requires reshaping the structure of the academy
itself: who is employed, who gets to speak, in
what languages one speaks (both literal and
theoretical) and, of course, who cares to listen.
As my account of the postcolonial museum
display I opened with sought to demonstrate,
even when we comport ourselves differently
around the object of ‘culture’, we cannot be
sure if the effects of the geographies we pro-
duce will be as postcolonial as we might wish.NOTESI would like to thank Stephen Cairns, Dan Clayton, Tony
King, Brenda Yeoh and the editors for their feedback on
earlier versions of this editorial.
1 Word restraints prohibit me from citing extensively
relevant examples of every style of geography that
I touch upon in this introduction. Further detail is
usually provided by the chapters to follow. In the
main I reference one indicative case that can provide
a trail scholars can follow.
2 For a specific geographical discussion of this see the
special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space, 1992.
3 Most radically and controversially we might think of
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) suggestion
that the logics of globalization have a scope and
intensity (an unboundedness) that have produced
empire effects in excess of anything that the process
of imperialism might have delivered.
4 A useful discussion of this is in the introduction to
Bell et al. (1995).
5 For a comprehensive analysis of the relationship
between postcolonial theory and feminism see Cheryl
McEwan’s chapter in this collection (Chapter 21).
6 Speaking about contemporary South Africa, Crush
(1994: 346–7) further opens out the problematic of
how ‘subaltern’ voices might be brought into histori-
cal and geographical narratives. See also Crush (1986;
1992), and Simon (1998).
7 Challenging the ‘centrisms’ of the discipline has been
a persistent concern in recent years. See, as exam-
ples, Blaut (1993), Katz (1995), McEwan (1998),
Mitchell (1998) and Sparke (1994).
8 An exemplary body of self-consciously decolonizing
geographical work is the considerable scholarship that
has emerged in response to the racist spatial logic of
settlement in Southern Africa (e.g. Crush et al., 1982).
9 Just as, say, GIS and other mapping techniques can
offer useful technologies of translation and legitima-
tion for postcolonial land claims.
10 My own work in this area has taken a psychoanalytic
approach to analyzing these aspects of colonialism’s
aftermath (see also Gelder and Jacobs, 1998; Gooder
and Jacobs, 2000; Jacobs, 1997).REFERENCESAnderson, K. (2000) ‘Thinking “postnationally”: dialogue
across multicultural, indigenous and settler spaces’,Annals
of the Association of American Geographers90 (2): 381–91.
Appadurai,A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions
of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Appadurai, A. (2000) ‘Grassroots globalization and the
research imagination’,Public Culture12 (1): 1–20.
Baker, R. (1999) Land Is Life: From Bush to Town – The Story
of the Yanyuwa People. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Barnett, C. (1997) ‘ “Sing along with the common people”:
politics, postcolonialism and other figures’,Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space15: 137–54.
Barnett, C. (1998) ‘Cultural twists and turns’,Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space16: 631–4.
Battaglia, D. (1995) ‘On practical nostalgia: self-prospecting
among urban Trobrianders’, in D. Battaglia (ed.) Rhetorics
of Self-Making. Berkeley: University of California Press.
pp. 77–96.
Bell, M., Butlin, R. and Heffernan, M. (eds) (1995) Geography
and Imperialism, 1820–1940. Manchester: University of
Manchester Press.
Blaut, J.M. (1992) ‘The theory of cultural racism’,Antipode
24 (4): 289–99.
Blaut, J.M. (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of the World:
Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History.
New York: Guilford.
Blunt, A. (1994) Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary
Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford.
Blunt, A. and Rose, G. (eds) (1994) Writing Women and
Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York:
Guilford.
Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Crang, P. (1992) ‘The politics of polyphony: reconfigura-
tions in geographical authority’,Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space10: 527–49.
Crush, J. (1986) ‘Towards a people’s historical geography
for South Africa’,Journal of Historical Geography12: 2–3.
Crush, J. (1992) ‘Beyond the frontier: the new South
African historical geography’, in C. Rogerson and
J. McCarthy (eds) Geography in a Changing South Africa.
Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Crush, J. (1994) ‘Post-colonialism, de-colonization, and
geography’, in A. Godlewska and N. Smith (eds)
Geography and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 333–50.
Crush, J., Reitsma, H. and Rogerson, C. (1982)
‘Decolonising the human geography of Southern Africa’,
Progress in Human Geography7: 203–31.
Driver, F. (1992) ‘Geography’s empire: histories of geo-
graphical knowledge’,Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space10: 23–40.
Driver, F. and Gilbert, D. (eds) (1999) Imperial Cities:
Landscape, Display and Identity. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.352 AFTER EMPIRESection-6.qxd 03-10-02 10:41 AM Page 352