of hill stations (Freeman, 1999; Frenkel and
Western, 1988; Kennedy, 1998; Kenny, 1995;
1997; King, 1976; Spencer and Thomas, 1948),
road and rail access to them, at cooler, higher alti-
tudes, distant from ‘native towns’ on the plains,
primarily for the rest and recuperation of colonial
military and administrative personnel, and later,
the comfort of colonial wives.
In cantonments, the extent of spatial appropria-
tion, design and orientation of colonial barrack
rooms, the allotted space for each occupant, and
air-circulating design features were determined by
reference to the temperature, flow and volume of
air (King, 1976). Special headgear and protection
for the white, European body were the subject
of extensive scientific research and Royal
Commissions (King, 1976; Renbourne, 1961).
‘The tropics,’ as Arnold states, ‘were created as
much as discovered’ (2000: 10), not least with the
help of the ideological and material apparatus dis-
seminated by imperialism, including the two most
globally recognized tropical symbols, the solar
topee and the tropical bungalow. As forms of pro-
tection for the body, they shared an uncanny simi-
larity of structure: the high, ‘double-layered’
crown and the double-layered roof; the broad rim
of the hat and the broad roof of the verandah, shad-
ing the head or body; the ventilation holes in the
crown and the high windows permitting cross-ven-
tilating currents of fresh air; the raised crown not
touching the head and, using stilts or pillotis, the
raised floor of the bungalow, high above the ‘dan-
gerous emanations’ from the ground. These all
resulted from the same ‘scientific’ medical princi-
ples: protecting bodies from the sun’s heat and
encouraging the circulation of ‘fresh air’ (King,
1984; Renbourne, 1961).
Combined over decades with changing racial
attitudes, cultural (and capitalist) notions of
property, and planning principles based on colo-
nialist rationalities, miasmic theories of disease
structured the shape of colonial cities, and
European sectors in them, in ways recognizable
long after the end of colonial rule. The less
densely developed, cleaner and greener, wind-
ward sector of the colonial city was to become
the site for post-independence suburbs of the
elite and multinational tourist hotels.
Notions of hybridity and mimicry which
characterize colonial discourse (Bhabha, 1994)
also have their referents in spatial and building
form. They also provide opportunities for think-
ing about hybridities in a cultural geographical
sense, not least in relation to hybrid cartogra-
phies (Jacobs, 1993) and different types of
hybrid architectural forms (Jacobs et al., 2000).
The concept of the bungalow, ‘the one perfect
house for all tropical countries’ (King, 1984: 200),the outcome, over time, of ‘interactions with
indigenous peoples and places’ (Driver and
Yeoh, 2000), with the help of tropical discourses,
moves into different regions of the globe.
The transformation of these tropical knowl-
edge paradigms into the ‘sanitary syndrome’ of
the twentieth century and subsequently into the
‘scientific’ basis of much contemporary urban
planning worldwide is their bequest. That the
tropics ‘continues to shape the production and
consumption of knowledge’ (Arnold, 2000: 10)
is evident from South East Asia to Brazil, where
the concept of ‘tropical architecture’ or ‘tropical
modernism’ is rematerialized through the lenses
of ‘regionalism’, national culture and interna-
tional capital (Kusno, 2000; Stepan, 2000;
Yeang, 1987). In this sense, the new ‘tropical
urbanisms’ mark out newly developed regional
or national identities while simultaneously
permitting the urban elite to stay within the
transnational space of modernism.
On the general topic of knowledge and power,
in the context of colonialism, some of the most
pioneering work was undertaken by anthropolo-
gist Bernard S. Cohn. In the words of Dirks,Long before the powerful theoretical proposals of Michel
Foucault made knowledge a term that seemed irrevoca-
bly linked to power, and before Edward Said so provoca-
tively opened up discussion of the relations between
power and knowledge in colonial discourses and
Orientalist scholarship, Bernard Cohn had begun to
apply an anthropological perspective to the history of
colonialism and its forms of knowledge in a series of
essays written between the mid 1950s and early 1980s.
(1996: ix)^3If Cohn stands out as a pioneer in addressing
questions of representation in colonial societies,
there are other scholars whose ethnographic,
descriptive, critical and theoretical explorations
of colonial communities, colonial space and
colonial cities between the 1950s and early
1970s laid essential foundations for any subse-
quent research in the field.^4 This raises important
issues of whether a new knowledge paradigm
only comes into existence when, like ‘postcolo-
nial theory’, it is designated with a distinctive
label. I suggest below the different social and
spatial conditions under which the phenomenon
of ‘postcoloniality’ became (belatedly) recog-
nized and widely studied in the western academy
from the early 1980s.
To summarize: in what might be called
(compared with the 1980s) the ‘pre-global’
1960s and early 1970s, both the audience for,
and interest in, such culturally oriented postcolo-
nial studies in the metropolitan academy were
restricted to specific disciplinary cells, whetherCULTURES AND SPACES OF POSTCOLONIAL KNOWLEDGES 3853029-ch20.qxd 03-10-02 4:54 PM Page 385