Cultural Geography

366 AFTER EMPIRE

CONCLUSION

There can be no simple summary to a chapter like

this, which ranges over a wide critical terrain.

But I will end with three points – two of them

derived from the literature and a final point of

my own. First, Barnes and Gregory note that

work on the geographies of colonialism and

empire has a central stake in ‘the worlding of

human geography’ (1997: 14–23). This range of

work is challenging the view that geography is a

field of study that is capable of producing an

impartial and independent body of knowledge.

The intertwined histories of geography and

empire that are currently being explored under-

score the notion that geographers are socialized

into a discipline and discourse ‘whose assump-

tions, concepts and ways of working are always

and everywhere earthed in material grids of

power’. Geography is not simply a way of find-

ing order in the world; it is also about the

creation and command of order.

Second, Livingstone suggests that work on

‘geography’s historical geographies’ is ‘rela-

tivising our definition of geography’, ‘pluralis-

ing our conception of geography’, and prompting

us to ‘particularise our own practice of geo-

graphy’ (2000a: 7). We acknowledge that ‘what

geography is cannot be uncovered in isolation

from the conditions of its making’ in different

times and places, and we ‘now admit, even cele-

brate, the impossibility of laying aside our own

particularity in cognitive and practical projects’.

We are caught up in ‘the retaliation of the situ-

ated’, and postcolonialism is one of its key mani-

festations. Indeed, there are few signs that the

range of work reviewed here will become deni-

grated by a sort of geographical prose of counter-

insurgency that restores order and objectivity to

geographers’ research and writing. Explicitly

historical-geographical work on postcolonial

matters will no doubt continue to grow and

change, in part as the wider field of postcolonial

studies changes, but it is not likely to be dis-

placed from debates about the historicity of

human geography or its cultural politics.

Yet third, there are clearly problems with this

literature. In my view, and as Hall (1996: 249)

notes about postcolonialism more generally,

geographers’ descent into discourse and focus on

geography’s empire can easily become an alibi

for deconstructive work that falls into the trap of

assuming that the theoretical critique of essen-

tialism necessarily entails its political displace-

ment, and in a sense bypasses the postcolonial

world beyond Europe altogether. The critique of

colonialism can become a seductive but sanitized

western intellectual pastime that may serve the

professional needs of oppositional academics –

who, as David Scott (1999) has observed, are

suffering from the loss of familiar and stable

political objects – but that barely connects with

the practical predicaments of formerly colonized

peoples and places. This is not to say that work on

‘real-world’ postcolonial problems is better than

work that deconstructs empire from its

metropolitan-disciplinary pavilions. But I do

want to end by calling for more dialogue between

geographers working within the different

orientations identified above, and geographers

working in different parts of the world.

NOTES

I would like to thank Charles Withers and his postgradu-

ate group at Edinburgh for their detailed comments on

an earlier and much longer draft of this chapter, Jane

Jacobs for her patience and comradely editorial advice

and Joe Doherty for commenting on a penultimate

draft.

1 Unfortunately, there is little space here to discuss the

ways in which questions of geography and space are

dealt with by postcolonial scholars in other disciplines.

Suffice it to say that geographical concepts and

metaphors have become coveted critical commodities.

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