The Dictionary of Human Geography

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foreign histories’ and ‘subordinate indigenous

histories’ (Perera, 1998, p. 6). It begs the

question whether the condition of the world

today has been so reconfigured as to be ‘incon-

trovertiblypost-colonial’ (Hall, 1996, p. 256),

or whether it is more likely that ‘colonialism

left the everyday life of many quite untouched;

or that the changes it did bring often passed

unrecognized as changes’ (During, 1992,

p. 346). Privileging ‘the moment of the

‘‘post-colonial’’ ... [may] simply revive or

re-stage exactly what the post-colonial so tri-

umphantly declares to be ‘‘over’’’ (Hall,

1996b, p. 248; cf. Gregory, 2004).

Others have cautioned against the navel-

gazing tendencies of certain forms of post-

colonial studies – which seem reluctant to go

much further beyond theorizing ‘the meaning

of the hyphen’ (Mishra and Hodge, 1991,

p. 399) – and have emphasized instead the

need for post-colonial studies to engage with

‘material practices, actual spaces and real pol-

itics’ (Sylvester, 1999, p. 712: see also Driver,

1996; Jackson and Jacobs, 1996; Barnett,

1997, p. 137; Lester, 1998; Driver and

Gilbert, 1999b). If the main limits of post-

colonial theories lie in their mistaken ‘attempt

to transcend inrhetoricwhat has not been

transcended in substance’ (Ryan, 1994,

p. 82), then an important starting place in

overcoming some of these limitations would

be to dissect post-colonialism as threaded

through real spaces, built forms and the

material substance of everyday biospheres.

At the same time, the ‘prospects of getting

past the post’ (Yeoh, 2001) must be tied to the

larger enterprise of constructing and elaborat-

ing alternative post-colonial geographical tra-

ditions that will steer a path through what

Ram (1998, p. 628) calls ‘on the one hand, a

sphere of the modern which is so hopelessly

contaminated by its colonial origins that it

seems exhausted as a source of critique and

action, and on the other, a non-elite discourse

which is completely unconnected with the

modern and is unable to represent anything

other than utterotherness’. The first steps

are the most difficult, as Chatterjee (1994,

p. 216) points out: ‘‘europeand theamericas,

the only true subjects of history, have thought

out on our behalf not only the script of colo-

nial enlightenment and exploitation, but also

our anti-colonial resistance and post-colonial

misery.’ Sidaway (2000, p. 593) also notes

that ‘any postcolonial geography must realize

within itself its own impossibility, given that

geography is inescapably marked (both philo-

sophically and institutionally) by its location

and development as a western-colonial sci-

ence’. For a post-colonial geography to aspire

to significant breaks with the prescribed script,

one step forward would be to view post-

colonialism as a highly mobile, contestatory

and still-developing arena, where opportun-

ities for insight may be gained at multiple sites.

While its redemptive features as a means of

resisting colonialisms of all forms and its

manipulative aspects as a vehicle for colonial-

ism to reproduce itself cannot be totally disen-

tangled, its critical edges may be sharpened

not only to ‘dismantle colonialism’s signifying

system’, but also to articulate the silences of

the native by ‘liberating the suppressed in dis-

course’, and to speak back to the centre

(Alatas, 1995, p. 131: see also Rattansi,

1997; Nagar and Ali, 2003). In this vein,

Robinson (2003a, citing Chakrabarty) calls

for a ‘provincialising’ of Western scholarship,

followed by a more sustained engagement with

cosmopolitan practices in the production of

post-colonial knowledge. by

Suggested reading

Blunt and McEwan (2002); Robinson (2003);

Sidaway (2000).

post-development A tradition of thinking

and political action that refuses to accept that

developmentis somehow natural or innocent.

Its proponents also dispute the suggestion that

‘developing countries’ can or should follow in

the footsteps of thewest/north. Some post-

developmentalists go further and argue that

the discourse of development has done

immense damage in the global South. Arturo

Escobar (1995) has famously maintained that

development produced onlyfamine, debt and

increased povertyfor the majority world.

Post-1950 development had failed, he said,

and other modes of being had to be discovered

and worked through. In this vein, post-

development refers to that set of ecological,

economic and cultural experiments that will

produce new and presumably better ways of

being human.

Post-development thought is really a spec-

trum of oppositional thinking that mixes old

and new insights in roughly equal measure. At

one end of the spectrum is a tradition of

anti-developmentthought that is frankly dis-

missive of development. Anti-development

activists reach back to Mahatma Gandhi and

Leo Tolstoy when they contend that develop-

ment is violent and dehumanizing. There is

more than a hint of this thinking is Escobar’s

book,Encountering development: development

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_P Final Proof page 562 1.4.2009 3:20pm

POST-DEVELOPMENT