Cultural Geography

CRITICAL IMPERIAL AND COLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES 355

ways in which geographers’ critical endeavours

can be called postcolonial. The first section

places the geographical literature in an encom-

passing intellectual setting and sketches geo-

graphers’ mixed reaction to the advent of

postcolonialism in the western academy. The

second section outlines the diverse ways in which

we can construe the links between geography and

empire; and the third section raises some

questions about geographers’ critical aims.

GEOGRAPHY AND

POSTCOLONIALISM

Geographers have a long-standing critical inter-

est in imperialism and colonialism, but the post-

1980s literature considered here is characterized

by a number of new trends. Much of it has

emerged in critical dialogue with postcolonial-

ism, which has become a trendy (if troublesome)

buzzword for a range of critical practices that

grapple with what it means to work ‘after’,

‘beyond’ and ‘in the knowledge of’ colonialism

(see Gregory, 2000a). Much of it displays an

anti-essentialist concern with the social construc-

tion of knowledge and identity, and the machina-

tions of knowledge and power. And much of it

treats geography as an eclectic, shifting and con-

tested body of concepts, knowledges and prac-

tices rather than as an autonomous discursive

field or tightly defined discipline. The bulk of the

chapter surveys these changing ideas about

geography. But we cannot fully understand how

and why geographers are turning to the imper-

ial/colonial past unless we first place their work

in a wider postcolonial intellectual context. It is

important to so situate geographers’ work for

numerous reasons, but let me make two sets of

observations that are pertinent to the discussion

that follows.

The power of postcolonialism

First, it has become commonplace to observe that

the postcolonial world has placed new demands

upon western theory and scholarship. There are

demands to listen to the other, to appreciate

claims to difference, to incorporate minor

histories into mainstream history, and to come to

terms with the cultural politics of academic

knowledge. Western academics have become

more attuned to the Eurocentric assumptions

embedded in their disciplinary visions, more

sensitive to issues of otherness and cultural

diversity, and more alert to the idea that the

universals enshrined in European (and especially

post-Enlightenment) thought are at once indis-

pensable and inadequate tools of critique. It ‘is

now unacceptable to write geography in such a

way that the West is always at the centre of its

imperial Geography,’ Trevor Barnes and Derek

Gregory (1997: 14) declare in a recent geography

textbook, and scholars from other disciplines are

spouting similar messages. ‘For scholars and

teachers of my generation who were educated in

what was an essentially Eurocentric mode,’ the

influential Palestinian-American literary critic

Edward Said has written, ‘the landscape and

topography of literary study have ... been altered

dramatically and irreversibly ... [S]cholars of the

new generation are much more attuned to the

non-European, genderized, decolonized, and

decentred energies and currents of our time’

(2001: 65).

Among other things, this new – postcolonial –

generation has pressed home the idea that the

configuration of Europe as the self-contained

fount of modernity and sovereign subject/centre

of world history is a powerful fiction that

obscures the reciprocal constitution of Europe

and its others. Postcolonial critics return to the

past to reveal that identities, cultures, nations and

histories have long been hybrid and intertwined,

and never self-sufficient or mutually exclusive,

with a select group of cultures being innately

superior over others. In this sense, postcolonialism

works as a critical perspective on the west

which shows that ‘colonisation was never

simply external to the societies of the imperial

metropolis ... [but] was always deeply inscribed

within them’ (Hall, 1996: 246). Europe ‘was

constructed from outsidein as much as inside

out’ through processes of ‘transculturation’,

Mary Louise Pratt remarks, beginning with

the metropole’s ‘obsessive need to re-present

its peripheries and other continually to itself’

(1992: 4–7).

But postcolonialism does not simply amount

to a ‘writing back’ to the west, or to a politics of

recognition, that debunks Eurocentric knowledge

and the denial of cultural and cognitive equality

that lay at the heart of the west’s spirit of domi-

nation. Postcolonial criticism is also driven by

the recognition that the freedom to take control

of the means of self-representation that indepen-

dence presented to colonized peoples did not

create some instantaneous freedom from the

burdens of colonial history. Leela Gandhi

describes postcoloniality as ‘a condition troubled

by the consequences of a self-willed historical

amnesia’ – by a desire to forget the past and the

west – and suggests that ‘the theoretical value of

postcolonialism inheres, in part, in its ability to

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