in anthropology, development studies, or among
those scholars with first-hand experience of
one-time colonies. From the late 1960s, radical
movements in the west spurred a surge of inter-
est in Marxism and, not least in urban and
regional studies, the advent of a neo-Marxist
urban political economy. Cultural issues, as
understood in current postcolonial discourses,
referring especially to issues of identity, cultural
autonomy and subjectivity, were not part of these
discourses. In David Slater’s retrospective view,
‘the failure to theorize subjectivity and identity’
(1995: 71) was the major weakness of such
Marxist accounts. We might say that, in the
1960s and early to mid 1970s, compared with the
situation in the 1990s, the social sciences were
much less interested in culture, and the humani-
ties (apart from an apolitical, ‘commonwealth
literature’ discourse: Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 2)
much less interested, if at all, in colonialism. One
can search the geographical (and other) literature
in vain at this time looking for research on issues
of culture and identity in ‘postcolonial’ or
‘developing countries’. The surge of interest in
these questions which surfaced in the early to
mid 1980s appears overwhelmingly in the anglo-
phone west rather than the postcolonial societies
themselves (see also Young, 2001: 62). As I dis-
cuss below, it is the outcome of selective social
and spatial processes of globalization.POSTCOLONIAL WORLDS: THE
HUMANITIESWhat might be termed the ‘second’ or ‘humani-
ties’ phase of postcolonial criticism seems, from
the frequency of publication, to have taken off in
the early 1980s,^5 its practitioners being both
metropolitan and ‘Third World’ intellectuals
(Dirlik, 1994). The earlier (social science) gener-
ation of ‘colonialism’ scholars were generally
male, European or North American, were occa-
sionally financed through ‘aid’ arrangements and
‘displaced’ from the metropole to the colony or
postcolony, and had a research focus on the poli-
tics, culture, society and space of the colonial
society. In contrast, scholars associated with the
second phase (specifically termed ‘postcolonial
studies’) have generally been from the humani-
ties, and are as likely to be female as male, to be
black (or non-white) as white, to have their ori-
gins in the one-time colonies (either exploitative,
for example, India, the Caribbean, or settler, for
example, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa)
as in the metropolis, and to have been ‘displaced’
from the colony or postcolony to the metropolisor vice versa. To various degrees, their critique
is informed by cultural or literary theory, par-
ticularly feminism and poststructuralism, and
the objects of analysis are primarily texts – lit-
erary (histories, travel writing, letters, diaries,
manuals, etc.) as well as graphic, photographic
or cartographic. As suggested above, the direct
or indirect starting point of this humanities
phase of postcolonialism has, in many if not all
cases, been Said’s Orientalism(1978). While
much, if not all, of the postcolonial geographi-
cal work dealing with ‘empire’ is in this mode
of analysing texts and representations, it is
worth noting that, in terms of location, much of
it is by ‘postimperial’ scholars rather than the
one-time ‘colonized indigenes’ or ‘settlers’
suggested above. In geography, as well as other
disciplines, it is also evident that the work from
postimperial as well as postcolonial (both previ-
ously colonized as well as settler) scholars has
very different priorities, politics and agendas.
Here, it is worth mentioning Western’s work
on Cape Town (1997, first published in 198l)
which, exceptionally for that time, deals
with issues of identity and the politics of
exclusion.
In recognizing that postcolonial theory and
criticism comprise ‘a variety of practices many
of them pre-dating the period when the term
“postcolonial” began to gain currency’ (Dirlik,
1994; see also Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Williams
and Chrisman, 1994), both the latter accounts
begin their histories in the early years of the
twentieth century with reference to the anti-
racist and/or anti-colonial writings of W.E.B.
Dubois, Sol Platje and, subsequently, the Harlem
Renaissance, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon and
others. Moore-Gilbert continues: ‘While post-
colonial criticism has apparently a long and com-
plex history outside Europe and America, it
arrived only belatedly in the Western academy
and British university departments more particu-
larly’ (1997: 2). Here, Moore-Gilbert documents
the development of the field in English studies,
emerging from conferences held in the UK in the
early 1980s (for example, ‘Literature and
Imperialism’ in 1983, ‘Europe and its Others’ in
1985), paying attention to the earlier, anglocen-
tric and apolitical paradigm of ‘commonwealth
literature’ whose sponsors had held their first
conference in 1964.
Where Moore-Gilbert traces the chronology of
the postcolonial paradigm in literary studies in the
UK, less attention is given to the geography,
sociology and demography of its development. No
mention is made, for example, of the virtual
absence, among British university populations in
the 1970s, whether humanities faculty or students,386 AFTER EMPIRE3029-ch20.qxd 03-10-02 4:54 PM Page 386