Cultural Geography

elaborate forgotten memories of this condition’

(1998: 3–17). Crucially, ‘postcoloniality must be

made to concede its own part or complicity in the

terrors – and errors – of its own past.’ We should

not turn a blind eye to the seductions of modern-

ity and colonial power. We need to recover the

lines of mutual desire between self and other that

crossed the colonial world as well as those of

coercion and mutual antagonism, and we need to

evaluate the ongoing influence of European

habits and categories of thought. In this sense,

Gandhi suggests, postcolonialism can be seen as

an ‘ameliorative’ and ‘therapeutic’ project that

necessarilyreturns to the colonial past in order to

help postcolonial subjects deal with ‘the gaps

and fissures in their condition.’ It grapples with

the spectre of belatedness and incompleteness

that haunts decolonization and anti-colonial

struggles: the spectre of only arriving on the

scene of autonomy after the west, and of strug-

gling to be modern yet different. Postcolonial

energies are focused on the extent to which colon-

ialism had a binary (dichotomous, exclusionary

and systematic) or ambivalent (differentiated,

fretful and contradictory) cast. The critical eluci-

dation of colonialism as a conceptual totality

with some transhistorical traits and grossly

unequal effects is tempered by work that empha-

sizes colonialism’s diversity, hybridity and

susceptibility to deformation (see Loomba, 1998).

Lastly in this subsection, postcolonialism is

centrally concerned with the connections between

culture and power. Economic and political

factors and explanations for colonialism and

empire are not ignored so much as integrated into

new cultural interpretive frameworks that explore

the creation and circulation of meaning, and the

binaries of self/other, centre/periphery, moder-

nity/tradition, coloniser/colonized and so on, that

shaped (some would say overdetermined) metro-

politan-colonial relationships. ‘Colonialism was

made possible, and then sustained and strength-

ened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as

it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of

conquest,’ Nicholas Dirks (1996: xi) suggests

(also see Thomas, 1993). Culture and power are

often connected via the concept of discourse, and

a short digression into the work of Edward Said is

appropriate at this juncture, because it is seen as

pivotal to the development of postcolonialism as

an academic project that recovers the political

significance of culture.

As Robert Young usefully notes, it was Said’s

elaboration of ‘the idea of Orientalism as a dis-

course in a general sense that allowed the

creation of a general conceptual paradigm through

which the cultural forms of colonial and imperial

ideologies could be analysed,’ and colonialism

could be seen ‘as an ideological production across

different kinds of texts produced historically

from a wide range of different institutions,

disciplines and geographical areas’ (2001: 343).

Said argued that we cannot fully understand how

imperialism and colonialism work unless we

examine the discursive means by which the west

arrogated to itself the power to grant (and deny)

cultural respect to others and authorize what

counts as truth (and what does not). His path-

breaking book Orientalism(1978) shows how

western power was exercised through a particular

kind of language (discourse – a term that Said

borrowed from Foucault) that was replete with

cultural attitudes of superiority and dominance.

Said exposed the west’s propensity to demean

and dominate the other, and emphasized the

binary (essentialist, exclusionary and self-

consolidating) cast of colonial discourse. He

examined how the orient constructed and manip-

ulated in orientalist discourse served as Europe’s

‘surrogate and even underground self’ – as

a ‘distorting mirror’ in which Europe defined

itself and celebrated its superiority (1978: 27;

Washbrook, 1999: 598).

Orientalism ‘opened the floodgates of post-

colonial criticism,’ Gyan Prakash (1995: 201)

recounts, by challenging taken-for-granted oppo-

sitions between western knowledge and western

power, scholarly detachment and worldly

motives, and representation and reality. Said’s

treatment of colonialism as a discourse that pro-

duces, fixes and encodes knowledge in diverse

forms and locations inspired a new generation of

scholars to re-examine the knowledges and identi-

ties authorized by colonialism, and to explore how

western power hinged on discursive strategies of

cultural projection, incorporation, debasement and

erasure. In short, Said drew out the discursive (or

epistemic) violence of colonization.

The pitfalls of postcolonialism

But second, and as some of this implies, there is

no consensus about the appropriate aims and

scope of postcolonial studies. Postcolonialism

has become an intellectual battleground for com-

peting philosophies, and one that pitches the

politics of totality, solidarity and universalism

against those of location, belonging and rela-

tivism. ‘Eclectic,’ ‘fragmented’ and ‘agonistic’

are the words that perhaps best describe the field

of postcolonial studies, and postcolonial work in

geography is far from cohesive.

Geographers are embracing and developing

postcolonial perspectives with a mixture of

excitement and caution. On the one hand, what they

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