the term ‘re-orients the globe once more around a
single, binary opposition: colonial/post-colonial ...
[such that] Colonialism returns at the moment
of its disappearance’ (1992: 85–6). For Boyce
Davis (1994), among others, it is too premature,
too totalizing, and ‘recentering resistant dis-
courses of women’. Geographer Jenny Robinson
has suggested that postcolonial studies ‘has
replaced the “other” and “other” places as the
object of study of Western academics, simply
replaying the same relations of domination which
characterized colonialism’ (1999: 210). From a
more conventionally Marxist perspective, James
Blaut (1993) has argued that notions of the post-
colonial misrepresent the realities of neocolonial-
ism which structure the contemporary world.
Thus, in Dirlik’s terms, ‘The global condition
implied by postcoloniality appears at best as a
projection onto the world of postcolonial subjec-
tivity and epistemology – a discursive constitu-
tion of the world’ (1994: 336). It is an analytical
category that began, in his (only partially face-
tious) view, ‘When Third World intellectuals ...
arrived in First World academe’ (1994: 329). If
postcolonial studies has become institutionalized
in the anglophonic western academy, especially
as colonial discourse analysis, we need to know
what, where and who are its political, social and
cultural referents. And as implied in Dirlik’s
comments, we also need to know what the mate-
rial and political implications, and real effects, of
postcolonial studies actually are.
In this chapter I shall argue for postcolonial
studies and criticism not only as relevant for
understanding the contemporary world but, more
especially, for the relevance of material, spatial,
architectural and urban geographical studies for
the development and strengthening of recent
‘literary-based’ postcolonial theory and criti-
cism from which, with some few exceptions
(Ashcroft, 2001; Said, 1993), it is conspicuously
absent (for example, Loomba, 1998; Young,
2001). Moreover, the neglect of the cultural real-
ities and cultural politics of postcolonialism and
colonialism in conceptualizations of ‘globaliza-
tion’ or the ‘world system’, and in theories of
‘development’ over the last four decades, has
been one of the most profound omissions in the
public perception as well as the academic study
and understanding of the modern world. The
most visible aspects of this omission are the
inequities of economic, cultural and political
power, both material and symbolic, manifest in
the territories and especially the cities of the
‘postimperial’ as well as ‘postcolonial’ world (as
land and racial disputes in Zimbabwe, or race
riots in the north of England, demonstrated in the
early twenty-first century).UNDERSTANDING POSTCOLONIAL
WORLDS: QUESTIONS OF
KNOWLEDGE AND POWERAt the root of all postcolonial theory and
criticism are questions of knowledge and power.
These are essentially concerned with issues of
agency, representation and, especially, the repre-
sentation of culture(s) under asymmetrical politi-
cal and social conditions. And as Dirlik (1994:
334), Chakrabarty (1992) and others have stated,
it takes ‘the critique of Eurocentrism as its
central task’.
In thinking about the representation and
understanding of issues in the contemporary
world, culture becomes important in two ways.
First, theoretical and historical representations
of imperialism, colonialism and the contempo-
rary global condition are culturally and histori-
cally constructed. In stating this we recognize
that ‘culture’, used in the anthropological sense,
is itself a particular and powerful construct that
accompanied imperial expansion, a lens or con-
tainer through which other peoples were known
and delivered back to the west. As Clifford
points out, the ‘anthropological definition of
culture ... emerged as a liberal alternative to
racist classifications of human diversity ... a
sensitive means for understanding different and
dispersed “whole ways of life” in a high colonial
context of unprecedented global interconnec-
tion’ (1988: 234). The concept has nevertheless
remained. Second, in their interpretations of
social, political and spatial relations, different
representations give greater or lesser atten-
tion to specific cultural phenomena such as
language, religion, aesthetics or other symbolic
and representational practices. In this context,
the concept of the postcolonial has become of
particular significance in regard to issues of
identity, meaning and agency and, not least, in
regard to the material forms and spaces in
which they are embedded (Yeoh, 1996; 2001).
It is these which act as vehicles for the exercise
of subaltern agency.
In the following sections where I explore
explanations for the earlier relative invisibil-
ity of postcolonial studies and then, from the
1980s, their subsequent explosion into view, I
trace two traditions of ‘postcolonial’ scholar-
ship, located broadly in the social sciences
and in the humanities, but separated both in
historical time and by geographical and disci-
plinary space, whether in regard to production
or consumption. The need to combine insights
from both approaches is implicit in the
account.CULTURES AND SPACES OF POSTCOLONIAL KNOWLEDGES 3833029-ch20.qxd 03-10-02 4:54 PM Page 383