Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24(1), 2003, 49-60  Copyright 2003 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishers Ltd TO RELIVE A FASCINATION WITH “THE TROPICS” So one might well ask, is this not the Dark Continent all over again? (Watts, this issue, p. 12) Perhaps what struck me most when I first read Watts’ paper was the way in which it begins and ends with the complex genealogies of tropical geography by raising questions about the nature of the British empire in Malaya in the 1950s, in particular, with mention of a “magisterial” text by Paul Wheatley about a Muslim city (see Wheatley, 1971; Wheatley & Sandhu, 1983). In the opening section, Watts (this issue, p. 6) mentions that the genealogy of tropical geography “has hardly begun to be unravelled” and alludes to a constant search for alternative “models”, mentioning this alongside his invitation by the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG) to talk about the “decentring” of geographical discourse. The intervention by Watts retains the spoken idiom of the original presentation – which I was not able to attend due to my giving a presentation in a parallel session at the conference. It would have been interesting, nonetheless, to have heard this paper presented in Los Angeles, particularly in the corporate hotel complex chosen as a setting for a talk about development and govern- mentality that was, at the time, mired in labour struggles, marking out the site of the real “capital of the Third World” (Rieff, 1990) with all its extremes of inequality and its diversity of immigrant populations. In many different ways 9/11 has come to be seen by many as a “problem of development”, as illustrative of “the failings” 1 of postcolonial states and secular nationalism, or (as Watts also argues) as delivering a “terrifying bonus” of “an anti-globalisation, anti-imperialistic resistance movement” that is armed by “cyber- cultural modernity” (p. 7). In the introduction, we hear about the historical confluence of powerful forces to create antisystemic, anti- imperial and anti-globalisation oppositions, but the connections to anti-globalisation protests and movements seem vague and unexplored (p. 8). This also seems somewhat dated in that Los Angeles, New York and a number of other cities across the United States of America (USA) have staged many such protests – but, there are important questions here about the “international” nature of these resistances and the spatial scales at which they are possible, particularly as many scholars interested in postcolonialism have yet to really study such forms of transnational resistance (Boehmer & Moore-Gilbert, 2002). However, the nature of the (transnational) intersections between these general protests and movements is left unspecified, as is the explanation of the “battles” fought by such movements “on the same ground” (this issue, p. 8). Perhaps what is intended is a more specific reference to anti- Americanism due to a saturated American presence in West Africa (oil companies, regulatory institutions, foreign investment and military commitments) which crippled a shallow RE-IMAGINING POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA A commentary on Michael Watts’ “Development and Governmentality” Marcus Power School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK Power.p65 2/28/2003, 10:10 AM 3