Cultural Geography

academics) between appointments in Australia,

Canada, the UK, the USA, Singapore, the

Caribbean and elsewhere, the stereotypically

weak language skills of (especially British,

American and Australian) academics, and the

relative lack of familiarity with developments in,

for example, German and Russian, let alone

Chinese or Arabic, scholarship, would seem to

confirm the persistently postcolonial nature of

anglophone scholarship, from which the struc-

tural impediments of language (and the lack of it)

offer little escape. This naturally leads to the

question of academic diasporas.

Unlike other major modern migrations, such

as that of European Jewish intellectuals at the

turn of the twentieth century, and subsequently

in the face of Nazi persecution in the 1930s, the

migration and transmigration of postcolonial

anglophonic intellectuals within, and across, the

space of the anglophonic world have constructed

what until recently may be characterized as dis-

aggregated histories. Anglophone postcolonial

intellectuals in New York are linked with those

in India, the Middle East, Canada, South Africa,

Australia, South East Asia, the Caribbean

and elsewhere. This creation of different post-

colonial identities – a result of a ‘technical’

postimperialism – from nation states with widely

differing standards of economic prosperity, even

though (some) intellectuals within poorer states

may be educationally and socially privileged, has

constructed a cultural space linked across, and by

means of, a particular anglophonic language

world. It is this anglophonic postcolonial subjec-

tivity which, as the opening quotes from Young

and Mongia suggest, is behind the suggestion to

transform the nature of established, metropolitan-

based systems of knowledge.

An examination of at least some postcolonial

texts can reveal a combination of citations drawn

from authors originally from a vast array of

postcolonial as well as other countries (see, for

example, the extensive bibliographies in

Williams and Chrisman, 1994, or Young, 2001).

This (apparently) theoretically coherent assem-

bly of diasporically related scholars, increasingly

cutting across the disciplinary differences of the

humanities and social sciences suggested above,

would have been rare, at least on such a scale, as

little as four or five decades ago. On the other

hand, it would be necessary to recognize not only

the dominance of English as the medium of this

literature and the absence of other major world

languages (Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic),

but also the metropolitan location where much of

this knowledge is being produced, where it is

being consumed, and by whom. What this

indicates is how specifically postcolonial and

anglophonic, or perhaps ‘post-’ or ‘neo-imperial’,

and very definitely not ‘global’, these particular

discourses are.

POSTCOLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES:

MATERIAL AND SYMBOLIC

Reference has already been made to the need ‘to

feel the tangible, historical, political and cultural

geographies that Edward Said “evokes” rather

than addresses’ (Godlewska and Smith, 1994,

above) and suggestions have been made else-

where as to why the current ‘humanities’ phase

of postcolonial studies has, until the mid to later

1990s, largely ignored the realm of colonial

urban, spatial and built environment studies.^10 In

ignoring the physical, spatial, architectural,

urban and landscape realities in which many of

these various colonial discourses developed,

these accounts erase (by ignoring) the essential

materialconditions, and mental referents, with-

out which other cultural practices and forms of

representation (in addition to architecture, plan-

ning and urban design) – writing, mapping,

ethnography, film, photography, painting –

would have been impossible. In an analogy with

Said’s comment (cited above) that 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’, we can

also say that literary (and many other) scholars

have failed to remark the physical, spatial,

symbolic, visual and material environments in

which everyday life actually occurs. Moreover,

such spatial and built form arrangements are not

simply signifiers of power and control, they also

materially affect the life chances of those who

live within them. As Brenda Yeoh has argued,

they were also real spaces in which the authority

of colonial power and control was effectively

contested (Yeoh, 1996). It is to the materialities,

built forms and physical spaces of the city and

how these affect and help to produce and repro-

duce social relations, identities, memories and

subjectivities that I turn.

The real spaces of the city (whether seen

primarily as representative of social relations of

power or as the lived everyday space of socially,

racially and ethnically differentiated popula-

tions) are essentially dynamic. As they change

over time, they represent transformations (or

reaffirmations) in the social distribution of

power, in access to resources, not least in post-

colonial times. One of the most frequently cited

texts in postcolonial studies is Frantz Fanon’s

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