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This paper brings together three parallel strands of work—Black Geographies, geographies of Caribbean creative practice, and quantum geographies. The paper begins by considering static linear spacetimes as colonial spacetimes, and draws on Michelle Wright's critique of Middle Passage epistemologies, from Black Studies, to elaborate on this. It then moves through a number of ways in which, over the last couple of decades, I have drawn together insights from Wilson Harris and Karen Barad to explore how quantum mechanics can facilitate a conversation about uncertainty, connectedness, entanglement and the liveliness of always already climate‐changed landscapes in relation to Black embodiment. In pushing briefly into string theory, the paper ends with the possibility of connecting spirituality with materialities, to push towards more politically attuned forms of emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview piece, Professor Emerita Carolyn Cooper speaks with Pat Noxolo about gender in Jamaican popular culture, about the classed and gendered geographies of Kingston, and about her own long career at the University of the West Indies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the special section of the periodical is presented with topics such as concept of in/security and substantive analysis of Erna Brodber's novel "Nothing's Mat" as a fractal narrative of gendered in/securities in the Caribbean.

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’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the collection of six African‐Caribbean academics, making the claim for the forum as an intervention that pushes towards the firmer establishment of a Black British Geography. This intervention forum arises out of a public event called "Urban roots of creative Black culture: gender, music, and the body," which took place at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, UK, in 2019, and was co‐sponsored by this journal, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (TIBG). After an introductory piece, the forum brings together four short papers by contributors to the event, each exploring Black creative culture, gender, music, and embodiment in relation to the city, archives, dance, and creative practice (respectively). Bringing together six African‐Caribbean academics, the forum is an intervention that presents aspects of an emergent Black British Geography and, as such, challenges Geography as a discipline to be sufficiently open to accommodate it. This intervention forum arises out of a public event called "Urban roots of creative Black culture: gender, music, and the body," which took place at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, UK, in 2019, and was co‐sponsored by this journal, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (TIBG). After an introductory piece, the forum brings together four short papers by contributors to the event, each exploring Black creative culture, gender, music, and embodiment in relation to the city, archives, dance, and creative practice (respectively). Bringing together six African‐Caribbean academics, the forum is an intervention that presents aspects of an emergent Black British Geography and, as such, challenges Geography as a discipline to be sufficiently open to accommodate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme for the chair's plenaries at the 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) ( RGS- IBG) Annual Conference is 'Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world'. This commentary explains why this pursuit of critical consciousness via decolonial thinking could do more harm than good. We show how the emphasis on decolonising geographical knowledges rather than structures, institutions and praxis reproduces coloniality, because it recentres non-Indigenous, white and otherwise privileged groups in the global architecture of knowledge production. It is argued that an effective decolonial movement within geography must recognise the intersectionality of indigeneity and race, and necessitates that the terms on which the discipline starts debates about decolonisation and decoloniality are determined by those racialised as Indigenous and non-white by coloniality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article ponders on interventions that cultural geography can contribute in the fight against global poverty based on the prologue and epilogue of the book "I Do Not Come to You By Chance" by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani. A summary of the novel is presented. Topics include the relationship between development and culture, and examples of complexity in cultural geography such as the understanding of global culture, the shaping of local cultures, and focus of global flows on different localities.

This piece holds onto the foundation of the material conditions of the experience of Indigenous people out of which decolonial theory springs, first by exploring decolonial theory as it re-shapes practice globally, and second by recognising how radical power risks becoming harnessed and domesticated in Western academic spaces. Finally, it suggests that the Global Challenges Research Fund is not fertile ground for truly decolonising geographical knowledge in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A short and direct introduction sets out the context for this special section. After a brief sketch of each of the commentary pieces and how they fit together, the key question will then be posed: how are geographers now inserting themselves into these ongoing dynamics, and which particular aspects of the present moment are geography academics well-placed to address? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary is a friendly response to Chris Philo's Boundary Crossing article on the relevance of security as a theme for that year's RGS Annual Conference (Philo C 2012 Security of geography⁄geography of security Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 1-7). The article did the important preliminary work of unfixing the meanings of security, and in particular introduced a fertile heuristic distinction between big-S and small-s security. This article seeks to bring this useful distinction into relationship with this year's (2014) RGS conference theme, the co-production of knowledge, through a located focus on the co-production of Caribbean big-S and small-s securities. It argues ultimately that co-production is a concept that needs to be used critically, and that engagement with Caribbean and other postcolonial theorists would be an excellent starting point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Chikwava's novelHarare 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a discursive analysis of the Conservative green paper for international development, published as part of the closely fought election campaign of 2010 that culminated in a UK coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. The article examines the paper in comparison with the discursive shifts represented by the first Department for International Development (DfID) white paper, published by the outgoing Labour administration in 1997. In contrast with the optimistic and globalist developmentalism that characterised Labour's development discourse, the green paper sounds a more cautious note, using empire to focus on Britain's leadership role in poverty alleviation rather than on global progress, and brings back the full force of developmentalism only at the point where it seeks to legitimate spending on security concerns as a development concern. The article then moves on to examine the green paper's most explicit discursive move, the signalling of a 'post-bureaucratic age'. This move towards increased information provision to promote transparency and accountability is likely to signal greater control by powerful donors in securitised times, albeit with a potential re-scaling of responsibility for poverty alleviation to the poorest local communities. Finally, the article looks briefly at information technologies in relation to the transnational spatiality of civil society, arguing that attention needs to be paid to the more embodied forms of transnational association encouraged by the green paper, and to the selection and impacts of information, which need to be seen in the discursive context of wider Conservative constructions of the 'big society'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay brings Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem (1986) and Wilson Harris's 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses postcolonial theory to establish a critique of the concept of ‘partnership’ in the British Labour government’s 1997 White Paper on International Development, which is routed through the colonial metaphor of the British Commonwealth ‘family of nations’ to reproduce racialized hierarchies and deny mutuality in the contemporary development of Britain and its former colonies. In the course of this critique, the paper urges British geography to acknowledge its own postcoloniality, which will lead to a mainstreaming of concerns about global justice and provide intellectual resources to reimagine the geographies of postcolonial Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual Medals and Awards recognise achievements in researching, communicating and teaching a wide range of geographical knowledge. The speeches and citations are a record of both the 2020 and 2021 celebrations, which were delayed and combined because of COVID‐19, with contributions from Heather Viles, Andy Eavis, Rita Gardner, Jonathan Rigg, Chris Philo, Peter Kraftl, Patricia Noxolo, Emma Mawdsley and Nina Laurie. The event concluded with comments from the Society's Patron, Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal. The speeches included comments on inspirational students and teachers; the importance of collaboration, of equity and inclusivity; understanding places, making connections and crossing boundaries; earth‐writing and earth‐righting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]