pockets of historical-geographical research that
deal with native agendas and try to listen to the
other. I have used archaeological and ethno-
graphic records as well as historical sources to
explore how the native – Nuu-chah-nulth – groups
of Vancouver Island incorporated British and
American fur traders into their own conflicts,
strategies of colonization and systems of the
world (Clayton, 2000a). In this contact zone (and
I suspect others), native peoples felt anything but
possessed or inferior to westerners during the
early years of contact. At the same time, the story
I tell of native tribal competition, conflict and ter-
ritorial change hardly squares with images of the
ecological Indian living in harmony with nature
and his/her neighbours, and in traditional territo-
ries from time immemorial, that have played an
important role in white-liberal sympathy for
native causes (a certain romanticism) and the
defence of native land claims in the law courts (a
certain strategic essentialism).
My experience raises more general concerns.
Critical human geographers may find other
voices and start to redress the biases and erasures
of colonialist historiography, but how far can
they go with them, especially if they hold the
view that all voices, identities and narratives are
constructions (fictions) of sorts? Do you apply
one set of deconstructionist techniques to the
white record, and some other set to the native
record? And if you apply the same set to both
records, are you not likely to diminish your abil-
ity to decolonize history? There are no simple
answers to such questions of theoretical probity.
Critical geographers run the risk of subordinat-
ing other voices to the secular codes and conven-
tions of western academic discourse (to rational
criteria over the use of evidence that underpin the
social sciences and humanities). Barnett notes
that many attempts to restore hitherto excluded
voices to our accounts still conform to a western
model of representation and criticism that ‘con-
struct[s] texts as having “voices” hidden within
them which await rearticulation through the
medium of the critic’ (1997: 145). This model
‘inscribe[s] colonial textuality within a quite
conventional economy of sense which ascribes
to voice and speech the values of expressivity,
self-presence, and consciousness, and under-
stands the absence of such signs as “silence”, as
an intolerable absence of voice, and therefore as
a mark of disempowerment’. And postcolonial
debates about historical discourse have taught us
that academic history runs a fine line between
rewriting history from ‘other’ perspectives and
longing for lost objects – for a radically hetero-
geneous world and/or coeval colonial ethno-
graphy (see Chakrabarty, 2000).Finally, as much of this discussion shows,
‘critical imperial and colonial geographies’ are
intellectual constructs that are implicated in the
construction of the objects that they apprehend.
Work that finds its critical feet by ‘displacing’,
‘interrupting’ and ‘subverting’ demeaning and
domineering knowledges is based on retrospec-
tive understandings of the relations between knowl-
edge, power and geography. Such work works,
in part, by the gravity of the imperial/colonial
geographies it creates and conjures with – by its
ability to jog us out of complacency, and expose
and criticize previously unseen and taken-
for- granted ideas (see Jacobs, 2000). Power and
dominance are rendered as the partly real and
partly imagined templates on which geographers
stencil their critical commitment to postcolonial-
ism. One of the basic problems with postcolonial
attempts to augment understandings of differ-
ence (as diversity, multiplicity, otherness) is that
they can also homogenize understandings of
sameness – or translate a history of the other into
the history of the same. Geographers write of
colonizinggeographies, normalizingdiscourses,
insidiousimaginaries in order to take them apart,
and to some degree depend on such standardized
images of what colonialism was all about to
make their critiques work. They depend on
powerful words that enable them to make
powerful critical gestures, and we need to think
about what is lost and gained as they pin colo-
nialism up as a totality (e.g. as a system of epis-
temic violence) or inherently contradictory and
compromised project of power.
In an essay on Said’s ideas about the role of
the intellectual, Bruce Robbins (1998) notes
that models of an inclusionary or democratic
oppositional criticism that challenges power in
its many guises depend on processes of ‘intel-
lectual rarefaction’. Critical intellectual author-
ity with regard to matters of exclusion and
marginality, and dominance and hegemony,
stems from ‘the presumed rarity or scarcity of
those willing to confront non-intellectual
authority’. It is the restrictivenessof this group
that gives it its ethico-political legitimacy,
Robbins argues, and ‘an ethical scarcity defined
by opposition will be indistinguishable from a
social scarcity that is a potential source of profit
and prestige’. The intellectual who faithfully
inverts the authority of power is dependent
on and prized by that power. In other words,
critical human geographers, like postcolonial
intellectuals, have a certain investment in
cultivating questions of difference and power,
and cultivating their own scarcity, if you
will, as well as challenging the legacies of
colonialism.CRITICAL IMPERIAL AND COLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES 3653029-ch18.qxd 03-10-02 10:57 AM Page 365