Topple the racists 2: decolonising the space and the institutional memory of geography

In this, the second of two linked articles, I move from efforts to address the colonial legacy of our public spaces to consider the colonial marking of the spaces and institutional memory of the discipline of geography. I use the work and legacy of Halford Mackinder as exemplary of some of these colonial affiliations. By the standards of his time, Mackinder was an enthusiastic imperialist and a resolute racist. He believed that humanity comprised superior and inferior peoples and that the best of the former should use force to defend its global hegemony. When Mackinder’s intellectual legacy is invoked it is all too often in order to promote a similarly bellicose colonialism as with the geopolitical imagination of Robert Kaplan. In his own practice of geographical adventuring, Mackinder himself set Black lives far below his own pursuit of geographical glory and those who vaunt his reputation in the spaces of the academy, burnish a glory that was most cruelly won