The Dictionary of Human Geography

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It has become commonplace to observe that

colonialism involves a mutual interdependence

of forms, at root because colonial identities are

constructedinrelationtobothametropolitan

core and indigenous/colonized lands and

peoples. Identities are formed and stretched

across both metropolitan/colonial and colon-

izer/colonized divides, creating what Edward

Said (1993, pp. 3–61) – a key thinker and

influence on geographers – dubs ‘overlapping

territories’ and ‘intertwined histories’. The

interdisciplinary critical project of post-

colonialism, which is inspired, in part, by a

‘desire to speak to the Western paradigm of

knowledge in the voice of otherness’, has sought

to show that Western/metropolitansubjectivity

has not been constituted in a self-contained

box, but through this long, stretched and often

violent process of colonial exchange, and tries

to expose and destabilize the way in which

Western and non-Western, and colonial and

post-colonial, identities have been shaped by

potent binaries – of ‘civilization’ and ‘sav-

agery’, ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ and so on

(Goldberg and Quayson, 2002, p. xiii).

This critical reconfiguration of Western his-

tory andcultureis intrinsically linked to what

many see as the cornerstone of colonialism’s

spatiality: the importance of displacement

for both colonizer and colonized (and for both

their knowledge systems and ways of life),

and the subsequent difficulty of ever going

back to some pristine or authentic connection

betweenplaceandidentitythat is uncon-

taminated by the experience of colonization.

‘Just as none of us is outside or beyond geog-

raphy,’ Said (1993, p. 7) writes in an influen-

tial passage, ‘none of is completely free from

the struggle over geography. That struggle

is complex and interesting because it is not

only about soldiers and cannons but also

about forms, about images and imaginings’.

Colonialism can be distinguished from

imperialismin terms of the local intensity

and materiality of this geographical struggle,

centrally over home and territory. Said

spurred interest in how colonialism works as

acultural discourseof domination animated by

images, narratives and representations – and

mediated byclass,race,gender,sexuality,

nationandreligion– as well as a material

project and feat of power. Over the past twenty

years, colonialism has been studied as a ‘cul-

tural technology of rule’ imperilled by various

‘investigative modalities’ (Cohn, 1996).

Said (1978, pp. 49–73, 327) deploys the

termimaginative geographyto capture the

connective imperative between geography and

discourse within the unequal framework

of empire: the ‘dramatisation’ of difference

between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘here’ and

‘there’, with texts ‘creat[ing] not only know-

ledge but also the very reality they appear to

describe’. In famously showing how the Orient

was produced, its meaning regulated and

Western dominance over it shaped, by

Western knowledge, institutions and scholar-

ship (by a discourse of Orientalism), Said does

not collapse the distinction between represen-

tation and reality. Rather, he underscores how

orientalism and other colonial discourses

exert authority by creating asymmetrical rela-

tionships between Western and ‘other’ know-

ledge systems. It is through this process of

‘knowledgeable manipulation’ that distorted

images and stereotypes of foreign lands and

peoples become taken-for-granted, traits of

difference become ascribed to particular

spaces, places, environments and natures,

and ‘other’ peoples are deemed unable to rep-

resent or govern themselves. This is what Said

(1978, p. 63) means when he describes ‘the

Orient’ as ‘an enclosed space’ and ‘a stage

affixed to Europe’, and David Arnold (2005,

p. 225) when he describes how British obser-

vers ‘affixed’ India to alien European ideas

of landscape and nature – as part of the

Tropics (seetropicality). While Said has

been criticized for obscuring how non-

Western peoples responded to this epistemo-

logical onslaught, he revealed how colonialism

revolves around grammars of difference,

othering and exclusion that are acutely spatial

• that function as ‘trait geographies’ (Gregory,
  2001b).

(2) History and interpretation. As much of the

above implies, there is more than onemodel

of colonialism. Indeed, it is important to rec-

ognize how different meanings and models

of colonialism have evolved and operatea

posteriori. Important distinctions have been

drawnbetweendifferent types of colonies: ex-

ploitation colonies (e.g. British India, French

Indochina; slave colonies, ‘protectorates’ and

‘dependencies’), which were established pri-

marily for the purpose of capitalist economic

extraction, where tiny expatriate colonial elites

often governed large subject populations, and

ideologies of race and paternalism played

a pivotal role in colonial rule; settler colonies

(e.g. North America andaustralasia), whose

political economies were premised on the

availability of extensive tracts of cultivable

and resource-rich land, and where indigenous

peoples were systematically displaced by

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 95 31.3.2009 9:45pm

COLONIALISM