Cultural Geography

their attention to colonizing discourses and

‘postcolonial’, ‘decolonizing’ or ‘counter-colonial’

projects. They are probing, questioning and

challenging the role the discipline has played in

disempowering people and making multiple reali-

ties and imaginaries invisible through exploring,

charting, locating, mapping and writing (for

example, see Blunt and Rose, 1994; Driver,

1992; 2000; Godlewska and Smith, 1994; Howitt

and Jackson, 1998).

Beyond research and fieldwork, geographical

writing has also been scrutinized for colonizing

power relations. Academic protocol has sought

to imbue academic knowledge and texts as

‘truth’ with a neutral, objective character that

cannot be challenged. This automatically excludes

some narratives, alienates some audiences and

discredits certain texts. Keith argues that dis-

tancing the author from the text powerfully

authorizes the text and ‘exemplifies the need of

the powerful to rationalise, comprehend and

control the seductively anarchic world of the

irrational “other”’ (1992: 563). Geographers,

anthropologists, literary theorists and others

have been considering the power relations

that imbue a text with authority by exploring

relations between authoring a text and the edito-

rial control with which authors make decisions

(Crang, 1992: 542). Much academic writing

ignores and makes invisible these relations and

the discursive communities they create. By

implication this asserts ‘authority over and

ownership of the work’ (McDowell, 1992b: 62).

A text is not a neutral, passive presentation of

an external truth (Christie, 1992). It is a partial,

active re-presentation of complex worlds using

particular strategies to persuade and influence

readers for specific purposes (Katz, 1992: 496).

The power involved in re-presenting people in

geographical texts also reflects and produces

colonizing relationships as people’s knowl-

edges and practices are excluded or devalued.

Attempting to include people and their perspec-

tives does not mean power relations have

been addressed and a ‘solution’ has been found

to ‘the problem’ of representing ‘others’.

Processes of inclusion are as saturated with

power relations as those of exclusion. Being

able to write, the appropriation of other

people’s experiences, choosing whom to

include and how to include them, the choices

other people have made in representing them-

selves to the author and other authors, the ways

the readers interpret the words and the ulterior

motive for the usage of the ‘voices’, all involve

relationships of power (Crang, 1992; Katz,

1992).

Human geographers have challenged attempts

to include ‘voices’ in projects that aim to speak

(or write) on behalfof ‘others’ who have been

excluded in Eurocentric representations. The

colonizing arrogance and politics of appropria-

tion encompassed in such a notion have been

challenged (McDowell, 1994: 242). In response

there has been some ‘opening up [of] spaces

within geography for alternative voices to be

heard [and read]’ (1994: 243). This chapter seeks

to open up such spaces, engaging the reader with

a polyphony that challenges Eurocentric assump-

tions of universalism which have silenced and

devalued other knowledges. This is the option

identified by Crang as:

a form of polyphony grounded much more firmly in

recounting the lives of particular individuals, each

becoming what we might call a bearer of cultural other-

ness without collectively forming an ‘Other’. (1992: 536)

UNSETTLING KEY IDEAS IN

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

Eurocentric knowledges typically assume an

essentialized, naturalized truth where boundaries

are seen as external to categorically separate

entities. For example, philosophical discourse

and social science method often assume a pro-

found, categorical distinction between and

around key concepts used in cultural geography,

for example:

• a separation between space, scale and time


• language and meaning form singular entities


• a binary opposition between culture and
  nature


• identities that are singular and static.

Each of these assumptions has been challenged

by recent cultural geographical research, but the

expectation that such concepts should be cate-

gorically distinct and independent persists.

Subsequently, academic discourse continues to

proceed in a piecemeal way. The further assump-

tion of universal applicability of this approach

obscures alternative approaches behind a mass of

mirrors. Human existence, communication, iden-

tity (and otherness) is always, inescapably and

inevitably, embodied, emplaced and (geographi-

cally, historically and culturally) contextualized.

Thus, conventions and assumptions of

Eurocentric knowledge and the practices of

academic discourse directly marginalize diverse

human experience and contribute to wider

political consequences.

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