COLONIAL GEOGRAPHY

Colonial Geography

Colonial Geography

Introduction

Geographers have a long-standing critical interest in imperialism and colonialism, but the post-1980s literature considered here is characterized by a number of new trends. Much of it has emerged in critical dialogue with postcolonialism, which has become a trendy (if troublesome) buzzword for a range of critical practices that grapple with what it means to work 'after', 'beyond' and 'in the knowledge of colonialism. Much of it displays an anti-essentialist concern with the social construction of knowledge and identity, and the machinations of knowledge and power. And much of it treats geography as an eclectic, shifting and contested body of concepts, knowledge's and practices rather than as an autonomous discursive field or tightly defined discipline. The bulk of the chapter surveys these changing ideas about geography. But we cannot fully understand how and why geographers are turning to the imperial/colonial past unless we first place their work in a wider postcolonial intellectual context. It is important to so situate geographers' work for numerous reasons, but let me make two sets of observations that are pertinent to the discussion that follows (Blunt, 1994).

Discussion and Analysis

First, it has become commonplace to observe that the postcolonial world has placed new demands upon western theory and scholarship. There are demands to listen to the other, to appreciate claims to difference, to incorporate minor histories into mainstream history, and to come to terms with the cultural politics of academic knowledge. Western academics have become more attuned to the Eurocentric assumptions embedded in their disciplinary visions, more sensitive to issues of otherness and cultural diversity, and more alert to the idea that the universals enshrined in European (and especially post-Enlightenment) thought are at once indispensable and inadequate tools of critique. It 'is now unacceptable to write geography in such a way that the West is always at the centre of its imperial Geography,' Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory declare in a recent geography textbook, and scholars from other disciplines are spouting similar messages (Kenny, 1999).

Among other things, this new postcolonial generation has pressed home the idea that the configuration of Europe as the self-contained fount of modernity and sovereign subject/centre of world history is a powerful fiction that obscures the reciprocal constitution of Europe and its others. Postcolonial critics return to the past to reveal that identities, cultures, nations and histories have long been hybrid and intertwined, and never self-sufficient or mutually exclusive, with a select group of cultures being innately superior over others. In this sense, postcolonialism works as a critical perspective on the west which shows that 'colonisation was never simply external to the societies of the imperial metropolis was always deeply inscribed within them'. Europe 'was constructed from outsidein as much as inside out' through processes of 'transculturation', Mary Louise Pratt remarks, beginning with the metropole's 'obsessive need to re-present its peripheries and other continually to itself.

But postcolonialism does not simply amount to a 'writing back' to the west, or to a politics of recognition, that debunks Eurocentric knowledge and the ...