subaltern subjects and groups. Such writings have deployed subalternity to designate a substantive subject or group marginalized in the face of power. Departing from this, the paper instead treats subalternity more figuratively, as a word able to evoke spatialities occluded by the E uro- A meri…
Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies
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, …
Between area and discipline: Progress, knowledge production and the geographies of Geography
This paper explores tensions that emerge from the injunction to make progress in geographical knowledge production in the globalizing landscape of higher education and research. The paper identifies gaps that emerge between disciplinary geographical knowledge production and area studies knowledge production, particularly connections to non-western areas on which many geographers work. It suggests these gaps are symptomatic and productive of the d…
Spatializing Difference beyond Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking Planetary Futures
This paper develops a critical engagement with 'cosmopolitanism' and specifically the geographical imaginations it implicates. It does so in order to work through some of the geographical closures in the new cosmopolitanism literature and, further, to suggest alternative - more uncertain and speculative - spatial imaginations for modes of living together with radical alterity. The paper is written in the context of the wealth of recent literature…
Responsible Learning: Cultures of Knowledge Production and the North-South Divide
In recent years there has been a surfeit of calls within human geography urging that our disciplinary knowledge and praxis become "more public", so that geography connects more with a variety of political and ethical issues, topical or otherwise (Murphy et al 2005; Murphy 2006; Ward 2005). For many geographers, this injunction is shadowed by the necessity to negotiate the simple fact that one's work is always already public in some capacity; that…
Nature', nationhood and the poetics of meaning in Ruhuna (Yala) National Park, Sri Lanka
Ruhuna, or Yala as it is more commonly known, is Sri Lanka's most famous national park, attracting hundreds of thousands of nature lovers annually. Included in the wealth of attractions that Ruhuna offers its visitors are transcendent landscape experiences amidst what is popularly considered to be its sacred and premodern 'nature'. This paper traces the powerful connections between this popular poetics of landscape experience and the creation of …
Dissent: Sri Lanka's new minority
Dissimulated Landscapes: Postcolonial Method and the Politics of Space in Southern Sri Lanka
This paper puts forward a broadly postcolonial method for engaging with landscapes in South Asia, in this case southern Sri Lanka. It argues that, as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they…
Postcolonial geographies of privilege: Diaspora space, the politics of personhood and the ‘Sri Lankan Women's Association in the UK’
This paper explores diaspora spatialities infrequently evoked within postcolonial geography: those of early twentieth‐century South Asian migrants to Britain who occupied privileged positions of class and status in their countries of origin. Specifically, I explore the collective practices of members of a London‐based, upper middle‐class/elite Sri Lankan women's association, formed in 1949. By closely exploring the group's historically contingent…
Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality, race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy
This article explores the ways that the popular diasporic novel Funny Boy, set in Sri Lanka but written from Canada by an exiled Sri Lankan born Tamil, intervenes in the country's contemporary geographies of difference. The novel itself explores a Tamil boy's struggle to negotiate life in Sinhala-dominated Colombo while also coming to terms with his emergent same-sex desire. By focusing specifically on the writing of two familiar middle-class Sri…
The world is sound? Geography, musicology and British‐Asian soundscapes
This paper contributes to recent geographical engagements with sound and music by exploring the benefits of a geographical approach conversant with musicological and ethnomusicological tools and agendas within a specific political and empirical context: British‐Asian cultural politics and contemporary dance music. Doing so, it suggests, sheds new light on an existing body of anthropological and cultural studies literature that critically highligh…
"Unlearning "Landscape
Landscape is a key concept in geography, one that has been critically engaged with by geography's subdisciplines using various conceptual and methodological approaches. Thus, landscape should be a key foundation with which to engage intradisciplinarity within geography. From a variety of strands within geography, however, the definitions that have emerged around landscape can still exclude a range of other voices and perspectives that can usefull…
Reading the geography of Sri Lankan island-ness: Colonial repetitions, postcolonial possibilities
This article focuses on the cultural dimensions of Sri Lanka's island geography. In particular it argues the importance of regarding the geography of Sri Lankan island-ness as a representational and imaginative trope repetitively and textually inscribed over time. I trace the contours of a topological enclosure that seem so matter-of-fact, natural and characteristic of the Sri Lankan island-state. Inviolability and historical-territorial integrit…
Introduction: Geographical encounters with the Indian Ocean tsunami
Utopian urbanism and representational city-ness: On the Dholera before Dholera smart city
This commentary responds to Ayona Datta’s critique of India’s smart city agenda by emphasizing the representational work that urban futures require. In the context of Dholera smart city, I draw attention to the discursive terrains – around city-ness and utopianism in particular – mobilized by the state in order to normalize the inevitability of exclusionary urban planning and imaginations. I suggest these representational fields are key battlegro…
Kicking Off in Brazil: Manifesting Democracy
On 6 June, nine days before the Confederations Cup was due to kick off in Brasília, the first of a series of public protests – ‘manifestações’ – began in São Paulo. They quickly swept across Brazil, rippling through at least 70 cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Belem, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and Brasília. The largest protests that the country, and indeed Latin America, has witnessed in more than twenty years, the manifestações have received wide…
Interventions in the political geographies of 'area
Aesthetics, politics, conflict
This special issue brings together an anthropologically
Decolonising spaces of geographical knowledge production: ‘Thinking geographically’ with undergraduate geographers in the RGS‐IBG at Kensington Gore
This commentary is a response to the Area commentary by Mark Griffiths and Kate Baker, which draws focus on the problematic prominence of colonial material histories at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)'s Lowther Lodge site. We outline an undergraduate field trip – run collaboratively by University College London (UCL) and the RGS‐IBG since 2018 – for first‐year UCL geography students that aims to make them both aware of geography's probl…
Reply When response becomes responsibility
Unpicking Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’ in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef
The 'City' as Text
This commentary develops a postcolonial critique of urban studies, which it distinguishes and delineates from postcolonial urban studies. To do so it mobilizes tools from postcolonial literary theory, regional and area studies, and an older tradition of thinking in the new cultural geography from which the invocation of 'the city as text' stands as a methodological guidepost
Unpicking Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’ in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef
Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality, race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy
This article explores the ways that the popular diasporic novel Funny Boy, set in Sri Lanka but written from Canada by an exiled Sri Lankan born Tamil, intervenes in the country's contemporary geographies of difference. The novel itself explores a Tamil boy's struggle to negotiate life in Sinhala-dominated Colombo while also coming to terms with his emergent same-sex desire. By focusing specifically on the writing of two familiar middle-class Sri…
The world is sound? Geography, musicology and British‐Asian soundscapes
This paper contributes to recent geographical engagements with sound and music by exploring the benefits of a geographical approach conversant with musicological and ethnomusicological tools and agendas within a specific political and empirical context: British‐Asian cultural politics and contemporary dance music. Doing so, it suggests, sheds new light on an existing body of anthropological and cultural studies literature that critically highligh…
Introduction: Geographical encounters with the Indian Ocean tsunami
Nature', nationhood and the poetics of meaning in Ruhuna (Yala) National Park, Sri Lanka
Ruhuna, or Yala as it is more commonly known, is Sri Lanka's most famous national park, attracting hundreds of thousands of nature lovers annually. Included in the wealth of attractions that Ruhuna offers its visitors are transcendent landscape experiences amidst what is popularly considered to be its sacred and premodern 'nature'. This paper traces the powerful connections between this popular poetics of landscape experience and the creation of …
Postcolonial geographies of privilege: Diaspora space, the politics of personhood and the ‘Sri Lankan Women's Association in the UK’
This paper explores diaspora spatialities infrequently evoked within postcolonial geography: those of early twentieth‐century South Asian migrants to Britain who occupied privileged positions of class and status in their countries of origin. Specifically, I explore the collective practices of members of a London‐based, upper middle‐class/elite Sri Lankan women's association, formed in 1949. By closely exploring the group's historically contingent…
Reply When response becomes responsibility
Awkward geographies: Spatializing academic responsibility, encountering Sri Lanka
This paper responds to recent postcolonial geographical scholarship that sets forth transformative agendas in order to create more cosmopolitan theoretical projects within the discipline. For many geographers the challenges they face are located within not only their own disciplinary parameters, but also those of other specific research communities within which their work situates them. By bringing geography and area studies into productive conve…
Responsible Learning: Cultures of Knowledge Production and the North-South Divide
In recent years there has been a surfeit of calls within human geography urging that our disciplinary knowledge and praxis become "more public", so that geography connects more with a variety of political and ethical issues, topical or otherwise (Murphy et al 2005; Murphy 2006; Ward 2005). For many geographers, this injunction is shadowed by the necessity to negotiate the simple fact that one's work is always already public in some capacity; that…
Spatialising Politics: Culture and Geography in Postcolonial Sri Lanka
Introduction: Spatial Politics and Postcolonial Sri Lanka
Reading the geography of Sri Lankan island-ness: Colonial repetitions, postcolonial possibilities
This article focuses on the cultural dimensions of Sri Lanka's island geography. In particular it argues the importance of regarding the geography of Sri Lankan island-ness as a representational and imaginative trope repetitively and textually inscribed over time. I trace the contours of a topological enclosure that seem so matter-of-fact, natural and characteristic of the Sri Lankan island-state. Inviolability and historical-territorial integrit…
The limits of responsibility: A postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production
A range of recent debates in geography have considered responsibility and/or critical practice, including the connections between knowledge production, ethics and politics. Taking our cue from these debates, this paper explores the question and limits of responsibility in research across a global North–South divide. Emerging from reflections on our own research projects, we interrogate a central challenge of postcolonial knowledge production by e…
Dissent: Sri Lanka's new minority
Governmentality
This article uses David Scott's notion of “colonial governmentality” (from Social Text 43) to make a broader postcolonial intervention into the power structures that shape the theoretical rubrics of contemporary critical intellectual work. Advancing an argument about the governmentality of leftist academic knowledge production, it suggests that Euro-American journals like Social Text be attentive to their ongoing role in the production and effect…
Sri Lanka inside-out: Cyberspace and the mediated geographies of political engagement
This research note begins by pointing to the forms of geographical and political enclosure that have resulted from the current Sri Lankan government's effective regulation of parts of the national media, as well as its mediation of knowledge produced about Sri Lanka more generally. It argues that a rather draconian and unbreachable geography of inside and outside is instantiated by the political regime's insularizing regulation of the country's m…
Spatializing Difference beyond Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking Planetary Futures
This paper develops a critical engagement with 'cosmopolitanism' and specifically the geographical imaginations it implicates. It does so in order to work through some of the geographical closures in the new cosmopolitanism literature and, further, to suggest alternative - more uncertain and speculative - spatial imaginations for modes of living together with radical alterity. The paper is written in the context of the wealth of recent literature…
Dissimulated Landscapes: Postcolonial Method and the Politics of Space in Southern Sri Lanka
This paper puts forward a broadly postcolonial method for engaging with landscapes in South Asia, in this case southern Sri Lanka. It argues that, as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they…
Kicking Off in Brazil: Manifesting Democracy
On 6 June, nine days before the Confederations Cup was due to kick off in Brasília, the first of a series of public protests – ‘manifestações’ – began in São Paulo. They quickly swept across Brazil, rippling through at least 70 cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Belem, Belo Horizonte, Salvador and Brasília. The largest protests that the country, and indeed Latin America, has witnessed in more than twenty years, the manifestações have received wide…
Subaltern geographies: Geographical knowledge and postcolonial strategy
In recent years a small but rich geographical literature has engaged with S ubaltern S tudies to explore the geographical and geopolitical imaginations of subaltern subjects and groups. Such writings have deployed subalternity to designate a substantive subject or group marginalized in the face of power. Departing from this, the paper instead treats subalternity more figuratively, as a word able to evoke spatialities occluded by the E uro- A meri…
Utopian urbanism and representational city-ness: On the Dholera before Dholera smart city
This commentary responds to Ayona Datta’s critique of India’s smart city agenda by emphasizing the representational work that urban futures require. In the context of Dholera smart city, I draw attention to the discursive terrains – around city-ness and utopianism in particular – mobilized by the state in order to normalize the inevitability of exclusionary urban planning and imaginations. I suggest these representational fields are key battlegro…
Between area and discipline: Progress, knowledge production and the geographies of Geography
This paper explores tensions that emerge from the injunction to make progress in geographical knowledge production in the globalizing landscape of higher education and research. The paper identifies gaps that emerge between disciplinary geographical knowledge production and area studies knowledge production, particularly connections to non-western areas on which many geographers work. It suggests these gaps are symptomatic and productive of the d…
Aesthetics, politics, conflict
This special issue brings together an anthropologically
Mainstreaming geography's decolonial imperative
This commentary makes three points in relation to the theme of ‘decolonising geographical knowledge’. First, it highlights the potential that the theme has in terms of widening the imperative to decolonise geographical knowledge; second, drawing on decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory, it stresses the structural difficulty of decolonisation efforts that are conceived within extant disciplinary infrastructures; and third, it argues that dec…
Interventions in the political geographies of 'area
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (27 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Geography (19 works) · Law (15 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Art (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · History (10 works)