Cultural Geography

involved attempts to legitimate ‘race’ as a scientific

basis for understanding human difference, but also

for justifying the practices of racialization

involved in subsequent colonial and capitalist

domination. The second stage involved a liberal

approach, grounded in positive social theories,

that eschewed belief in ‘race’ as a determining

factor, yet e-raced the effects of human differenti-

ation by reducing racial characteristics to spatial

patterns and by failing to address the ways in

which human beings construct difference.

In the third moment, the most recent con-

structivist approaches have recognized the idea

of ‘race’ as the basis for the historical project of

racialization, and have advanced critical under-

standing of the discursive forms that sustain

racism. Yet such understanding has done little to

deracialize the discipline of geography and has

even reinforced the power of white geographers to

define the intellectual terms in which we under-

stand ‘race’. All three moments have been funda-

mentally structured by Enlightenment notions of

human and spatial differentiation, notions that

have been reinforced by the ocularcentrism of

society in general and of the discipline of geogra-

phy in particular. Both notions have deep, albeit

far from exclusive, roots in the work of the

geographer/philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Geographical knowledge is indeed powerful –

more powerful, perhaps, than we have given it

credit for. The challenge before us, if we are to

use geographical knowledge to overcome

racism, is twofold: to explore further the recur-

sive knowledge relationship between ‘race’ and

‘space’, between historical processes of racial-

ization and spatialization; and to bring to

geographical knowledge more reflexivity and

stronger political commitment. For, as the

history of racism shows, geographical knowl-

edge and activism are synonymous.

NOTES

1 According to David Livingstone, possibilism is ‘a the-

sis about the relationship between human culture and

the natural environment which claims that the human

species has the capacity to choose between a range of

possible responses to physical conditions’ (2000:

608–9). Originally advanced as a counter to environ-

mental determinism, possibilism also carries the

implicit rejection of ideas of racialization, but that line

of discussion was not followed in the geographic liter-

ature, partly because of the geographic emphasis on

culture as an epiphenomenon.

2 Much of the poststructuralist theoretical literature,

particularly that produced in France, was written in the

years before and immediately after World War II, and

thus predates the so-called quantitative revolution in

geography. I am not arguing for a straightforward

chronology here, therefore. But in terms of the major

developments in the discipline of geography, post-

structuralism did not become a major paradigm until

the 1980s. Positive theories, which include positivism

on the part of a much smaller group, became popular

in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, fuelling much

of the discussion in the 'relevance debate'.

3 In tracing the progress of geographical knowledge, it is

significant that current work on the white construction

of racism is being undertaken by students of David

Ley at the University of British Columbia, thus estab-

lishing a new generation of scholars with direct lineage

to Ceri Peach and others at Oxford, who influenced

Ley as well as Jackson and Smith. As an aside, as a

former student of David Ley, I count myself as part of

that lineage.

4 The proceedings of this conference will be published

in 2002 in special issues of The Professional

Geographerand Social and Cultural Geography.

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