ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches out some of the ways the field has approached questions of space, territories, regions, and boundaries. It includes Edward Said’s imaginative geographies, colonial urbanism, hybrid ‘third spaces’, global ‘scapes’, and, finally, the Global South. The chapter traces the ways post-colonial theory has conceived of and critiqued the world’s spaces and regions in relation to imperialism, anti-colonialism, nationalism, diaspora, and globalization. Such spatializations are necessarily transregional in that they transform and transcend regional constructions. Fanon’s account of the colonial city works through a number of spatializations that remain indispensable to post-colonial studies today. In particular, his attention to the epistemologies and subjectivities produced in the transregional matrix of colonial urbanism has opened up multiple avenues for comparative and interdisciplinary research on (post-)colonial cities. This research, in turn, has provided the basis for new work that addresses the post-colonial metropolis as the spatial form that, palimpsest-like, must mediate between colonial legacies and global futures.
