significant development allowing geographers,
along with other social scientists, to move
beyond an understanding of ‘race’ as a taken-
for-granted fact to recognizing its socially con-
structed status.CRITICAL ‘RACE’ THEORY AND
GEOGRAPHYThe most significant theoretical development of
the poststructuralist era is the recognition that
‘race’, like other forms of physical manifestation
such as gender or sexuality, is an idea. The idea
of ‘race’ has allowed the construction of the
raced body according to historically, culturally
and place-based sets of meanings. Thus the term
‘racialization’ refers to the process by which
somatic characteristics (which maybe phenotyp-
ical or genotypical) have been made to go
beyond themselves to designate the socially
inscribed value and the attributes of racialized
bodies. Those bodies are the results of normative
vision, constituted by the eye of the most power-
ful viewer. Such values determine how those
bodies will be used, as slaves, as racialized
labour or, in the case of ‘white’ bodies, in posi-
tions of power. Historically, both the siting and
the sighting of the body have thus reinforced
racialized notions.
Poststructural approaches see ‘race’ as a
historicallyconstructed idea that first entered the
English language in the early seventeenth
century and became commonly used in scientific
writings throughout the Enlightenment period.
By the nineteenth century, it had become fully
accepted in popular discourse and had taken on
the ideological trappings that made racism, capi-
talism and colonialism the dominant characteris-
tics of human systems. The world had become
racialized(Miles, 1989; 1993; see also Banton,
2000; Barzun, 1938; Guillaumin, 1972; Jordan,
1974; Malik, 1996; Montagu, 1997; Stepan,
1982). While there occurred major debates
throughout the last three centuries on the actual
effects of ‘race’, it was not until the second half
of the twentieth century that it came to be viewed
by critical theorists as what Montagu (1997)
calls ‘man’s most dangerous myth’.^2
The impetus for the social constructivist
position combines two intellectual initiatives that
have recently informed geographical knowledge.
First, in the intense reaction to Hitler’s Nazism
following World War II, repudiation of the
concept of ‘race’ became a major project of the
United Nations, and a part of the campaign to
create an international framework for humanrights. The United Nations Educational
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
undertook a major research project that resulted
in the publication of three volumes (Kuper,
1975; UNESCO, 1956; 1980) that bring together
some of the world’s most respected scientists
and social scientists to refute the concept of
‘race’. This repudiation has been interpreted
through a poststructuralist lens to examine the
particular forms of modern, or postmodern,
social relations that sustain the discursive power
of ‘race’ to create human difference. Theorists
such as Goldberg (1993), Malik (1996) and Omi
and Winant (1994) have extended our under-
standing of how ‘racism’ works within dominant
cultural contexts and in a range of political
contexts, and in the production of labour
(Phizacklea and Miles, 1980).
While the poststructuralist literature is now
very large, two writers bear mention for their
overwhelming influence and their relevance to
geographers. Colette Guillaumin’s (1972; 1980)
early work as part of the UNESCO project was
perhaps more influential than any other, both in
explaining the historical constitution of ‘race’
ideas and in linking the concepts of ‘race’ and
gender (see Guillaumin, 1995). She simultane-
ously provides a scientific basis for questioning
our assumptions about ‘race’ as a social given,
and asks that we recognize the ways in which
different forms of historical oppression intersect.
Franz Fanon (1952) not only provided the first
anti-racist reading of major French poststruc-
turalists, but also inspired a whole generation of,
in particular, American scholars to understand
anti-black racism and its relationship to the
history of colonialism and slavery. Recent
rereadings of his work continue to enrich this
perspective, and now refer to the intellectual
phenomenon of ‘Fanonism’ (see especially
Gibson, 1999; Gordon et al., 1996). Fanon’s
work has been especially influential among
geographers concerned with the historical inter-
sections of racism and colonialism (for example,
Blaut, 1993). As Pile has recently pointed out:What particularly attracted people was Fanon’s refusal
to allow the ‘normal’ categories of colonial life – such
as ‘black’ or ‘white’, ‘native’ or ‘foreigner’ – to be
authentic or stable. (2000: 262)The practice of destabilizing life’s normative
categories is one that is deeply unsettling and
fundamentally geographical:For Fanon, the colonial regime’s imposition of skin
hierarchies not only defines the visibility of the body,
and also territorialises the body, but ... is also woven by
the white man ‘out of a thousand details, anecdotes,THE CONSTRUCTION OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 5493029-ch30.qxd 03-10-02 11:09 AM Page 549