Cultural Geography

the Pacific north-west at the end of the eighteenth

century is that western explorers and traders and

the metropolitan politicians and pundits who

turned native space into imperial territory engaged

native people in markedly different ways

(Clayton, 2000a).

Historical work on colonialism’s geographies

contains some rich, empirically developed

insights into colonial hybridity, ambivalence and

anxiety (three key postcolonial tropes).

Geographers argue that these dynamics stemmed

as much from the messy pragmatics of cultural

contact as they did from colonialism’s inherent

contradictions (such as the colonizer’s need to

‘civilize’ its others yet keep them in everlasting

otherness). This scattered body of geographical

work on different colonial regions also fills out

the postcolonial idea – expressed forcefully by

Prakash (1996) – that imperial projects became

somewhat hinged as they left metropolitan space

and came into contact with alien peoples and

environments. Geographers are showing that

imperial expansion kick-started diverse and often

unpredictable interactions between ‘Europe’, the

natural environment and indigenous peoples, and

argue that the geographer’s traditional interest in

the associations between land and life should lie

at the heart of geographical studies of colonialism

(see Harris, 2002; Sluyter, 2001).

As these remarks imply, work on colonial-

ism’s geographies raises difficult questions about

whether it is possible to generalize about colo-

nialism and empire in geographical terms (and

whether geographers should want to do so), and

about the relative weight we should accord to the

power of western representations of people and

territory relative to more material and embodied

forms of imperial assertion and colonial dispos-

session that involved native peoples. I have

argued that we should think about how particular

places and local circuits of contact were articu-

lated with the global imaginings, networks and

flows of empire, and develop multiscaled

geographies of these local-global connections that

account for the interplay between ‘the material’

and ‘the discursive’.

This, in outline, is how questions of colonial-

ism and empire have appeared in geography over

the last 10 years. On the one hand, we have an

academic centre bent on decentring, and on the

other a range of geographical scholarship that is

concerned with colonialism’s multifarious

geographies. These two orientations are not poles

apart. Geographical studies of the imperial/colo-

nial past have multiple critical trajectories, and

there is cross-fertilization between the subthemes

I have identified. There have also been some

impressive attempts – I think, especially, of the

work of Jane Jacobs (1996), Jonathan Crush

(1994) and Alan Lester (2001) – to bring

metropolitan-disciplinary and colonial-’edge’

agendas into a unitary analytical field and

explore the tensions between them. But if my

attempt here, largely for the sake of convenience,

to draw a distinction between work on geo-

graphy’s empire and colonizing geographies has

any merit, then it is because it is important to

think about how geographers position them-

selves in relation to colonialism and empire. If,

as Gregory insists, ‘we are the creatures and cre-

ators of situated knowledges’ (1998: 57), then we

must think about the production and politics of

positionality. Postcolonial theory teaches us to

historicize our work with reference to its site(s)

of production, think about our geographies of

intellectual labour, and remain alert to the impli-

cations of our acts of interpretation.

It is this question of positionality that I will

now take up a little more directly, beginning with

some questions about geographers’ critical aims

and moving on to their vexed engagement with

other voices.

GEOGRAPHERS’ POSTCOLONIAL

PREDICAMENTS

Decentring the west and decolonizing geography

What should we make of the industriousness

with which geographers are dredging up onerous

representations of foreign peoples and places?

Are they contesting images and discourses that

are best left in the past, or ones that need to be

unpacked and challenged because they influence

the present? Is work on geography’s empire

meant to constitute some sort of enlightenment

for the discipline? Are geographers documenting

a deleterious disciplinary past in order to demon-

strate that ‘we’ now do things differently? Are

they trying to mark the discipline’s contempo-

raneity by making geographical modes of analy-

sis that come from other periods exist in the same

time (in our research and teaching) but remain in

different moral, political and epistemological

worlds? Geographers have raised these and other

crucial questions about their critical endeavours,

but only in fits and starts, and their answers to

them are far from uniform and in some ways

paradoxical.

David Livingstone (1998: 15), for instance,

reports that he has been accused of reinforcing

racism by re-presenting images of race in his

writing. He says that he finds this a puzzling

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