Cultural Geography

This passage trades on the epistemic violence of

geography’s empire, and Barnett specifies the

importance of science and reason as duplicitous

vectors of inscription (also see Anderson, 1998).

There is a strong focus in the literature on

‘official’ geographical ventures that were sanc-

tioned by the state, learned societies and geo-

graphy’s professional research culture. But

geographers such as Teresa Ploszajska (1996)

and Avril Maddrell (1998) have drawn our atten-

tion to the role that geographical education

(school textbooks and field trips) in Britain

played in shaping imperial assumptions among

the young. And in recent years there has been a

spate of work on the forms of travel, leisure and

consumption that nurtured imperial attitudes

among the middle and lower classes (e.g.

Phillips, 1997).

Felix Driver’s Geography Militant(2000) is

perhaps the most accomplished account to date

of British geography’s nineteenth-century impe-

rial heritage. Driver charts the formation of a

Victorian ‘culture of exploration’ that centred on

Africa, involved the mobilization of a variety of

material and imaginative resources (equipment,

guides, patronage, publicity, authority, scholar-

ship, myths and so on), and hinged on the

creation of new spaces of knowledge. He stresses

the importance of examining both the production

and the consumption of geographical knowl-

edges, reading both official and popular texts,

and thinking about the site-specific negotiation

of meaning and power. The image of ‘darkest

Africa’ that was presented to the British public

was put together by a gentlemanly network of

scholars, politicians and philanthropists who

made the RGS an authoritative site for the

promotion of exploration and dissemination of

geographical knowledge. Yet this imaginative

geography of Africa was also moulded in public

spaces of knowledge such as the museum, exhi-

bition hall and advertising billboard, and in

popular accounts of exploration (such as those of

Henry Morton Stanley) that were deemed to be

sensational by the geographical authorities.

Driver effectively pluralizes understanding of

the geographical tradition, and politicizes work on

exploration and empire by showing how many of

the discursive tropes that entered into the geo-

graphical construction of ‘darkest Africa’ (scien-

tific rhetoric, and a thirst for adventure and the

exotic) are being recycled in a variety of contem-

porary cultural forms. ‘The notion of geographical

knowledge as the preserve of a modern university-

based profession (the “discipline” of geography)

is clearly anachronistic for the nineteenth

century,’ he argues, and ‘inappropriate for the

twentieth’ (2000: 7, 202, 216). Britain’s growing

and changing imperial presence in the world

over the course of the nineteenth century became

central to geography’s public image, and

Britain’s imperial past is still at large in our

geographical imaginations.

Work on geography’s empire debunks what

Gillian Rose (1995) has dubbed the ‘specular

spatiality’ of the geographical tradition. We are

encouraged to challenge the way that geography

has worked as a disciplinary space ‘into which

some are gathered and from which others are

exiled’, and which imposes order (historically in

the guise of reason and science, and in the name of

civilization and progress) on an uncharted and

unruly world. Few geographers would dissent

from the view that geography has always been a

practical science, and many now insist that we look

at a greater range of geographical knowledges and

practices than the ones that geography’s historiog-

raphers have deemed central to the definition and

development of the discipline. Geographers are

pointing to other voices and ways of knowing that

geography’s empire has appropriated or placed out

of bounds, and thinking about what a more inclu-

sive history of geography might look like. And

‘geography’ is treated as both a practical (embod-

ied, investigative, instrumental) pursuit and a

discursive (conceptual, textual, institutional, peda-

gogic) enterprise. Critical geographers look for

signs of ambivalence, contradiction and the asser-

tion of power in the geographical archive, and are

showing that empire was deeply inscribed within

the discipline of geography.

Colonizing geographies

Yet the fashioning of ‘critical imperial and

colonial geographies’ cannot simply be whittled

down to a revamped disciplinary history. Derek

Gregory has urged us to break out of the parame-

ters of a ‘contextual’ historiography, which recov-

ers the historical contingency and mutability

of geographical ideas and practices, and devise a

‘spatial analytics’ that ‘discloses the implication

of spatiality in the production of power and

knowledge’ (1998: 11). He uses the term ‘colo-

nizing geographies’ to signpost the myriad ways

in which geography and colonialism work into

one another, and the myriad critical positions

from which such workings might be approached.

I will touch on four such approaches with some

examples from the literature: by analytical focus

(e.g. the production and representation of space),

by politico-intellectual position (e.g. feminism),

by substantive theme (e.g. cartography) and by

location – though there are other ways of charac-

terizing the literature.

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