Cultural Geography

often simply term ‘the postcolonial critique’

is bolstering the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in human

geography, reaffirming the importance of historical

perspectives within the discipline, and bringing

many new objects of study into critical play (see

Graham and Nash, 2000). Said has a talismanic

status in all of this, and not just because of his

ideas about discourse, which now have a stan-

dard place in geography. His work has been

doubly important to geographers because of his

insistence that imperialism and colonialism

should be conceptualized geographically – as

constellations of power that are intrinsically con-

cerned with land, territory, displacement and dis-

possession (see Gregory, 1995). Much of Said’s

work is based on the idea of ‘imaginative

geography’ – ‘the invention and construction of a

geographical space called the Orient, for instance,

with scant attention paid to the actuality

of the geography of its inhabitants’ (Said, 2000:

181; see also Said, 1993). This elastic critical

motif now frames myriad geographical studies,

and geographers use it to spatialize (if not always

carefully historicize) the idea of colonial dis-

course ‘in a general sense’. But Said is not the

only postcolonial thinker with geographical

interests. Indeed, he has nurtured a spatial turn in

postcolonial studies, and geographers have

drawn on the work of scholars such as Paul

Carter and Timothy Mitchell who are keenly

interested in the spatiality of colonialism and

empire (see Gregory, 1994: 15–208).

On the other hand, there are complaints about

the type of work that postcolonialism is encour-

aging within and beyond geography. Much post-

colonial work, it is suggested, is thin on detail,

hung up on questions of discourse and the

agency of the colonizer, marred by textualism

and wanton generalization, too tightly based on

the colonial experience of particular parts of the

world (particularly India), and imbued with

forms of intellectual tourism that keep us within

the imperial trajectory of the west. The most

common complaints are that postcolonial critics

lose sight of the diversity and materiality of

colonialism and empire, and only partially real-

ize their commitment to the postcolonial subject

because they fixate on the projection of a western

will to power and tend to reduce colonialism to

matters of discourse. Geographical writing on

colonialism and empire generally retains a much

stronger concern with bodily experiences and

material practices, the physicality of movement

and interaction, and the creation of networks of

power than much postcolonial work that

emanates (especially) from literary and cultural

studies. It is partly for these reasons that geo-

graphers sometimes represent literary/cultural

postcolonialism as an alien body of ideas that

needs to be recontextualized wherever it is taken.

And it is important to note that geographers are

not simply drawing on postcolonial theory. They

have also engaged the new historiography of

western science (e.g. the work of Bruno Latour

and Stephen Shapin), feminist philosophies,

French poststructuralist theory, and scholarship

in the fields of imperial history and cultural

anthropology.

The critical imperial and colonial geographies

that we will now explore in more depth have

emerged in the midst of these developments and

debates. Postcolonialism can be described as a

powerful interdisciplinary mood in the social

sciences and humanities that is refocusing atten-

tion on the imperial/colonial past, and critically

revising understanding of the place of the west in

the world. Yet different disciplines have been

implicated in empire in different ways and do not

have identical postcolonial concerns.

GEOGRAPHY, COLONIALISM

AND EMPIRE

Geographical research on colonialism and empire

takes diverse forms, but it is possible to identify

two main orientations in the literature. We can

distinguish between research that concentrates

on what Felix Driver (1992) has dubbed

‘geography’s empire’ and that which explores

what Derek Gregory (2001a) calls ‘colonizing

geographies’. The former body of work has a

more or less exclusively metropolitan-disciplinary

focus, whereas the latter is more concerned with

the historical-geographical diversity of colonial-

ism and empire.

Geography’s empire

In the early 1990s, geographers started to ques-

tion self-contained and in-house narratives of the

history of geography, prise open the western

biases enshrined in geographical thought, and

explore geography’s historical imbroglio with

empire. When Driver’s paper ‘Geography’s

empire’ appeared in 1992, there was hardly any

critical reflection on the discipline’s historical

complicity in empire. ‘Some might regard...

[this] as a sign of the strong hold that the colonial

frame of mind has upon the subject,’ he wrote. ‘It

is as if the writings of our predecessors were so

saturated with colonial and imperial themes that

to problematise their role is to challenge the

status of the modern discipline. Yet this is

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