Cultural Geography

different sorts of difficult theory’. One wonders,

too, about the extent to which geographical work

on the imperial/colonial past helps postcolonial

subjects to come to terms with ‘the gaps and

fissures in their condition’. Studies of geography’s

empire surely decentre geographical thought, may

satiate a poststructuralist thirst for multiplicity and

dispersal, and may even be ameliorative for geo-

graphy and therapeutic for geographers. But in

what ways are they postcolonial?

Significantly, geographers’ attempts to impute

a critical distance between ‘then’ and ‘now’

work by a different historicist light than the one

that guides postcolonial work in countries such

as India. In India especially, Partha Chatterjee

argues, where people are daily reminded of their

subjection, ‘it is precisely the present from which

we feel we must escape,’ and ‘our desire to be

independent and creative is transposed on to our

past’ (1997: 281). In European post-Enlightenment

thought, by contrast, the present is conceived of

as the site of one’s escape from the past. ‘This

makes the very modality of our [Indian] coping

with modernity radically different from the his-

torically evolved modes of Western modernity.’

As he implies, postcolonial work that is rooted in

the experience of subjection is likely to be dif-

ferent from that which stems from a sense of

guilt, or historic injustice, or what have you. We

should not think of the former type of postcolo-

nial work as more truly postcolonial than the lat-

ter. Rather, my point is that we cannot talk about

imperial/colonial history without thinking about

the locations (academic, intellectual, cultural,

geographical) from which we historicize our

investment in the past and anthropologize our

investment in the other.

Other voices and native geographies

Let us now turn to a particular knot of questions

within this critical fabric – questions of other-

ness. There has been a flurry of work by geog-

raphers on processes of othering, but little of it

delves very deeply into the critic’s relationship

with the other (see Staum, 2000). Colonial dis-

course analysis in geography, like that in other

disciplines, often works at a great distance from

its objects of discourse – its others. It is difficult

to get at ‘the native’ side of the story from thor-

oughly lopsided archives that do not render

knowledge about ‘them’ on ‘their’ terms. But

geographers exacerbate such problems by

focusing exclusively on the white/western

historical record. Geographical studies that

conceptualize colonial encounters as negoti-

ated, situated, intersubjective, contested or

anxiety-ridden often work much better in theory

than in practice.

For example, in an essay on ‘British women

travellers and constructions of racial difference

across the nineteenth-century American West’,

Karen Morin (1998) links the travellers’ meet-

ings with and representations of Native

Americans to gendered colonial discourses, and

tries to ‘decentre’ such discourses by thinking

through ‘the social relations inherent in the mul-

tiple contact zones [in this case, mainly railroad

stations] within which the encounters took

place’. Like many other similar studies, the

analysis of texts and representations is conceptu-

ally sophisticated but the idea that colonial dis-

courses respondto the stresses and strains of the

contact zone – Thomas’ point – gets abstracted

away because the other is viewed solely through

the filters of a white/western record.

The aim here is not to single out Morin’s essay

for criticism, but to suggest that it points to a

widespread interpretive problem in the

geographical literature (and postcolonialism

more generally): that otherness is dealt with

through the determining pressure of western dis-

courses. The colonial world is deconstructed

according to the word of the west. Some geogra-

phers confront this problem by recoiling from the

analysis of native agency (by not trying to speak

for the other) and sticking to the task of showing

how dominant knowledges were put together.

But such pared-down lines of enquiry can come

at a price. They can romanticize the other, or

make erroneous assumptions about how natives

responded to newcomers. Without any ‘native’

testimony to go on, they can make imperialism

and colonialism look too austere (and thus exag-

gerate the power of the west) or too anxiety-

ridden (and thus overinflate the agency of the

critic who chooses to see this trait in the colonial

record, or chooses to equate knowledge and

power). Much work that passes as postcolonial

within geography hinges on the trials and tribu-

lations of colonizers in other spaces rather than

on the intersubjective contours of the contact

zone in question.

Brenda Yeoh (2000) points out that work on

the historical geography of colonialism over-

shadows the difficult but crucial task of uncover-

ing ‘the historical geographies of the colonised

world’. As difficult and time-consuming as it

may be (not what academics under pressure to

publish quickly want to hear), she argues, it is

vital that geographers complement their decon-

structive work on (and in) ‘the centre’ with

research on (and at) the margins of empire and

the agencies of the colonized. Yeoh does this in

her work on colonial Singapore, and there are

364 AFTER EMPIRE

3029-ch18.qxd 03-10-02 10:57 AM Page 364