Cultural Geography

majority of geographical language is peppered

with the word ‘space’, used in much the same

way that ‘race’ is used in popular discourse.

Bonnett’s challenge to overcome spatial

fetishism needs to be taken seriously, then, but

not at the expense of fully exploring the ways in

which geographers throughout the history of the

discipline have been complicit in the construc-

tion of ‘space’ and thereby in the construction of

‘race’. Contrary to Bonnett, however, I believe

that geographers’ preoccupation with space

means that it needs to be taken more seriously, so

that we might work through this relationship to

focus on racialization and spatialization.

But there is yet another problem that requires

the development of activism in geography. As

long as geographical knowledge of ‘race’

remains privileged as white knowledge, even the

most critical and reflexive of scholars will have

a difficult time sustaining or defending anti-

racist scholarship. As Delaney opines:

It’s my impression that Geography as an institution is

nearly as white an enterprise as country and western

music or professional golf ... most of the teachers are

white, most of the students are white, most of the dis-

cussion of race in these contexts is among white folk.

(1998: 25, 22)

But despite some of the encouraging scholarship

discussed above, there is little evidence that

those discussions are taking place on a major

scale. Both the continued relative neglect of

issues of racism, and the continuing scarcity of

geographers of colour, are a direct result of the

discipline’s racialized past, entwined within a

legacy of deep assumptions about the natural

differences that ‘race’ creates. As Gerry Thomas

points out:

The categorical ignoring by the discipline of issues con-

fronting American society (and Western society and

their colonies in general) with regards to race relations,

race identity and race politics ... speaks to a discipline

that is impregnated with a particular racial identity and

ideology. (1998: 134)

In Britain, where much of the critical ‘race’

theory in geography has been produced, the dis-

cipline is almost completely white, and changing

very slowly. In the United States and Canada, the

situation is somewhat – but only somewhat –

better. Unfortunately, the dialogue between the

critical race theorists and activist geographers of

colour has been extremely limited, either at the

theoretical or at the political level. Recent events

such as the NSF-funded workshop on ‘race’ and

geography held at the University of Kentucky in

1998 have begun to chip away at these solitudes.

That conference inspired the creation of an

‘anti-racist manifesto’ aimed at the discipline, as

well as a project, supported to date by the

Association of American Geographers and the

Canadian Association of Geographers, to take

measures to increase the participation of students

of colour in graduate training programmes. The

scholarly proceedings from the conference show

for the first time a well-developed integration of

critical theory and activism.^4

As much as it needs further epistemological

development of anti-racist theory, geography

needs an anti-racist transformation, to make geo-

graphers, not just geography, representative of

its political aims. Partly, this is an issue of human

rights and accessibility, to allow people of

colour access to the ‘spaces’ of knowledge that

have previously been denied them. But equal

opportunity is not the only issue. While there is

no essential reason that geographers of colour

should have a better perspective on questions of

racism, it remains a fact that the majority of

empirical work that maps the racialized exclu-

sion of communities of colour has been done by

geographers who have a personal attachment to

those communities, an attachment born of com-

mitment, personal experience, and an ethic of

caring that stimulates their work. In an ideal

anti-racist world, colour would not matter, either

to knowledge or to political commitment; there

is no theoretical reason that colour should affect

either. But the very fact that geography remains

such a white discipline shows that, at least at this

time in our history, colour does matter, and until

we redress the balance, our knowledge will

remain hypocritical dogma. Critical geographers

have established well the concept that knowl-

edge does not stand independently of the

knower, but they have been relatively ineffective

as yet in shifting the balance of knowers. To do

so, we need also to take seriously the spatiality of

the discipline, the question of who gets to be in

which disciplinary place, and to wield power

over its occupation.

CONCLUSION

I have addressed three moments in the history of

geographical knowledge of the idea of ‘race’, to

show that geographers have moved over time

through at least three significant moments. While

these stages do not follow a strict chronology or

even a consistent intellectual trajectory, and

there are many individual outliers to the progres-

sion described here, these three moments depict,

I believe, major conceptual shifts in the ways that

geographers have studied ‘race’. The first moment

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