of non-white, British-born subjects. Moore-
Gilbert is also silent in regard to his own origins
(born in Tanzania, son of a game warden in colo-
nial Tanganika, which became Tanzania in 1961)
or his geographical location – like Paul Gilroy, the
author of perhaps the earliest proto-postcolonial
monograph in British cultural studies, There Ain’t
No Black in the Union Jack(1987),^6 also subse-
quently based in the University of London’s
Goldsmiths’ College in south-east London, a
major site of multiethnic communities, especially
from the Caribbean and Africa, in the postimperial
metropolis. In 1991, approximately one-fifth of
London’s 6.5 million inhabitants were classified
as ethnic minorities, the large majority either born
in or descended from parents born in the one-time
colonial empire. Nearly half of Britain’s ethnic
minority population lived in London in 1991
(Starkey, 1994: 24-5).^7
While Dirlik (1994) is partly correct in main-
taining that the postcolonial paradigm had
resulted from a postcolonial, English- (and
native-language-) speaking diaspora from east to
west, i.e. ‘when Third World intellectuals have
arrived in First World academe’, it clearly also
needed audiences, situated in appropriate loca-
tions. New forms of knowledge need receptive
subjects and, where teaching relies on mono-
graphs, textbooks and journals to publish acade-
mic research, all three began to appear in the
(postimperial?) global city of London, the major
publishing centre of the anglophone world in the
late 1980s.^8 With minority populations predomi-
nantly formed, from the early 1960s, by immi-
gration from the one-time colonial empire
(Ireland, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the
Caribbean, East and West Africa, Hong Kong),
the UK can more obviously be represented as
‘postcolonial’. Conversely, the United States,
with a much greater diversity in its ethnic minor-
ity origins (though with obvious colonial rela-
tionships with Puerto Rico and its indigenous
Native American peoples), has been represented
under this label in relation to its (internal) history
of slavery and recent immigration. The wide-
spread adoption of the paradigm in the United
States academy from the late 1980s also rests on
an increasing acknowledgement that most of
America’s ‘ethnic minorities’ – Hispanics,
Chicano/as, Asian Americans and others – are in
the United States as the result of colonial wars
(in the nineteenth century with Spain and
Mexico, and in the twentieth in Korea, Vietnam,
El Salvador and Grenada, amongst others). The
adoption of the postcolonial paradigm is also
associated with the civil rights movements from
the 1960s and the resultant ideological construc-
tion of a multicultural society (Geyer, 1993).The growth of minority faculty numbers in the
American academy, and an increasing audience
of minority students in US higher education in
the later 1980s and early 1990s, primarily in
public institutions, also provided an educational
market for postcolonial studies (Finkelstein
et al., 1998).^9 The paradigm was also boosted by
the increased internationalization of graduate
education, not least students from decolonized
states. Under the category of the ‘postcolonial’,
such students have acquired a framework with
which to recognize their historic colonial con-
nections with the USA and with postcolonial
confrères elsewhere, but also an identity within
‘the west’ to contest a western, white (and as I
discuss below, frequently male) cultural hege-
mony as well as the facts of social and academic
racism. In this sense, postcolonialism has
enabled an alliance between ‘Third World’
students and those of African American, Latina/o,
Asian American or Native American US minori-
ties. These material factors affecting the cultural
politics of education also need to be seen along-
side intellectual developments, including the
emergence of ‘an explicit theoretical sensibility
(which was largely foreign to mainstream
history); and secondly, an attempt to recover the
political significance of culture and the epistemic
violence of colonialism’ (Gregory, 2000: 613), if
the rapid growth of postcolonial theory and crit-
icism is to be understood.
It is evident from these accounts that different
postcolonial critiques, irrespective of the geo-
graphical or disciplinary location in which they
emerged, have shared a common objective in
deconstructing epistemologies and reformulating
the objectives and methodologies of knowledge
production. Because they operate under different
social, historical and geographical conditions,
however, their referents, as well as their politics
and agendas, are understandably not the same.
This is apparent from the critical work that has
been undertaken on interrogating and decon-
structing ‘imperial geographies’.
Geography, understood literally as ‘a writing
of the (surface of ) the earth’ (OED), is inher-
ently a universalizing science, though developed
within specific political and historical conditions.
Can there ever be, therefore, a ‘postcolonial
geography’ that allows people and places to
represent themselves in their own terms? Such a
question raises issues not only about the histories
of geographical knowledge (Driver, 1992) but
also about its geographies – an issue which, in
academic and popular imaginations, is more
frequently grasped through their varied carto-
graphies (Harley, 1987; 1988) and the different
worldviews they represent. In examining ‘theCULTURES AND SPACES OF POSTCOLONIAL KNOWLEDGES 3873029-ch20.qxd 03-10-02 4:54 PM Page 387