ABSTRACT
While Pierre Gourou’s worry in his melancholic 1990 letter to Yves Lacoste (see Chapter 6) that the word tropique was disappearing from French schools may have been well placed, the term never left academic study and debate, and sprang back to life at the end of the century in the guise of tropicality. In Chapter 1 we explained how Gourou enters this frame via two critiques of his work that appeared fifty years apart, and in different anti-colonial and postcolonial climates. In these last few pages we reflect on what we have made of Gourou’s “impure and worldly geography,” and whether tropicality in a wider sense is dead or markedly different than yesteryear, and partly in light of the fact that Orientalism has become emboldened in recent decades. 1
