One of the best ways of rejuvenating a discipline is to announce that it is in crisis. This has been happening to disciplines such as history and anthropology for some time now; more recently, it seems to have been happening to geography as well. In the 1980s, geography – like several other academic disciplines – went through its postmodern turn, amid growing fears that ‘to be labelled a geographer was an intellectual curse, a demeaning association with an academic discipline so far removed from the grand houses of modern social theory and philosophy as to appear beyond the pale of critical relevance’ (Soja 19). On into the 1990s, geography was seen as a stronghold for white-bourgeois heterosexual masculinity, a fortress to which a number of feminist geographers vigorously laid siege. At the end of her 1993 book Feminism and Geography, Gillian Rose, for example, calls spiritedly for

Arguably one of the ‘other’ geographies to have developed over the last decade or so is postcolonial geography. In spite – or possibly because – of routine prescriptions, often delivered from outside the discipline, that ‘geography is a language in crisis, unable to represent the immense changes that have taken place in a postcolonial, post-communist, post-migratory’ global environment (Rogoff n.p.), geographers have been quicker than most to respond to the negative (self-)perception of their discipline, and to adjust its parameters to an increasingly technology-driven, simultaneously interconnected and radically fragmented world (Appadurai). The new geographies that have emerged are alert to global/local dialectics and well attuned to the colonial foundations of the discipline. They are also theoretically informed and conscious of parallel developments in other disciplines, for example English literary/cultural studies, where excellent work continues to be done in the crossover fields of literary geography and spatial history.