[Indian] empire as a single territorial and political
entity’. And Burnett (2000: 38–52) has looked at
the power of cartographic metalepsis– how
explorers, surveyors and mappers both invoked
and remapped the authoritative (and often
mythic) texts of their predecessors in order to
advance territorial claims, bound colonial space,
and secure their own reputations. Yet these and
other scholars are also concerned with how we
might interrupt and subvert the spatial certainty
of the map. We might recover moments of
ambivalence in the cartographic record, probe
the local knowledges that western travellers used
and erased, and delve into the fraught physical
and cross-cultural circumstances in which carto-
graphic knowledges were made (e.g. Bravo,
1999; Clayton, 2000b). There is also a plethora
of work on alternative – aboriginal and post-
colonial – mappings that are based on different
cultural and epistemological premises than the
‘abstract projective, co-ordinate geometries’ of
western cartography (Lewis and Woodward,
1997: 537).
Third ‘colonizing geographies’ are amenable
to critical examination from a variety of politico-
intellectual positions. Feminism is one such posi-
tion, and one that is leaving a deep mark on
geographers’ engagement with identity and dif-
ference. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (1994:
14) have stressed the need to question ‘imperial
cartography’, entertain more fluid conceptions of
subject formation, and explore ‘paradoxical
spaces’ that resist the ‘transparent’ and ‘homo-
geneous’ space mapped by masculine forms of
knowing. They treat ‘imperial cartography’ as a
concept metaphor for all of those strategies
(including cartography proper, of course) that
inscribe gender differences as spatial differences
by constructing some spaces as essentially femi-
nine and others as definitively masculine.
Some of this feminist-geographical literature
has an acutely disciplinary orientation, but much
of it examines the broader gendered spatial
boundaries that were authored and authorized by
colonialism, and their articulation with construc-
tions of race and class. Sara Mills (1999) and
Judith Kenny (1995) have discussed the ways in
which British and Indian men and women nego-
tiated the ‘confined spaces’ of colonial India (its
hill stations and cantonments), and wonder about
the adequacy of confinement (or exclusion and
transgression) as ways of organizing understand-
ings of femininity and masculinity in colonial
contexts. Alison Blunt (1994; 2000) and Cheryl
McEwan (2000) have explored how the subject
and viewing positions of white women travellers
changed as they moved between ‘home’ and
‘away’ and presented themselves as women,scientists, explorers, writers and agents of empire
before ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ audiences. And
James Duncan (2000) has started to unpack
the construction of colonial masculinity in
natural environments that were radically different
than the ones from which colonizers hailed. He
shows how, in the coffee plantations of the
Kandyan Highlands of Ceylon, moral discourses
on tropical climate and nature were connected to
a second discourse of ‘moral masculinity’ that
was inflected by the narrative conventions of the
masculine adventure novel. Planters represented
the tropical highlands as a physical and psychical
adversary that tested their manliness and moral
fibre, and against which their stories of heroic
(and sometimes ignominious) struggle, and fear
of losing their masculinity, gained textual
momentum.
Fourth, geographers are concerned with how
we might devise an alternative postcolonial
geography that is not just concerned with disci-
plinary issues but is more widely interested in
the nature of colonialism and decolonization in
different parts of the world. Work in this vein
emphasizes the contextually located nature of
colonialism and explores what Jane Jacobs
(1996) has called ‘the politics of the “edge”’ (the
subversive influence of the margin on centrist
practices of spatial demarcation, and the discor-
dant postcolonial politics of countries such as
Australia). Much of this literature treats colonial-
ism as an intersubjective (if unequal) relation-
ship between colonizing and colonized groups,
and stresses the need to distinguish between
Eurocentric and nation-centred imperial visions,
and the different logics of power enshrined in
settler and dependent colonial formations. Much
of it is also concerned with the ways that global
forces and local exigencies were articulated in
the making of particular historical geographies,
and how specific postcolonial predicaments
frame the questions that are asked about the colo-
nial past and the postcolonial theories that are
used (see Crush, 1994).
Regionally focused studies of colonialism’s
geographies eschew any essentialized vision of
either western power or native agency, and many
of them show that colonial discourses were
skewed and subverted by their material position-
ing in the colonies. Alan Lester (1998) has
shown how British discourses on southern Africa
were shaped by the competing visions of colo-
nial officials, humanitarians and settlers, and the
different kinds of spaces and conflicting
geographies they created – missions, stations,
farms, government spaces of control, and social
spaces of segregation. And one of the main
themes of my work on native–western contact inCRITICAL IMPERIAL AND COLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES 3613029-ch18.qxd 03-10-02 10:57 AM Page 361