Cultural Geography

almost all nongeographers – continue to treat it,

not only as a fully-fledged continent, but as the

archetypal continent’ (1997: 36).

The boundaries and meaning of Europe were

first asserted within colonial contexts or within

those societies that saw themselves as peripheral

to the ethnic centre of an emerging white,

European identity. Exemplifying both forces, the

eighteenth-century Russian geographer Vasilii

Tatishchev’s designation, in the 1730s, of the

Urals and the Caucasus as, respectively, the east-

ern and southern termini of Europe is of interest,

not merely because of its survival to the present

day, but because it reflects the emergence of an

almost paranoid desire amongst the Russian elite

to establish Europe and Asia as highly meaning-

ful and utterly separate entities. Amongst the

Russian aristocracy of the eighteenth century, the

notion was established that a discrete, identifi-

able culture of economic and technological

advance and rationality existed to ‘the west’ and

that, through ‘westernization’, the underdevel-

oped European qualities of Russia itself could be

brought into view and any Asiatic trace could be

erased or marginalized. Although, by 1917, this

view was also common amongst Marxist revolu-

tionaries, it was first established as part of elite

Russians’ attempts to cast themselves within a

normative image of European culture and colo-

nialism. As this suggests, in attempting to estab-

lish Russia as European, the westernizers were

also fixing the majority of the country as periph-

eral, uncivilized and Asian. Emphasizing the

colonial dynamic contained in this formula,

Becker points out that what came to be seen as

the proximity of Asia to Russia was understood,

not as a threat to Russia’s European identity but rather

as an opportunity to prove that identity. In bringing to

her Oriental subjects the fruits of Western civilisation,

Russia would be demonstrating her membership in the

exclusive club of European nations. (1991: 50)

As these explanations imply, the uniting of the

historical and the geographical imagination

appears to be a necessary characteristic of serious

study of ‘taken for granted’ ethno-geographical

terms. In the late 1970s, Orientalism(1979) by

Edward Said quickly emerged as the classic text

of this kind of endeavour. Said’s historical

unpacking of the way the orient was invented

within the west has proved an inspiration for

geographers seeking to take their discipline in a

more reflexive direction (Gregory, 2000). In one

sense, though, Said provided a conventional depar-

turepoint for explorations of identity, his focus

being firmly on the way an exoticized and demo-

nized other was excluded by an all-powerful

western master narrative. By contrast, the recent

emergence of a literature on occidentalism

(Carrier, 1995; Chen, 1995; Venn, 2000; see also

Gogwilt, 1995; Lewis and Wigen, 1997) is indica-

tive of a desire to situate and examine the west

and westernization not as unstoppable, as an ‘all-

conquering’ social and economic fait accompli,

but as contingent and partial creations. Indeed the

term ‘occidentalism’ was introduced into current

debate by those who saw it as a counter-discourse

of resistance again the west, a reverse objectifica-

tion (see Hanafi, 1992; also Tonnesson, 1994).

The relationship between European hegemony

and the demarcation of the world and its peoples

has also provided a starting point for the explo-

ration of other familiar categories. In The Inven-

tion of Africa(Mudimbe, 1988) and Inventing

Eastern Europe(Wolff, 1994) it is shown how

Africa and eastern Europe first emerged as west

European designations, and how they played a

crucial role in the designation of vast and diverse

populations as having stereotypical, racial attrib-

utes. However, these works are also alert to the

way this process has been taken up, adopted and

adapted by different groups around the world.

Africa has long since ceased to be a European

idea, a fact seen particularly clearly within the

rise of pan-Africanism and Afrocentrism. The

intercultural nature of the contemporary use of

ethno-geographical labels provides a corrective

focus to the tendency to overemphasize European

agency. Two studies that have been particularly

influential in detailing the interaction of European

and non-European classificatory systems are

Pratt’s Imperial Eyes(1992) (which concerns the

‘transcultural’ development of images and ideas

of the Americas) and Thomas’ Entangled Objects

(1991) (a study of the way the symbolism of

everyday artefacts from the Pacific was subject to

interpretation and reinterpretation, back and forth,

between the colonized and colonial powers). Yet,

as Pratt stresses, an appreciation of transcultural-

ism should not be used as a way of bypassing the

fact of European dominance. The outcome and

meaning of hybridity reflect the power relations

of colonialism and neocolonialism. This also sug-

gests that, however transcultural their present-day

usage, ideas such as ‘African’, ‘Asian’, ‘European’

and so on are not easily extricated from the racial

logic which first enabled their modern dissemina-

tion and acceptance.

REPRESENTATIONS OF

RACE AND PLACE

For the past 40 years geographical discussions of

race have tended to be focused on questions of

302 PLACING SUBJECTIVITIES

3029-ch15.qxd 03-10-02 10:54 AM Page 302