account for the people and places whose lives
are depicted as being overrun by global forces.
As an alternative,Appadurai proposes ‘process
geography’ that will ‘name and analyze ...
mobile civil forms’ and chart ‘various kinds of
action, interaction and motion’ (2000: 7).
Yeoh’s chapter shows that nations that are
cross-hatched by transnational flows of
people can use that movement as something
against which the security (and boundedness)
of the nation is imagined, sometimes joyously
through the frame of multiculturalism,
and sometimes anxiously through the frame
of xenophobia. For Yeoh such diasporic and
hybrid spaces are genuinely agonistic, throwing
up perplexing new forms of racism and new
levels of self-reflexivity.^10 As Kay Anderson
(2000) suggests, the challenge facing contem-
porary geography is to give analytical contours
to these kinds of transnational processes and
the social spaces they produce. In searching for
the tools by which to conduct such a geogra-
phy it is crucial that our scholarship does not
simply take for granted the concept of culture
being activated. As this editorial has tried to
show, the way we conceptualize culture is not
given and, in fact, the question of how it is con-
ceptualized is central to the postcolonial
potentials of our scholarship.
Let me finish by offering a few thoughts on
the politics of doing cultural geographies ‘after
empire’. It would limit the prospect for a rad-
ical shift in the politics of the discipline’s
knowledge field if revision were confined to
the matter of what topics were researched.
Decolonizing the discipline relates also to
modes of research and representation. I am
not simply suggesting that an attention to ‘dis-
course’ be replaced with more material geo-
graphies – that the imperial archive be
forsaken for postcolonial ethnography (see
Hansen and Stepputat, 2001). Ethnographies of
postcolonial formations can suffer from their
own omissions and elisions. Nowhere is this
more evident than in thinking through the
identity categories and processes that come
to be associated with something called ‘resis-
tance’. For example, David Slater (1998) has
argued in relation to indigenous struggles
against internal colonialisms in Central and
South America that the idea of the ‘indige-
nous’ is often deployed in a way that masks
the heterogeneity within such a category. Thisis a version of what Sherry Ortner would
describe as ‘dissolving the subject ... into a set
of “subject effects” ’ (1995: 183). Ortner offers
a most relevant consideration of how to
research and represent resistance. She argues
that there has been a romantic impulse to
‘sanitize the internal politics of the dominated’
and labels this a form of ‘ethnographic refusal’
(1995: 179). She concludes that glossing over
the prior and ongoing politics among subal-
terns leads to an impoverished understanding
of resistance itself. One might add to this
observation another specification that returns
us to the problematic of ‘culture’ itself. When
resistance is understood as operating in the
logic of ‘culture’, what precisely does that
mean? As Barnett (1998) so provocatively
asks: what concept of ‘culture’ is being acti-
vated in geographies that claim to chart the
‘cultural politics’ of resistance?
When thinking about how cultural geogra-
phy might conduct itself postcolonially, we
need to be mindful of ourselves as ‘situated
actors engaged in the political work of repre-
sentation and the production of knowledge’
(Katz, 1992: 496). In this regard a thoroughly
decolonized geographical praxis may have as
much to do with our forms of representation
as it does the postcolonialness of our
theories. Crang (1992), for example, suggested
that geographers construct more ‘polyphonic’
geographies as a way of reconfiguring acade-
mic authority in relation to ‘research subjects’
(see, as an example, Huggins et al., 1995).
Katz’s own reflections on her field experience
in Sudan reveal that neither theory nor writ-
ing strategy alone can structure a fully decol-
onized research process. As Katz notes, she
was, after all, ‘the one defining the terrain of
the questions and looking for illumination in
the practices of others’ (1992: 502).There are
some signs for optimism, and here I think of
the action research of Richard Howitt (1998;
Howitt and Jackson, 1998) in which the
research questions are determined collabora-
tively with the indigenous communities with
which he works. But there are also good
reasons to remain sceptical about the capacity of
the discipline to fully move on from the frame-
works of knowledge and power bequeathed
by the idea of empire. For example,Tony King’s
chapter to follow provides a sobering
reminder that decolonizing a disciplinary fieldINTRODUCTION 351Section-6.qxd 03-10-02 10:41 AM Page 351