Preface and Acknowledgement

With a deep sense of us surviving the vicissitudes in life, let me state that this is emphatically a COVID-19 book - conceived, written, and published during the 2020-2023 pandemic. You might be able to gauge it from my Squid Game-symbolled cover. In light of good hygiene habits learnt during and thereafter the pandemic, let me preface the book with some 'health warnings' before saying something more personal and acknowledging several unrepayable intellectual debts and causal powers.

To begin, the book was conceived during my usual afternoon nap on 29 May 2020 - never underestimate the incredible power of power naps, my well-known little secret for research productivity! I felt strongly about something 'happening' in Geography that kept me awake. I just couldn't sleep over it - how can Geography contribute better to the understanding and explanation of all those life-changing disruptions (lockdowns everywhere), shortages (masks and toilet papers then), and everyday life and death occurring in the midst of this terrible COVID-19 pandemic? Can we do so by offering more reading 'against the grain' and incessant critiques from the perspectives of the various so-called critical 'theory'? Are these critical theories really theory as their names so pompously suggest? If so, in what sense and can it be explanatory? And so what? These were the unforgettable questions that I kept pondering over in that fateful hot afternoon (as often the case in tropical Singapore), and the rest is what you are reading, albeit with a fairly long delay over three years (blame it too on the pandemic and, as I've been saying to many old and new friends worldwide lately, TIE [see full spelling at the end])!

But what is this work for in terms of its audience, approach, and purpose/positionality? I hope the book is akin to some medication that presumably treats common symptoms and perhaps serious underlying conditions. On audience, this is an academic book written as a research monograph and thus comes with its highest scholarly intent and purpose. So it's not for the faint-hearted readers and don't bother to read it as an undergraduate text because it would be harder to survive my text than in Squid Game (only one out of 456 players emerged alive). To my best knowledge (and I've rechecked this with my dear colleague James Sidaway, himself a shrewd historian of our discipline), there is no recent authored academic book in Geography that goes into this kind of epistemological debates on theory and method. My favourite one though would be Derek Gregory's Ideology, Science and Human Geography published quite some decades ago. And yet such a statement beyond a typical textbook on contemporary geographical thought needs to be made to reinvigorate our collective sensibility on theory and explanation in Geography. I believe this monograph will provoke such serious reflections and (mis)givings among many practicing geographers and advanced students interested in the development of our collective thought and normative vision for society and space.

To ensure the book's performativity as a full-blown monograph, I have taken an open-ended approach of engaging with the original works of a strategic selection of critical theorists and (continental) philosophers and their well-known interlocutors in human geography. Nevertheless, I really don't like the arcane writing style of some of them and I want to spare you, my dear readers, from a similar agony of reading this work. I have therefore opted for an extensive engagement approach in my narratives and a writing style of citing some of them in the main text and putting in each chapter's endnotes the most tedious quotations, comprehensive literature grounding/long citations, and further elaborations on important debates. To me, this is a pragmatic and straightforward style of writing and theorizing - not too philosophical nor too convoluted. To the discerning readers, this is not quite like poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 'hallucinatory experiences' of writing in their A Thousand Plateaus, nor feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti's nomadic habits of narration allowing for reading at random in her Nomadic Theory (note: only non-geographers like them are given 'titles' by way of introduction, a writing habit I have used throughout this book). Readers are thus advised to consider skipping these endnotes on the first pass and, if sufficiently impressed thereafter, to revisit them together with the main text on subsequent nomadic (re)readings and passes.

Still, the book is meant to be well grounded in the relevant literature, i.e. thorough enough by combining formative and contemporary work, and committed enough to following through such debates over theory with care and patience. In a reversal of critical urban scholar Ananya Roy's complaint about 'citationary alibis' in her field, I actually provide such alibis for critical theorists and their geographer interlocutors in my text. Nonetheless, instead of indemnifying them from any intellectual liabilities and granting any conceptual carte blanche to their theories, I do hope the book can be read as a rigorous interrogation of their key theories and concepts in geographical writing that comes with an acute awareness of the limits of these allegedly 'grand theories' in theory and practice. To render my approach more 'approachable', I also offer some personal reflections along the way to help readers contextualize different events and happenings in Geography at various times and places and my own theory development journey.

But why bother to write this book in the first place? In the larger scheme of things, losing an afternoon nap is really not a big deal. My purpose here, however, is indeed quite simple. Just like one very kind reviewer of my full manuscript has alluded, I too wished I had seen and perhaps read such a book during my Manchester PhD in the early 1990s (even though I did benefit much from reading and appreciating Gregory's Ideology in my undergraduate days just before going to England). I think my book is useful in making a clear(er) case for explanatory mid-range theory in Geography that might complement diverse accounts of 'weak theory' and other calls for grounded theory, dirty theory, minor theory, modest theory, and so on. Indeed, theory should be explanatory and geographical explanation should be grounded in theory. As you will find out from reading this book though, it is not a standard nor an authoritarian prescription for all theoretical efforts in Geography - doing so would likely shut down, rather than open up, possible avenues for new and meaningful theory work (my sincere thanks to Colin McFarlane for his persuasive reminder of this important point over a recent dinner in Singapore)! To borrow from Doreen Massey's For Space, my book is in itself a dynamic simultaneous multiplicity of (hopeful) becomings that must be open for a reimaginable and changeable future.

Let me clarify further my positionality. Despite my long-time training and practice in the subfield of economic geography and urban and regional studies, this book is not written for economic geographers per se, but rather for the entire discipline of Geography as a global knowledge enterprise. Since my PhD days (some details in Chapter 6), I have had a longstanding interest in, and quite some publications on, philosophical and epistemological debates in (economic) Geography. The book thus offers a broad engagement with various critical theories and approaches in social and cultural geography, feminist and postcolonial geographies, critical geopolitics, environmental studies, urban geography, economic geography, and so on. I hope readers from these and other subfields will take some cues from my approach here to reflect on their 'favourite' theories and explanations in all domains of geographical knowledge. While some of the key ideas in this book have been brewing and germinating for quite some time now, I have only been able to concretize and even materialize them in this form after a decade-long interregnum of producing several social science-oriented monographs on global production networks, developmental states in East Asia, and the interconnected worlds of electronics production! So, it's better late than never.

Ultimately, my goal is to stimulate more and better theorizing and explanatory work in our discipline and for the wider social sciences. If you get that message in this book, it will really make me happy, much like the late Doreen Massey in her personal note to me about her own happiness in reading my review of her World City (reproduced in my Chapter 4 endnotes). At the end of the day, that's what makes our scholarly work worth its salt.

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On the more personal front, there were two life and death 'events' during the writing of this book - one real and another metaphorical - and I want to make sure these events and their influences are fully acknowledged here. First, I was caring for my late mother, who had moved to our home not too long after that sleepless afternoon nap, till her eventual passing at home in end June 2022 due to geriatric illness. This tragic event took place a couple of months after I had completed this book's first full draft (an experience similar to my dad's passing two years earlier just before I finished...