that first draw the visitor into the visual orbit
of this story? For all of its critical cleverness,
this display tells us little of those spears as
indigenous possessions. Of course, armed
with postcolonial theory we might argue that
there is no such thing as a discrete ‘Aboriginal
object’ anymore, and so no need (or way) to
place such objects neatly back into an indige-
nous frame. We might, for example, approve
of the way in which this exhibit so usefully dis-
plays the unruly afterlife of ethnographic
things taken up into global circuits of collect-
ing and consumption (Appadurai, 1996;
Thomas, 1994). Yet, for those invested in a
postcolonial politics which tries to give ‘voice’
back to the colonized, the incorporation of
these objects into the story of the born-again
museum may feel an only too familiar ‘silenc-
ing’. And if the message of this exhibit is not
ambiguous enough, then we need only begin
to ask, as Clive Barnett (1997: 139–40) usefully
does, what ‘silence’ might exactly mean in such
a context. Is the ‘silence’ that is registered
around the indigenous life of these objects the
result of the noise an imperial institution
makes when it is being self-reflexive? Or is it a
strategic silence resulting from an indigenous
choice to stop satisfying non-indigenous
romances about traditional Aboriginal life? Are
these objects mute, or are they animated by a
new language of resistance? Is this a postcolo-
nial museum, or is it an imperial institution
whose powers have been enhanced by certain
postcolonial practices?
A decade ago Cindi Katz (1992) opened her
essay on postcolonialism, new anthropology
and geography with a reading of the politics of
a museum/art display. In a similar move, I wish
to use this example of a postcolonial museum
display to bring into sharp relief a range of
issues associated with the after-effects of the
postcolonial turn upon the discipline of geog-
raphy – and specifically cultural geography. In
the first instance, we might ask how imperial
institutions (like the museum) and knowledge
frames (like geography) decolonize them-
selves. What do the kinds of critical historical
frameworks embodied by this postcolonial
museum display reveal about imperial pasts
and what do they continue to conceal? How
necessary is something called ‘postcolonial
theory’ to such a process? Who is in charge of
such rearrangements of knowledge andpower, and specifically, whose political, ethical
and moral objectives are being served by
these critical approaches? Is it possible to
break structures of ‘othering’ that so charac-
terize the cultural logic of imperialisms of all
kinds? And is this something those ‘others’,
whose postcolonial futures may now depend
on claiming ‘cultural’ difference, actually want?POSTCOLONIALISM AND
GEOGRAPHYFor a discipline like geography, whose past has
been so closely linked to empires of old, how
it might move towards geographies that have
alternative assemblages of power and space
remains vexed. The chapters to follow chart
the varied ways in which geographers, and
others whose interests intersect with the
explicitly spatial concerns of the discipline,
have attempted such a task.They also indicate
some of the difficulties of this kind of process
for a disciplinary field (and an academy) that is
overdetermined by its practical and institu-
tional histories, its language hegemonies, and
its cultures of knowing and reportage. In what
follows readers will find generous intellectual
pathways through this scholarship. They will
also find useful measures of enthusiasm and
skepticism about the intellectual field of post-
colonial theory that has become so central to
the project of decolonizing the discipline.
It will be clear from the chapters to follow
that the term ‘postcolonialism’ refers to much
more than formal (political) processes of
decolonization. As Brenda Yeoh’s contribution
shows, postcolonial states remain complexly
entangled in their colonial pasts, just as they
may be negotiating forms of neo-imperialism,
or launching themselves into new trans-
national possibilities.The persistence of various
kinds of colonialism led Anne McClintock
(1992: 87) to issue the salutary warning that
the term ‘postcolonial’ was ‘prematurely cele-
bratory’. Imperialism is not something that
belongs back then, nor is it confined to specific
sovereign configurations; nor, for that matter,
is it something that necessarily even produces
a geopolitical unit called ‘empire’.^3 James Sidaway
has noted that current geographies exhibit
‘an array of postcolonialisms’ (2000: 592).346 AFTER EMPIRESection-6.qxd 03-10-02 10:41 AM Page 346