The construction of the human body is a historical

form of geographical knowledge that reflects

geography’s ocularcentric past. Although they

have seldom been explicit about doing so,

geographers have usually followed dominant

social norms and intellectual trends, placing

human bodies in particular landscapes, setting

spatial limits upon the activities of those bodies,

and linking the characteristics of those bodies

(their gender, ‘race’ or ability, for example) to

specific places. In other words, much of the

history of cultural geography is about how bodies

are – and should be – seen. This ocularcentric

tendency is strongly evident in the ways in which

geographers have constructed racially visible

bodies, and fundamentally linked to the ways in

which society as a whole has categorized human

beings according to a racialized vision.

In this short chapter, I take up the concept of the

racialized body as a form of geographical knowl-

edge. I situate the racialized body at three general

moments in the history of the western disciplinary

gaze: during the late eighteenth century, when

Enlightenment thinking provided a scientific

justification for racialized colonial expansion that

culminated in a deeply racialized modern landscape

a century later; during the post-World War II

period, when the racialized body was stripped of its

particular characteristics but the subsequent undif-

ferentiated gaze resulted in a deepening of cate-

gories of difference; and finally during the

poststructuralist period, in which the racialized

body is given explicit recognition as a social

construction and some geographers have attempted

to disrupt racialized vision through anti-racist

analysis. For all three moments, I attempt to link the

geography of ‘racial’ knowledge and vision and the

larger intellectual and social context.

THE COLONIAL OTHER

Scholars who study the process of racialization

generally agree that the concept of ‘race’, at least

as we now know it, had little social meaning

prior to the Enlightenment period. Over the two

centuries between the eighteenth century and the

turn of the twentieth century it became a funda-

mental part of western understanding of what is

human, normalized in every aspect of common

discourse, from the intellectual to the political,

the economic and the social. Enlightenment

thinkers, one of the most notable of whom was

the geographer Immanuel Kant, had set the intel-

lectual world on a trajectory that defined ‘race’

as an irrevocable marker of human value. Kant’s

lectures on geography advanced the definitive

position that skin colour is a result of distance

from the equator, and that those of darker skin

colour are possessed of inferior moral, social

and intellectual qualities. He thus racialized

the two primary forms of geographical knowl-

edge, that of ‘space’ by asserting the relative

position of persons of various skin colours across

the surface of the earth, and that of ‘place’ by

establishing what kinds of human landscapes

(people in particular places) are most civilized.

Kant’s view – which was widely and more and

more commonly held by scholars – depicts

human beings as a single genetic species, derived

from what he calls a ‘stem genus’, and consti-

tuted as follows: ‘the elemental determinants for

a certain development which are inherent in the

nature of an organic body (plant or animal) may

be called ... germs [Keime]; but if this develop-

ment concerns only the size or the relationships

between parts, I call these determinants natural

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The Construction of Geographical

Knowledge – Racialization, Spatialization

Audrey Kobayashi

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