also rings with his own sense of the importance
of the blues as a statement of culture empower-
ment in black America. Finally, I can speak with
personal conviction of my own experience in
melding my commitment to equity and human
rights with my academic work devoted singu-
larly to issues of racism (Kobayashi, 1994;
2001). I believe that my work would be dimini-
shed in credibility, understanding and impact
were it not based firmly in an activist agenda.
But what of Bonnett’s contention that geogra-
phers need to give up their sense of discipline to
fulfil an anti-racist agenda? Significantly,
Bonnett’s recent book Anti-Racism(2000), while
appealing to a broad, interdisciplinary audience,
makes virtually no mention of geography.
Similarly, in another piece where he emphasizes
the importance of a ‘historical and geographical
contingency of whiteness’ (1996b: 104) he
makes no mention of the work of geographers.
His contention is that the disciplinary fetish has
resulted in a failure to incorporate the concepts of
whiteness or anti-racism sufficiently thus dis-
qualifying the discipline from an adequate under-
standing of racialization. But Bonnett’s failure to
engage the geographical literature, especially
that produced within the last five years, means
that he has foreclosed the possibility of revising
his own understanding of geographical contin-
gency. Nor, does he make clear the important,
indeed historically fundamental, relationship
between ‘race’ and ‘space’ from an interdiscipli-
nary perspective. That project, if done effec-
tively, could make it more clear that sociology,
history, and other social sciences, also cannot be
supported by fetishes of ‘society’, ‘time’, and the
like. We await, then, the work that will allow a
transformation of geographical knowledge such
that we are made more reflexively aware of the
ways in which geographers, through their almost
casual acceptance of the concept of ‘space’, have
been unable to deal as effectively as they might
with the ways in which ‘race’ and ‘space’ are
intertwined.
Bonnett and others fail to explain adequately
the point that ‘space’, like ‘race’, is a historically
constructed concept that has been mobilized in
the major projects of modernity. The construc-
tion of ‘space’ too needs to be taken back to its
Enlightenment roots, coming full circle back to
the ways in which Kant structured and racialized
the knowledge of future geographers. The idea of
‘space’ was for Kant an essential ontological cat-
egory, necessary for engagement between human
and world, and also for structuring the fabric of
human action. I have argued elsewhere
(Kobayashi and Peake, 1994: 239; see also Kant,
1970: 55) that modern spatial strategies, includingthe designation of particular places as accessible
or inaccessible, the exclusion of particularly
women and people of colour from certain sites,
the development of a sense of spatial territorial-
ity through both colonialism and the concept of
private property, need to be understood in the
light of efforts by Kant and other Enlightenment
thinkers both to construct ‘space’ and to encode
its particularly public use with ideological
designs.
The scope of this chapter does not allow for a
full discussion of the development of the concept
of ‘space’ as an essentialized category, but it is
important to note that ‘space’ and ‘race’ share a
similar heritage. Both play a dual role as public
discursive categories rooted in Enlightenment
logic and essential to the aims of both colonialism
and capitalism and, simultaneously, as objects of
scientific investigation, albeit that ‘race’ came
under scientific scrutiny a couple of centuries
before ‘space’ became so elevated in the twentieth
century. Both have been obscured by ideology
from critical assessment. Indeed the ideological
project of racialization is equally a project of
spatialization. Both projects are a fundamental part
of the construction of geographical knowledge.
And that knowledge has been based upon a his-
torically peculiar form of moral vision in which
the geographer’s eye has been trained to cast itself
upon the world, organizing, mapping and con-
structing its human dimensions according to
essentialized notions used to ideological ends as
constructions that organize, constrain and catego-
rize human experience.
Given its historical construction, then,
geography matters just as ‘race’ matters, not
because either infers essentialized characteristics
of human beings or landscapes, but because both
result from processes of human differentiation. It
is not so much a disciplinary fetishism as a
spatial fetishism that has hampered geographers
from a fuller recognition that they have been held
intellectual hostage, in many ways, to a faith in
‘space’ as an object of enquiry. At root of the
spatial fetish, as with the racial fetish, is an
essentialist notion of our discipline, which
moved through a series of other essential ideas
before it became fixated upon ‘space’ (see
Mayhew, 2000).
Notwithstanding recent work that explicitly
develops the relational, ideological and histori-
cally constituted quality of ‘space’ (see Lefebvre,
1991; Soja, 1996), geographers have been very
slow to give up the study of ‘space’, or to recog-
nize how deeply essentialized that concept has
become. For evidence, simply pick up any
geographical journal, even the radical or critical
journals, to see the uncritical way in which the552 SPACES OF KNOWLEDGE3029-ch30.qxd 03-10-02 11:09 AM Page 552