Cultural Geography

interplay between colonial power and modern

geography during the “age of empire”’, Driver

(1992: 27) cites Hudson’s (1977) pioneering

account tracing the close correlation between the

birth of modern geography and the emergence of

a new phase of capitalist imperialism in the

1870s. Geography developed, in Hudson’s view,

‘to serve the interests of imperialism ... includ-

ing territorial acquisition, economic exploitation,

militarism and the practice of race and class

domination’. This radical and empirical geo-

graphical tradition is also manifest in The

Geography of Empire(1972) where Buchanan

suggests that the material impoverishment

wrought by European and US imperialism ‘may

well prove to be of less significance than the

undermining of indigenous cultures’ through ‘the

pillage of brains’, the ‘infiltration of Third World

education systems’ and similar cultural practices

(1972: 19).

However, as Driver is at pains to point out,

‘[G]eography during the “age of empire” was

more than simply a tool of capitalism, if only

because imperialism was never merely about

economic exploitation. There are significant

aspects of the culture of imperialism ... which

deserve much more attention from the historians

of modern geography than they have yet

received’ (1992: 27).

Many of these issues are addressed in the

essays in Godlewska and Smith’s collection

Geography and Empire(1994), the major merits

of which are not only its wide geographical

scope, addressing the origins and intellectual and

material implications of imperial geographies in

the main European imperial societies, as well as

Japan, the USA and elsewhere, but also the fact

that it draws attention to a critical postcolonial

geographical tradition, largely independent (with

the exception of the introduction and the chapter

by Crush) of work developed in the light of the

postcolonial theory of the late 1980s. The editors

nonetheless fully recognize the contribution of

Said’s important works, Orientalism(1978) and

Culture and Imperialism(1993). In highlighting

Said’s ‘vivid geographical sensibility’ they draw

attention to his discussions of ‘imagined political

geographies’ and particularly how literary schol-

ars have ‘failed to remark the geographical nota-

tion, the theoretical mapping and charting of

territory that underlies Western fiction, historical

writing and philosophical discourses of the time’

(Said, 1993, cited by Godlewska and Smith,

1994). Yet in recognizing the ‘brilliant vista’ of

Said’s work they also draw attention to its

ambivalence ‘towards geographies more physi-

cal than imagined, a reluctance to transgress the

boundaries of discourse and to feel the tangible

historical, political and cultural geographies he

evokes’ (1994: 6–7). This last is an important

point and one to which I return below. However,

irrespective of the objects, methods, scope and,

not least, the possibilities of a reformed and criti-

cal geographical knowledge in a western-

oriented world of scholarship where English has,

for better or worse, become the commonly

accepted international language, there exists the

barrier (or facility?) of what I shall call the ‘post-

coloniality of English’.

THE POSTCOLONIALITY

OF ENGLISH

The extent to which contemporary (anglophonic)

human geography is still (unwittingly) a post-

colonial project is manifest in a paper by two

Madrid-based Spanish geographers, researching

‘the extent to which international journals of

human geography are really international’.

Language is probably the most basic constitutive

feature of culture, occasionally used as a

metaphor for culture itself. In the postcolonial

literature, not least in geography, surprisingly

little attention has been devoted to its most

fundamental and constitutive feature, namely the

anglophonic nature of the discourse itself.

On the assumption that English is the common

language of communication of international jour-

nals, the study examines the national origins (by

institutional affiliation) of papers published, the

composition of editorial boards according to

national locations, and related indices, of 19

prominent English-language geography journals.

The authors show, among other results, that over

86 per cent of articles come from either the one-

time metropolitan country (UK) or countries of

what they refer to as the ‘Anglo-Saxon world’

(largely, the USA, and also Canada, Australia

and New Zealand); similarly, the editorial boards

are made up of scholars, over 80 per cent of

whom are from these countries. Either curiously

or expectedly, in stating their conclusions, first,

that such journals ‘are not, in fact, very inter-

national’ and also that ‘human geography is still

fragmented into national or linguistic communi-

ties’ (Gutierrez and Lopez-Nieva, 2001: 67), the

authors do not refer to these findings as an out-

come of politically, geographically and cultur-

ally influenced colonial and ‘postcolonial’

histories, nor do they make any use of that term

in their analysis. Yet combining this information

with what is common knowledge about the

extensive circulation of anglophone geographers

(as well, of course, as many other disciplinary

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