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Noxolo P, Raghuram P, Madge C, 2008, "‘Geography is pregnant’ and ‘geography’s milk is flowing’: metaphors for a postcolonial discipline?" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(1) 146 – 168
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‘Geography is pregnant’ and ‘geography’s milk is flowing’: metaphors for a postcolonial discipline?

Pat Noxolo, Parvati Raghuram, Clare Madge

Received 14 October 2005; in revised form 2 February 2007

Abstract. This paper attempts to mobilise the metaphors of pregnancy and lactation to address the imperatives arising from British academic geography’s 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.

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