Impure and Worldly Geography

Tropicality is a centuries-old Western discourse that treats otherness and the exotic in binary – ‘us’ and ‘them’ – terms. It has long been implicated in empire and its anxieties over difference. However, little attention has been paid to its twentieth-century genealogy.

This book explores this neglected history through the work of Pierre Gourou, one of the century’s foremost purveyors of what anti-colonial writer Aimé Césaire dubbed tropicalité. It explores how Gourou’s interpretations of ‘the nature’ of the tropical world, and its innate difference from the temperate world, were built on the shifting sands of twentieth-century history – empire and freedom, modernity and disenchantment, war and revolution, culture and civilisation, and race and development. The book addresses key questions about the location and power of knowledge by focusing on Gourou’s cultivation of the tropics as a romanticised, networked and affective domain. The book probes what Césaire described as Gourou’s ‘impure and worldly geography’ as a way of opening up interdisciplinary questions of geography, ontology, epistemology, experience and materiality.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students within historical geography, history, postcolonial studies, cultural studies and international relations.

Gavin Bowd is Reader in French, School of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews, UK.

Daniel Clayton is Senior Lecturer in Geography, School of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews, UK.

By re-examining French geographer Pierre Gourou's work, this book highlights the significant (yet only partially understood) role he played in shaping how the tropical world was viewed during the 20th century. It does so by connecting Gourou to the idea of 'tropicality' - a discourse which constructs 'the tropics' as the West's environmental Other (in both positive and negative terms - as exotic, Edenic and bounteous, but also as backward, debilitating and pestilential).While Gourou had a towering influence over French geography, this is the first book-length study of him, as well as being the most extensive critical and contextual treatment of the geography of tropicality to date. Through its focus on Gourou, it explores how questions of geography (of ontology, epistemology, experience and materiality) enter into the constitution of this discourse and its imperial maps of meaning.During a long career spanning eight decades which took him to many different parts of the world, Gourou's attempt to explain and interpret 'the nature' of the tropical world is best conceived as a series of projects and experiments in investing 'the tropical' with meanings that were built on the shifting sands of world affairs and that operated in a lateral relationship with dominant and competing 20th-century discourses - of modernity and disenchantment, war and revolution, culture and civilisation, empire and freedom, and race and development.In addressing key questions about the location and power of knowledge, this book argues that Gourou should be regarded as a leitmotif of a more general (constitutive) ambivalence in the make-up of tropicality and its manipulation of meaning.

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