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of mapping and location have a seminal place
in post-colonial theory.(3) Critical problematics. While recent work on
colonialism eludes simple characterization, it
can usefully be located within a series of inter-
related spatial poles of interpretation, which
grapple with whether colonialism,in extremis,
can and should be treated as uniform or
diverse, coherent or fragmentary, centred
or decentred, and whether it put in train a
cultural history of affinity or difference, con-
nection or separation, inclusion or exclusion.
These analytics can be traced through two pairs
of watchwords that infuse work in the field of
colonial studies and the wider project of post-
colonialism.
With regard to diversity and specificity,
recognition of the historical–geographical di-
versity of colonialism is often registered as a
warning about the perils of generalizing about
‘it’ from particular locations (Algeria, India
and the Caribbean being the crucibles of
much theorizing). Colonialism is conceived as
less amenable toabstractionthan imperial-
ism, as more localized and differentiated than
models suggest, and in need of more compara-
tive research. This critical impulse to extend
what Fanon (1963 [1961], p. 239) called ‘the
will to particularity’ – to expose the duplicity of
Western universals and absolutes – has
been manifested in calls to bring metropole
and colony into ‘a unitary analytical field’
(Cooper and Stoler, 1997a, p. 1), to conceptu-
alize colonialism as a ‘forged concept’ involving
both similitude and difference (Lloyd, 1999,
p. 7), and to re-examine those processes (both
violent and intimate) that colonizers and the
colonized shared, as well as those that set
them apart.
A range of recent scholarship on struggles
over ‘who was inside and who was outside the
nation or colony, who were subjects and who
were citizens’, demonstrates the importance of
escaping older scholarly containers and ‘map-
ping. .. difference across nation and empire’
(Hall, 2002a, p. 20; Lambert and Lester,
2006). Starting from an analytical standpoint
of liminality (how colonialism operates in
terms of what it excludes and places outside
its domain of comprehension and action), and
from the premise that significant gaps existed
between metropolitan/imperial prescriptions
of power and the daily realities and pressures
of colonial rule, a feminist-inspired literature
examines how colonialism involves incessant
struggles over the making and protection of
cultural boundaries and frontiers – strugglesthat are gendered, sexualized and racialized,
and that work to demarcate the foreign from
the domestic, the civilized from the wild or
savage and home from away (Stoler, 2002;
Blunt, 2005).
Emphasis is now routinely placed on the
spatialityof such struggles and dynamics,
and geographers have been particularly con-
cerned with how colonialism operates through:
(i) particular sites and contact zones, such as
ships, forts, plantations, trade posts, ports and
cities, native reserves, mission stations,
museums and exhibitions; (ii) the networks
and institutions – such as the London-based
Royal Geographical Society and Seville-based
Council of the Indies – that coordinated the
flows of people, goods, orders and information
connecting this array of places and spaces; and
(iii) the inscription devices and systems of
representation– forms of recording, writing,
and calculating distance and measuring differ-
ence, such as maps, journals, ledgers, paintings
and despatches; practices of exploration,
observation,fieldwork,classificationand
synthesis; and discourses justifying colonialism- that both shaped and were shaped by such
sites, domains and networks (Driver, 2001a; cf.
centre of calculation;climate;tropical-
ity). This body of work emphasizes that
Europeans’ ability to know, physically reach
and govern distant and far-flung lands was
something made, practiced and performed
(and thus amenable to criticism and re-inven-
tion) rather than given (and was not some
innate and distinguishing European quality
and mark of its superiority).
However, such site-specific and de-centred
readings can arguably lose sight of colonial-
ism’s trans-historical traits and general effects - such as (for some) its propensity to racialize
difference the world over, and (for others) the
way in which the state is deemed to be
the bearer of the most rational and civilized
practices of rule – and thus undermine an
anti-colonial politics that is responsive to the
commonalities of experience among the col-
onized. Anti-essentialist and non-teleological
approaches to colonial history that refuse to
generalize and conceptualize colonialism
in extremis, or as a totality, can trivialize its
impact, and can serve divisive ethnic and
nationalist agendas in the post-colonial world
that ‘repeat ... colonialism’s own strategy. ..
to regionalize, split up, divide and rule’
(Young, 2001, p. 18). Conceptual and ethical
tensions also arise when critical affiliation with
the colonized (and other so-called ‘injured
identities’) is derived from a critical stance that
Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 97 31.3.2009 9:45pmCOLONIALISM