charge, because he sees his work as an attempt to
elucidate ‘the intellectual sources of racism’, but
this spat over the politics of postcolonial repre-
sentation opens up a number of important issues.
Jane Jacobs rehearses the widely held concern
that ‘despite its postcolonial leanings’, revision-
ist work on the imperial/colonial past
‘re-inscribes the authority of the events, net-
works and people that it seeks to decentre and
revise’ (2001: 730). It does so in a number of
ways, but Nicholas Thomas argues that work on
colonial discourses and representations is espe-
cially problematical because it frequently privi-
leges the power of inscription over material
practices and portrays western concepts and
visions as ‘impervious to active marking or
reformulation by the “Other”’ (1993: 3, 105).
This leads us to a related concern: that much
postcolonial work within (and beyond) geography
that seeks to identify with the subject positions
of the colonized remains stuck in a Eurocentric
mould. Mary Louise Pratt has criticized recent
work on travel writing for its fixation with
European experience. The experience of travel,
she complains, is ‘examined from within the
self-privileging imaginary that framed the travels
and travel books in the first place’(2001: 280).
European sensibilities remain of intrinsic inter-
est, and while ideas of cultural negotiation are
explored in methodological terms, they are rarely
pursued in great substantive depth. Scholars
working in this area are teaching us a great deal
about how Europeans ‘staged’ foreign places
for inspection and imperial consumption, how
identities were renegotiated as Europeans
travelled from here to there and remade distinc-
tions between ‘home’ and ‘away’, and about the
stresses involved. But this literature tells us far
less about the non-European peoples and places
that supposedly infiltrated and splintered a
sovereign European self and imperial subject.
We learn a great deal about how Europeans envi-
sioned the other and the faraway, but much less
about how the staging of place worked in nego-
tiation with other places and peoples themselves.
This fixation – if it is that – is not misguided
in itself. It only becomes a bone of critical con-
tention when scholars working in this way claim
that they are also bringing the perspectives and
impress of the colonized more clearly into view.
Postcolonial critics have responded to – or at
least defused – these kinds of charges by claim-
ing that their ‘critical apparatus does not enjoy a
panoptic distance from colonial history but exists
as an aftermath, as an after – after being worked
over by colonialism. Criticism formed as an
aftermath acknowledges that it inhabits the
structures of Western domination that it seeks toundo’ (Prakash, 1994: 1475). Eurocentric habits
and categories of thought are very much part of
this aftermath, Prakash argues, and we need to
question ‘the comfortable make-believe’ that
there exists a critical position outside the histori-
cal configurations of colonialism from which a
postcolonial future (or decolonized discipline)
will emerge. We will not find a true or authentic
‘native’ perspective that is uncontaminated by
the experience of colonization, or a timeless or
unitary European worldview that can be decon-
structed. Prakash (1996) insists that we critique
colonialism in media res– from inside a story
that has not ended – and Bill Ashcroft notes that
‘the most intransigent problem to face post-
colonial states today is (still) the challenge of
reconstructing inherited institutions and prac-
tices in a way that adheres to the demands of
local knowledges, makes use of the benefits of
local practices, and maintains an integrity of self-
representation’ (2000: 23).
Gregory (1998) also makes this sort of point,
suggesting that we can easily fall into the
assumption that the geographical knowledges
and practices we are placing under the critical
spotlight belong to the past. Historical work on
the geographies of colonialism and empire, how-
ever piously or unwittingly Eurocentric it may
be, has been effective in revealing that demean-
ing and domineering representations of the other
are still alive in western cultural and geographi-
cal imaginations, and that ‘the fatal attractions of
colonial nostalgia [for “timeless scenes” of, and
windows on to, “ancient” worlds like Egypt] are
inscribed in contemporary forms of travel’
(Gregory, 2001c: 113). Similar claims have been
made about the political economy of colonial
nostalgia (the imbrications of wealth, stability
and empire). And among other (appalling)
things, the recent tragic events in America high-
light the enduring power of imaginative geo-
graphies, imbued with imperial symbolism, that
glide over and crash into the complexities of
cultural difference.
Such ideas sharpen the political edge of ‘criti-
cal’ work on empire that is written from the
metropolitan-theoretical heartlands of the disci-
pline, and geographers like Gregory rightly see
their work as a critique of the present. But ques-
tions remain about geographers’ critical aims.
Clive Barnett, for instance, thinks that ‘the value
of history in the relativized historiography of
geography remains largely unproblematized’
(1995: 414). And he suggests that work on the
imperial/colonial past has become popular
not because it necessarily has a bearing on
geography’s present but because it is ‘a conve-
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