Cultural Geography

been more evident than in recent feminist

historical geographies.^5 These geographies have

brought into view the women whose lives

were entangled with the masculinist project of

the making of empires (see, as examples only,

Blunt, 1994; Blunt and Rose, 1994; McEwan,

1996; Morin, 1998). The travel diary and per-

sonal journal are the primary archive of this

scholarship because women of this time were

largely excluded from official and scientific

forms of knowledge production. The ‘map of

empire’ such feminist geographies produce

shows just how internally contradictory were

the cultures of imperialism. On the one hand,

women were accessories to the masculinist

project of empire building, often drawing on

vectors of racial difference in order to assume

a position of superiority denied them within

their own patriarchal social settings. On the

other hand, the very positioning of women as

peripheral to the privileged spheres of knowl-

edge and action associated with empire build-

ing often placed them into relations with the

colonized that unsettled those lines of differ-

ence and distinction (for example, Lester,

2002; Morin and Berg, 2001).

The overall legacy of these historical

geographies for the project of decolonizing

the discipline is somewhat unclear. One of the

key collective contributions of the now exten-

sive body of critical historical geographies of

empire has been to point to the complexities

of colonialism as a lived event: the ambiguities

of colonial authority, the porosity of the

boundaries between colonizer and colonized,

and the diversity of views about difference and

superiority. This kind of historical revisionism

can have decolonizing effects, but, much as in

the case of the self-reflexive museum display

with which I opened this editorial introduc-

tion, it is essential to know what the political

register of that effect might be. Is such scholar-

ship offering a radical decolonization of the

discipline or simply a therapeutic moment that

makes contemporary geography feel better

about itself? Does such critical revision decen-

tre authorization or refine the discipline’s pre-

existing ways of knowing? The chapters by

Dan Clayton and Anthony King to follow, both

tackle these challenging questions.

In thinking through such questions one might

note the introversion of such geographies and

how they invariably turn our attention back to

European knowledge fields, and to those figures

who translated these into ways of colonizing.

They recentre Europe in the name of decen-

tring that place and that idea. In doing so, they

enact a disciplinary specific version of the epis-

temic violence so famously diagnosed by

Spivak in her essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’

(1988). Spivak’s question brings into our sights

one of the key limits of many critical historical

geographies of imperialism: their failure to

adequately account for what was happening

on the other side of the frontier and thereby

bridge the intersubjective space that is ‘con-

tact’. Dan Clayton’s chapter to follow reflects,

in part, on his own valiant attempts to hear the

‘native voice’ through the incomplete and par-

tial perspectives of the imperial archive that

frames it.^6

Despite any shortcomings we might detect

in the now extensive scholarship on the his-

torical geography of imperialism, one question

remains viable: would it be possible for mod-

ern geography to effectively decolonize its

practices without this kind of critical revision-

ist scholarship? Such reformulations are a part

of a necessary space clearing gesture. As Smith

and Godlewska argued, ‘only through a full

acknowledgement of [geography’s] past can

we begin to understand the role of geogra-

phers in the maintenance of a certain privi-

leged order of things’ (1994: 8). More

optimistically, I would add, it is only through

such looking back that the discipline might

look forward to imagine alternative (postcolo-

nial) geographies. As Clayton’s chapter to fol-

low argues, whatever shape these alternative

geographies might take, they cannot be wholly

outside the histories (and historicist struc-

tures and representational modes) of the geo-

graphies that preceded them. This does not

mean that geographical knowledges cannot be

renewed ‘from and for the margins’ in a pro-

ject that Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 16)

describes as ‘provincializing’.This is the task to

which geography must now attend.^7

POSTCOLONIAL CULTURAL

GEOGRAPHIES?

Many geographers have, for some time, oper-

ated in an ethical and political framework with

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