Cultural Geography

regimes and cyclical shifts of the world economy;

what were once symbols of colonial control

or authority get demolished or refurbished

according to the priorities that tourism policy

commands. The contested ‘heritage’ of various

elements in the postcolonial city and their invest-

ment with symbolic capital is an important theme

of this literature. But one-time residential areas

(and houses) of the colonial elite can also

become, in postcolonial times, a contested terrain

for different social and ethnic populations, both

materially and in battles over nomenclature.

Focusing on the postcolonial as conventionally

understood, Yeoh (2001) also cites studies that

show how, in the Asia–Pacific region, old colo-

nial ‘core centres’ of the global economy are

being spatially transformed by new shifts in the

spatial economy, not least in regard to the eco-

nomic power of Japan (see also Perera, 1998).

These issues of identity, encounters and heri-

tage which Yeoh highlights here, with their

emphasis on indigenous agency (and well repre-

sented in literary form by Khatabi, 1993, writing

on the North African medina), focus attention

once more on the different meanings of ‘post-

colonial’. The questions which Yeoh addresses

relate to the possibility and methods (however

contested) of ‘hearing or recovering the experi-

ence of the colonized’ (Sidaway, 2000: 594)

during or after colonization. Not all postcolonial

places or nation-states permit this possibility. As

Myers writes in relation to postcolonial urban

planning in East Africa, ‘Although draped in the

banners of socialism rather than imperialism, the

post-colonial state inherited from the colonial

regime an obsession with spatial order as an ide-

ological tool and means of civic control’ (1995:

1357). The result is that projects are ‘activated in

the interests of powerful leaders more than in the

interests of the people for whom (they) ostensi-

bly were planned’.

What emerges from these studies, therefore,

is the critical importance of the presence or

absence of local, indigenous perceptions of

‘postcoloniality’, what is implied by it, and who

has the power of political control. The problem

of postcolonial studies, according to Kusno

(2000), has been a tendency to undertake a criti-

que of colonial discourse around a broad, often

undifferentiated critique of ‘the west’, without

acknowledging that colonialisms come in many

forms. Recognizing historical differences

between various colonial states, Kusno argues

that, until the demise of Suharto’s ‘new order’ in

1998, Indonesia in fact continued as a colonial

regime in all but name. Departing from a key

theme in much postcolonial criticism, he argues

that colonialism in Indonesia did not bring about

a displacement of indigenous culture. As

Indonesians were encouraged by Dutch oriental-

ist discourse to remain ‘Indonesian’, they never

thought of themselves as part of a colonial

legacy.

Where many previous studies of colonial

urbanism have examined ways in which colonial

power attempted to use spatial discourses to

exert control over the indigenous population (for

example, Metcalf, 1989; Mitchell, 1988;

Rabinow, 1989; Wright, 1991), more recent

research has documented the role of indigenous

agency in either resisting, accommodating or

problematizing the nature of that control

(Hosagrahar, 2000; Raychaudhuri, 2001; Yeoh,

1996). The major exception is Yeoh’s (1996)

innovative study of Singapore, demonstrating the

extent to which indigenous inhabitants retained

power over their own space. Also absent in most

postcolonial urban and architectural studies are

attempts to understand the connection between

the built environment and the construction of the

subject. In this context, Kusno explores how dif-

ferent spatial discourses and practices under

Sukarno helped shape the national imagination

and subjectivity; and under Suharto, how the

making of two social and spatial categories (the

underclass kampung and the middle-class ‘real

estate’ suburb) helped to create two divided

national subjectivities in the capital city.

POSTCOLONIAL PROSPECT

As an interpretive paradigm, the use of post-

colonialism is surely destined to spread. The

evidence lies not only in the ever-increasing

literature, or the new and imaginative ways the

concept is being used (Sidaway, 2000), but also

because the political, cultural, social, demo-

graphic and also religious conditions (King, 2000a

and b) in which it has been established will cer-

tainly grow. Briefly stated, its achievement has

been to put colonial and postcolonial realities at

the centre of understandings of the contemporary

global condition. As a way of giving voice to and

recognizing the agency and identities of subal-

tern others, it is increasingly being taken up

across the disciplines, irrespective of geographi-

cal location and language (Vacher, 1997; Young,

2001: 62; see also Claytòn, Chapter 18 in this

volume). Its value is in complementing (and also

contesting) other representations of the contem-

porary world – cultural or political economic

theories of globalization, postmodernism,

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