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MATERIAL GEOGRAPHIES AND POSTCOLONIALISM

Cheryl McEwan
School of Geography and Environmental Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2TT
Fax: 0121 4145528
Email: c.mcewan@bham.ac.uk
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ABSTRACT

While postcolonial studies have inspired new ideas, a new language, and a new theoretical

inflection for a wide range of teaching and research in human geography, there have been few

sustained discussions about what might constitute a postcolonial geography. This paper

attempts to deal with this absence by exploring the possibilities of material geographies of

postcolonialism. It suggests that geographers are particularly well placed to respond to

criticisms of postcolonialism as remaining overwhelmingly textual, cultural and/or historical

in focus by contributing towards a productive engagement between postcolonialism and the

material realities of global inequalities and towards a revivified political and ethical project. It

explores how particular tactics might inform postcolonial methodologies within geography

and makes some tentative suggestions on what a postcolonial political praxis might look like.

KEY WORDS

Postcolonialism, discourse, materiality, global economy, politics, ethics

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MATERIAL GEOGRAPHIES AND POSTCOLONIALISM

INTRODUCTION

Postcolonial studies are intrinsically geographical and an increasing range of geographical

teaching and research is located within a broadly postcolonial framework. Intersections

between geography and postcolonialism provide challenging opportunities to explore the

spatiality of colonial and neo-colonial discourse and the spatial politics of representation.

Geography is one of the dominant discourses of imperial Europe that postcolonialism seeks to

destabilise, to problematise the ways in which the world is known and to challenge the

unacknowledged and unexamined assumptions at its heart that may be profoundly insensitive

to the meanings, values and practices of other cultures (Spivak, 1990). Postcolonial

approaches invoke an explicit critique of the spatial metaphors and temporality often

employed in geography, insisting that the „other‟ world is „in here‟, rather than „out there‟ and

„back there‟ (Chambers 1996: 209), and integral to what in the west is referred to as

„modernity‟ and „progress‟. Postcolonial theory reveals the situatedness of knowledge, and

particularly the universalising knowledge produced in imperial Europe (Said, 1993, 1999),

whilst simultaneously being conditioned by its places of formation (Clayton, 2000; Lester,

forthcoming).

Postcolonialism, then, is a geographically dispersed contestation of colonial and neo-

imperial power and knowledge and geography should lie at the heart of postcolonial critiques

(McClintock, 1995; Jacobs, 1996; Loomba, 1998). Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the most

powerful critiques of Anglo/Eurocentric geographies are being produced in Asia, stimulated

by the growing intellectual traffic based around new centres and journals devoted to this

purpose.i It is only in recent years, however, that geographers have begun to develop a critical

engagement with the theoretical and substantive challenges of postcolonialism.

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Despite a recent burgeoning of geographical research positioned within postcolonial

frameworks there have been relatively few sustained discussions about what might constitute

a postcolonial geography (Blunt and McEwan, 2002; Blunt and Wills, 2000; Clayton,

forthcoming; Nash, 2002). At the same time, there have been a number of recent criticisms of

postcolonialism, including its alleged failure to connect critiques of discourse and

representation to the lived experiences of postcoloniality and its apparent inability to define a

specific political and ethical project to deal with material problems that demand urgent and

clear solutions. I wish to argue here that geographers are particularly well placed to respond

to these criticisms by contributing towards a productive engagement between postcolonialism

and the material realities of global inequalities and towards a revivified political and ethical

project.

In attempting to initiate thinking around these issues, the paper outlines briefly the

major criticisms of postcolonialism – namely, that it is too focused on historical, theoretical

and cultural concerns that preclude political and ethical responsibilities. I suggest that while

these criticisms are perhaps overstated, geographies are well placed to respond to specific

calls for a „rematerialised‟ postcolonialism and to explore critically the lived experiences of

postcoloniality. I also explore how particular tactics might inform postcolonial methodologies,

with the potential to connect the discursive/textual strategies and insights of postcolonialism

to macro-issues (globalisation, transnationalism and poverty) that have allegedly been absent

in postcolonial theory. Finally, I reflect on what postcolonial geographies might contribute to

the ethical and political considerations raised by criticisms of postcolonialism more broadly

and offer some tentative suggestions on what a postcolonial political praxis might look like.
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THE POVERTY OF POSTCOLONIALISM?

Criticisms of postcolonial theory are now well rehearsed but they are useful in speculating

about what geographies can bring to postcolonial analysis and what future directions

postcolonial geographies might productively take. Cultural and textual approaches, including

postcolonialism, have been accused of a tendency to overplay the cultural as a separate

category of analysis (Marcus, 2000). Philo‟s (2000) reflection on the „cultural turn‟ elaborates

on how lived experience has effectively been neglected in favour of an over-zealous focus on

identity politics, discourse, texts, signs, symbols and imaginings. Philo‟s concerns resonate

with a growing unease within geography with what might be considered the proliferation of

„desocialised‟, „dematerialised‟ and „depoliticised‟ geographies through an over-privileging of

the cultural (Barnett 1998a, Castree 1999, Gregson 1993, Sayer 2001, Storper 2001).

Similarly, postcolonial geographies are being criticised for focusing on historical, cultural,

theoretical and discursive concerns at the expense of the materialities and everyday

experiences of postcoloniality.

Privileging the past and the cultural?

Intersections between postcolonialism and geography have largely been historical in focus.

This is understandable given that the interconnections between geography and empire shape

the ways in which questions of postcolonialism have been interrogated within geography, but

the critical return to the past has a tendency to re-focus attention primarily in western contexts

and on areas formerly colonised by European powers. Much of this work has been extremely

important, particularly in elucidating the relationship between power and knowledge and in

revealing the historical agency of people oppressed by imperialism and neo-imperialism.

However, this focus adds weight to the criticism that, like postcolonialism, postcolonial
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geographies tend to be preoccupied with history and have failed to say much about

postcolonial futures.

This criticism can be countered to some extent by recent work that uses the colonial

past to cast the present in a new light, connecting radical revisionist histories with

contemporary political claims for reparation and recognition (see, for example, Clayton, 2000;

Harris, 2002; Jacobs, 1996). As Gandhi (1998) argues, postcolonialism „necessarily returns‟ to

the past in an ameliorative and therapeutic attempt to deal with the „gaps and fissures‟ in the

postcolonial condition (see also Chatterjee, 1997). I am not arguing here that postcolonial

geographies should sideline the past – far from it given that relations between the past and

present have not been fully disclosed. Rather, the impetus of postcolonial geographies ought

to be in shedding critical light on how the past informs and shapes the present and in a broader

range of contexts that do not necessarily begin and end western metropolitan space.

Apart from geographical work investigating postcolonial approaches to globalization

and development (Corbridge, 1993; Crush, 1995; see McEwan, 2002, for an overview),

intersections between postcolonialism and geography have also tended to revolve around

cultural concerns. Although spatial images such as location, mobility, borderlands and exile

abound, more material geographies of both past and present have often been overlooked.

Postcolonial geographies are thus exposed to the same criticisms that have been levelled at

postcolonial approaches more broadly. Realists accuse postcolonialism of ignoring issues of

the human rights and freedoms of marginalised people. Concerns with representation, text and

imagery are perceived as too far removed from the exigencies of the lived experiences of

millions of impoverished people (Jackson, 1997). In dismissing the universalist assumptions

of political economy, postcolonial approaches have also been accused of ignoring the material

ways in which colonial power relations persist (Ahmad, 1992; Dirlik, 1994). As Jacobs (1996:

158) notes, the theoretical abstractions of postcolonial theory do not always adequately
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connect to the specific, concrete and local conditions of everyday life and are not easily

translated into direct politics. This apparent neglect of material concerns and political

strategies has generated the fiercest criticism of postcolonialism, accusing it of ignoring

urgent life-or-death questions (San Juan, 1998) and of solidifying the fundamental schism

between western theorising and the practical needs of impoverished people globally.ii

The argument that postcolonialism is too rooted in discourse might have some

credence but, of course, it also ignores the fact that discourse itself is intensely material.

Indeed, geographers have demonstrated this with examples ranging from the ordering of

imperial and postcolonial urban spaces, to the materialities of travel and emigration, to

concerns with embodiment, identities, cultural politics and reconciliation (see Blunt and

McEwan, 2002). Similarly, intersections between postcolonialism and feminism have had

some influence in geography and have demonstrated the ways in which discourse informs

lived experience in ways that are relevant to women everywhere, whether they are striving for

economic empowerment whilst having simultaneously to renounce „normality‟ or facing the

conundrum of attaining citizenship whilst becoming alienated subjects (Quayson, 2000). This

is also compounded for those women most marginalised by global inequalities. For example,

Spivak (1985, 1999) draws out the connections between the silencing of „Other‟ women, who

are often spoken for, about and against, and their marginalised position within global

economies. Postcolonial feminisms have made important contributions in exploring the links

between the discursive and the material in creating possibilities for effecting change (Rose,

1987; Rajan, 1993). Clearly, it is not sufficient to confine analysis to texts alone but there are

connections between the relations of power that order the world and the words and images

that represent the world. The challenge for postcolonial geographies is to respond to the

potential of „mixing up conceptual elaboration with substantive detail‟ (Philo, 2000: 27) and

of dealing simultaneously with the material and immaterial, the cultural and the political.
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Global capitalism and class?

Postcolonial theory necessarily positions itself in critical opposition to global inequalities.

It is perhaps ironic, therefore, that its most persistent criticism is that it has failed to consider

the relationships and tensions between postcolonialism and global capitalism (Dirlik, 1994;

Eagleton, 1994; Hall, 1996). According to Parry (2002: 78):

The sanctioned occlusions in postcolonial criticism are a debilitating loss to thinking

about colonialism and late imperialism. This dismissal of politics and economics

which these omissions reflect is a scandal.

With respect to the more cultural issues of the politics of recognition postcolonial approaches

might appear radical and progressive, but from the perspective of political economy and the

politics of distribution they look less progressive, „for they offer no means for challenging the

economic system‟ (Sayer, 2001: 688).

The relative neglect of class in favour of identity politics in postcolonial analyses has

also been criticised as a potentially serious omission, both in terms of the conflicting class

interests within post-independence political formations and the international alliances forged

by the new indigenous ruling classes. Yet without Marxism, some of the best ideas that

postcolonialism has produced, from Fanon to Spivak, would be much poorer. As Parry (2002)

argues, what Marxist critics such as Ahmad, Dirlik and San Juan actually achieve is a much

more rigorous engagement of postcolonialism with the legacy of Marxism. Indeed,

postcolonial theorists such as Said and Chakrabarty have consistently argued for a

postcolonial criticism that is worldly and attuned to both discursive and material concerns.

The two should not necessarily be seen as antagonistic as some critics of postcolonialism

would suggest.
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Despite this, with some exceptions (for example, the writings on post-development by

Esteva (1987) and Escobar (1992, 1995)), postcolonialism has not easily been translated into

action on the ground and its oppositional stance has not had much impact on global power

imbalances or inequities. However, as Rattansi (1997: 497)) argues,

[I]t is simply untrue to say that global capitalism has been ignored in postcolonial

research, although… what postcolonial studies has been about is finding non-

reductionist ways of relating global capitalism to the cultural politics of colonialism.

Much postcolonial research has been engaged with exploring the constitutive relation between

imperialism, colonialism and global capitalism (see, for example, Chatterjee, 1986; Miyoshi,

1997; Said, 1993; Spivak 1987). While class relations are not often explicit, in many studies

they are implied. Much of Spivak‟s work, for example, has been concerned with exploring

connections between the micro-spaces of academe and the macro-spaces of the global

economy/international division of labour, and between the discursive construction of gender

and the doubly subaltern position of women in the former colonies.

As the absence of class relations is perhaps exaggerated, the failure of discursive

approaches to engage with critiques of capitalism is also to some extent overplayed. As

Ashcroft (2001) argues, despite the centrality of representation, the significance of

postcolonial analysis is its insistence on the importance of the material realities or lived

experiences of postcolonial life that are directly related to economic issues. He uses the

example of the consequences of the rise to prominence of tropical sugar for Caribbean

societies and cultures as a resonant demonstration of the link between the material and the

discursive in the process of postcolonial transformation, and how political economy and

cultural approaches might work in tandem to critique the dominant order (Perrons, 1999).

Similarly, Young (2001: 428) makes a powerful case that while postcolonial critique

challenges established, eurocentric knowledge in the cultural sphere, it also continues to work
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in the spirit of anti-colonial movements by further developing its radical political edge to

reinforce global social justice; its „politics of power-knowledge asserts the will to change‟

injustice, inequality, landlessness, exploitation, poverty, disease and famine that remain the

daily experience of much of the world‟s population. As Yeoh (2001: 462-3; see also Hall,

1996; Slater, 1998) suggests, the task of interrogating the relationship between

postcolonialism and global capitalism is a crucial one that „requires a more critical and

simultaneous engagement with both registers‟.

Celebrating postcoloniality and transnationalism?

Culturalist approaches have been accused of precipitating premature and inappropriate

celebrations of postcoloniality. Parry (2002: 74) argues that a dismissal of political economy

means that the imperial project is detached from its beginnings and inseparability from

trajectories of capitalism. Thus „globalisation is divorced from capitalism, married to

postcolonialism, and despite egregious inequality between and within centre and periphery,

the promotion of transnational cultural flows is applauded‟. As Loomba and Kaul (1994: 4,

13-14) argue, „diaspora‟ has swelled „to demarcate the entire experience of postcoloniality‟

and „the subject-position of the „hybrid‟ is routinely expanded as the only political-conceptual

space for revisionist enunciation‟.

The privileging of migrancy, in particular, in postcolonial discourses can be

considered deeply problematic. As Sharma (1996: 29) argues:

The logic of contemporary global racialized capitalism is to (re)produce new forms of

exploitative social relations, at the local, national and transnational level. The recent

turn, in the avant-garde sectors of the Western academy, to the study of marginal

culture, has failed to engage adequately with the oppressive dynamics of this mode of

reorganised capitalism… Devoid of any progressive political agendas, the project of

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celebrating hybrid „ethnic‟ cultures obscures the epistemic violence of Western

intellectual knowledge…, reduces „Other‟ cultures to essentialist and „traditional‟

fixities – as „victims‟ of progress, as objects of tourism, as the labour of migration and

the colours of multiculturalism – and then valorizes hybridity as their encounter with

the emancipated West.

This encounter of „Other‟ cultures with the west becomes the framework through which „non-

western‟ cultures are interpreted. Hybrid ethnic cultures are celebrated, but this further

marginalises „traditional cultures‟, the colonial encounter remains privileged and the global

domain of cultural capital remains unchallenged. As Parry (2002: 72) argues:

Perhaps the time has come for postcolonial studies to promote empirical investigations

of these unsettled diasporas, and undertake the dissemination of the experiences

spoken by scattered, impoverished, and despised populations stranded in temporary

and exploited employment as contract workers, casual labourers, or domestic servants

in Europe, North America and the Gulf States.

Studies of transnationalism that explore the success of overseas business communities, the

vibrancy of „ethnic‟ industries, and the success of some migrant groups in securing space for

themselves within popular cultures need to be balanced with an understanding of the harsh

realities facing immigrants all over the world (Lipsitz, 1997) and the fact that many multi-

ethnic economies around the world are still characterised by low wages, poor working

conditions and racism. In what follows, I explore how geographers are already beginning to

respond to criticisms of postcolonialism to undertake precisely this kind of work. I also

propose a number of tactics that might enable a more critical engagement between material

geographies and postcolonialism.

‘REMATERIALISED’ AND ‘REPOLITICISED’ POSTCOLONIALISMS

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Geography and geographers have a central role to play in what Chakrabarty (1992, 2000) has

referred to as provincialising Europe, relocating western narratives of progress in their wider

colonial histories and rethinking the „centre‟ by exploring the complex webs of

interconnections between „metropole‟ and „periphery‟ (Hall, 1996). However, I want to

suggest that postcolonialism can also play a part in the necessary but difficult project of

disrupting entrenched Cold War narratives that pervade area studies, in particular. As recent

critiques demonstrate (Miyoshi and Harootunian, 2002), area studies have failed to come to

terms with the epistemological challenges posed by postcolonialism. Contributions from

corporations and foreign governments, especially in East Asia, put pressure on scholars to rein

in critical approaches lest they lose funding. The possibilities of postcolonial approaches,

therefore, are not only to provincialise Europe but to disrupt Cold War narratives and

Eurocentric understandings of the world that have a global presence. Focusing on Japan,

Miyoshi and Harootunian (ibid.) explore how a dramatically reconfigured area studies can

help further an understanding of a rapidly changing world characterized by fluid interchange

between cultures. Geographers are also beginning to engage with this project.

Postcolonial geographies are responding to the need to connect discursive and material

realities and to intersect with critiques of global inequality, which has implications for a

revivified political and ethical project. Some of the most exciting current work in economic

geography, for example, is exploring attempts by workers disempowered by the conditions of

postcoloniality - emigrant status, lack of citizenship rights, seasonality and informality of

employment and fragmentation in terms of language and nationality - to empower themselves

through organisation. These forms of subaltern resistance to the marginalising effects of

global capitalism lend themselves to postcolonial analysis.iii Some feminist geographers,

working within broadly postcolonial theoretical frameworks, are producing work on translocal

and transnational geographies and the experiences of diasporic groups of women (Pratt, 1999;
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Yeoh and Willis, 1999; Blunt, forthcoming), contributing to the exploration of the „messiness

of… race politics‟ (Jackson and Jacobs, 1996, 3) and their material geographies. Drawing on

these developments, I now wish to consider the possibilities of postcolonial practice, politics

and ethics.

Postcolonial practice: hearing, speaking and writing tactics

As Nash (2002: 222) suggests in her discussion of postcolonialism, the „critical attention to

geographical difference, interconnection and the spatial imaginaries of „progress‟,

„civilization‟ and „development‟, at best, also foregrounds the material geographies of

colonialism and their legacies‟. Geographers are particularly able to link discursive and

textual strategies to material concerns because of their understanding of local scale analysis

that can reveal localised resistances and re-appropriations. They can employ tactics through

which to „hear‟ voices of resistance, such as reading archives against the grain to reveal

historical agency (Barnett, 1998b; McEwan, 1998), or analysing different forms of resistance

writing that reveal the lived experiences of people otherwise silenced by hegemonic

relationships of power. These include autobiography and testimonio by people marginalized

by poverty, which provide a rich site for postcolonial analysis because they demonstrate the

way in which individual lives are affected by a global system of capital initiated as the

economy of the empire of modernity (see Barrios de Chungara, 1978). Postcolonial reading

strategies can work for and with poor people so „that the law of genre will no longer dominate

the representation and expression‟ of people from different parts of the world (Kaplan 1998:

215). They allow for the appropriation of the dominant language „for the purpose of re-

inscribing place to produce a regional, or localised, worldview, and thus disrupt one of

modernity‟s most pervasive effects – the emptying out of local space by colonialism and neo-

imperialism‟ (Ashcroft 2001: 30-1).

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The role that academics can play in creating spaces for the articulation of voices of

resistance through textual production is important, since very few marginalized people are

able to make their voices heard within the global economy of publishing. Artist and academic

Shelley Sacks‟s work on social sculpture is particularly inspiring in this regard. The

significance of her exhibition Exchange Values (an installation of stitched dried banana skins,

each corresponding with an oral testimony by the Windward Islands farmer who grew them)

has been explored by cultural geographers (Cook et al., 2000). It attempts to use art to connect

the largely voiceless people at one end of the commodity chain (in this case the Caribbean),

whose labour remains invisible, to consumers at the other end, using the product itself

(bananas) to make this connection. This is a radical critique of the effects of „free trade‟ with

the potential to empower people at both ends of the commodity chain: producers by giving

them a voice through which to engage with consumers and facilitating connections that the

functioning of the global economy often mitigates against; and consumers, who may not

realise that the choices they make can have a direct bearing of the lives of people elsewhere.

This project blends art, discourse and materiality to connect different places and the peoples

within them, breaking down the boundaries between core and periphery, former imperial

metropole and former colonial hinterland. It suggests ways in which postcolonialism might be

translated from a sometimes dense and obfuscating theory into a methodology, breaking down

boundaries, creating connections and alternatives, facilitating participation and empowerment

and giving voice to the previously voiceless.

These examples suggest ways in which geographers might respond to the challenges

of postcolonialism, employing a number of methodological procedures for producing a

postcolonializing discourse. As Quayson (2000: 21) argues, postcolonialising is meant to

„suggest creative ways of viewing a variety of cultural, political and social realities both in the

West and elsewhere via a postcolonial prism of interpretation‟. Sometimes this involves a
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rigorous analysis of existing theories; a careful analysis of conditions governing particular

subject positions in the modern world; an interdisciplinary reading of the cultural and the

political; or finding creative ways beyond the dominant modalities of analysing particular

social issues. In this way, procedures censured as „facile textualist thought‟ that contrive to

block „the appeal to any kind of real-world knowledge and experience‟ (Norris, 1993: 182)

can be avoided, and the „politics of the symbolic order‟ do not displace the theory and practice

of politics (Parry 2002: 67).

The politics and ethics of postcolonial geographies?

Broadly speaking postcolonial perspectives can be said to be anti-colonial (Ashcroft et al.,

1995; Radcliffe, 1999). The politics of postcolonialism, however, often diverge sharply from

other perspectives and its radicalism rejects established agendas and accustomed ways of

seeing. Postcolonial critical agendas in different places are shaped by the different nature,

form and timing of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, different levels of social division,

and new forms of neo-colonial domination and transnational connections. As Nash (2000:

227) argues, these differences „work against postcolonialism becoming a set of impressive

theoretical tools that are never challenged by the particular, complex, messy material of social

relations in different places‟. They also work against the positing of a singular postcolonial

politics or set of political strategies. Therefore, in raising questions about the „politics‟ of

postcolonialism, I also want to signal that these are always positioned within different and

interconnected colonial contexts and legacies.

Connecting the discursive to the material inevitably involves thinking about what the

political might mean for postcolonial analysis in geography. It could be argued that political

imperatives have driven postcolonialism from its beginnings because of its anti-colonial

stance. However, as Quayson (2000) argues, there are also tensions between an activist
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engagement with the real world and a more distanced participation through analyses of texts,

images and discourses. The pretext for postcolonial criticism – the desire to speak to western

paradigms of knowledge in the voice of otherness, to show how the constitution of western

subjectivity depended on interactions with subjected others, to destabilise centres and

peripheries (Stoler, 1995; Bhabha, 1994; Ong, 1999) – is that it is an ethical enterprise,

pressing its claims in ways that other theories such as those of postmodernism and

poststructuralism do not. Paradoxically, however, the idea of a postcolonial politics is also

problematised by a constant reluctance to take radical ethical standpoints. Thus postcolonial

theory and criticism is riven by a contradiction that has attracted much criticism:

…social referents in the postcolonial world call for urgent and clear solutions, but

because speaking positions in a postmodernist world are thought to be always already

immanently contaminated by being part of a compromised world, postcolonial critics

often resort to a sophisticated form of rhetoric whose main aim seems to be to rivet

attention permanently on the warps and loops of discourse. (Quayson, 2000: 8)

As Quayson and Goldberg (2002) suggest, however, it is difficult if not impossible to separate

postcolonial discourse from an ethical project, even though the means by which its ethical

ends are to be achieved remains a highly contentious issue. Of course, it is still possible to

speak and to indicate an existential tentativeness in whatever has been spoken (Katz, 1995;

Storper, 2001) but questions remain over what the ultimate objectives of a responsible

postcolonialism should be. What, for instance, is the use of a discursive analysis of the

language of development when this does not address the economic and social disjunctures

produced in developing countries by the imposition of structural adjustment policies? What is

the use of undermining discourses of power when „we never encounter any specific scenario

of injustice, domination, or actual resistance from which we may gather intimations of the

passage through the postcolonial ordeal‟ (San Juan, 1998, 2)? To return to a question raised
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earlier, what do academic postcolonial studies contribute to the experience of postcolonialism

in the contemporary world?

Although these questions remain somewhat rhetorical, Spivak‟s (1993) interrogation

of the role of academics in a global context and her model of a continuing politico-intellectual

global activism is useful. Throughout her work, Spivak alludes to the significance of the

unlearning of privilege as loss. In terms of educational opportunity, citizenship and location

within the international division of labour most academics are privileged. Privileges, whatever

they might be in terms of race, class, nationality, gender, and so on, may have prevented us

from gaining access to Other knowledges, not simply information we have not yet received

but the knowledge that we are not equipped to understand by reason of our social positions.

Spivak‟s „unlearning‟ of privilege involves working hard to gain knowledge of others who

occupy those spaces most closed to our privileged view and attempting to speak to those

others in a way that they might take us seriously and be able to answer back. This is especially

important in provincialising geography and postcolonialising praxis.

Spivak also outlines a formulation of ethics in which she posits the ethical relation as

an embrace between parties who learn from each other, which has implications for thinking

about hearing and writing tactics. This embrace is not the same thing as wanting to speak for

an oppressed constituency. When Spivak (1985) argues that the subaltern (those formerly

colonised peoples oppressed by the international division of labour and especially by the

super-exploitation of female labour in „developing‟ countries) cannot speak, she means that

s/he cannot be heard by the privileged in both „developed‟ and „developing‟ countries. Or as

Jacobs (2001: 731) puts it, „It is very common nowadays for the postcolonial politics of not

speaking for the other to override an alternative postcolonial politics of listening to the other‟.

The latter only cease being subaltern when, to use Gramsci‟s terms, they become organic

intellectuals or spokespeople for their communities. Such a change will not be brought about
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by intellectuals attempting to represent oppressed peoples or by merely pretending to let them

speak. However, interactions between academic and non-academic researchers in disparate

locations can generate new languages and social representations that can become „constituents

of alternative social visions and practices‟, as well as „enabling new political identities and

initiatives‟ (Gibson-Graham, 2002: 108). Despite the problems of the inevitable partiality of

the privileged academic view, recognising the effectiveness of knowledge „creates an

important role for research as an activity of producing and transforming discourses, creating

new subject positions and imaginative possibilities that can animate political projects and

desires‟ (ibid. 2002: 105;1994).

A further dilemma for a postcolonial politics is the fact that postcolonial theory seems

to locate itself everywhere and nowhere. As Quayson and Goldberg point out, it borrows from

a wide range of social theorists (for example, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Adorno, Deleuze and

Guattari) and can seemingly be deployed in any historical period (for example, Cohen‟s The

Postcolonial Middle Ages). For geography, however, this can be both theoretically and

politically productive. Various theories, seemingly with no connection with postcolonial

issues, have generated new discourses of postcolonialism. The tensions and dilemmas in new

ways of conceiving cross-cultural feminist politics, for example, have produced postcolonial

feminisms with the potential to contribute to the critical exploration of relationships between

cultural power and global economic power and towards a radical reclaiming of the political.

The conceptual alliances between postcolonialism and feminist, gay/lesbian, ethnic and

disability studies, drawing on similar theories to address issues of representation, hegemony

and othering, have been particularly productive within and beyond geography, even though it

is not always clear that this has effected unified political agendas within universities and

outside.
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Despite these developments, debates persist about what precisely postcolonialism is in

geography and what it is meant to do. In considering how postcolonial geographies might

develop, it is perhaps helpful to think of postcolonialism as an „ethico-politics‟ of becoming

(Ferguson, 1998), a „process of postcolonializing‟ (Quayson 2000: 9) or an „anticipatory

discourse‟ (Childs and Williams, 1997: 7), recognising a condition that does not yet exist, but

working nevertheless to bring that about. Postcolonial geographies have the potential to

provide a careful grounding of the specificities of the local and to embed phenomena in a

variety of social, cultural, historical and political contexts through which „a transfigured and

better future might be brought into view‟ (Quayson and Goldberg, 2002: xiii). Postcolonialism

is a viable way not just of interpreting events and phenomena that pertain directly to

postcolonial contexts, but as a means by which to understand a world thoroughly shaped at

various interconnecting levels by „the inheritance of the colonial aftermath‟ (Gandhi, 1998: x).

Thus the „process of postcolonializing‟ should refer to the critical process by which to relate

modern-day phenomena to their explicit and implicit relations to this heritage.

Drawing on these insights, we might more carefully consider what the „political‟ might

mean for a meaningfully postcolonial geographical knowledge. Ashcroft (2001: 19) argues

that „a theory which may more faithfully engage the actual practice of post-colonial

subjects… is a poetics and politics of transformation‟. On the one hand, a poetics of

transformation is concerned with the ways in which writers and readers contribute

constitutively to meaning, the ways in which formerly colonised societies appropriate

dominant discourses, and how they interpolate their voices and their concerns into dominant

systems of textual production and distribution. Transformation recognises that power is

central to cultural life and resists by adapting and redirecting discursive power, creating new

forms of cultural production. On the other hand, a politics of transformation works constantly

within existing discursive and institutional formations to change them. Through taking hold of
 20

writing itself, in political discourse or political structures, in educational discourse and

institutions, conceptions of places, peoples and even economics are transformed; „ultimately,

a poetics and politics of transformation effects a transformation of the disciplinary field‟ (ibid:

19).

Postcolonial geographies might also provide a more reflexive understanding of the

complexities of postcoloniality. Rather than „sort out postcolonialism once and for all‟ (Nash

2002: 228) and devise theoretical or political frameworks that are all-encompassing, settled

and complete, it might be more productive to keep the notion of a postcolonial politics within

geography as provisional and constantly under review, able to respond to different spatialities

of the postcolonial but constantly in question. What is apparent in this is the continuing

centrality of culture to a transformative postcolonial geography and the recognition that

underlying all economic, political and social resistance is the struggle over representation,

which occurs in language, writing and other forms of cultural production. The potential of

postcolonial geographies is to discriminate between the continuing reality of imperial power

and subject peoples and to resist the submergence of the neo-colonial subject within global

power relations. Whereas globalism erases differences between people on the basis that they

are all consumers, postcolonialism works to reveal the gaps between peoples that still remain,

revealing that people belong to a society as well as an economy, and that society is still

controlled by a cultural hegemony established by imperialism (Ashcroft 2001).

Transformation of representation is crucial because such practices are situated in a material

world often with critical material implications.

Central to this is an understanding of the importance of place-based and local/global

machinations of postcoloniality. Critical reflections on the geographical dynamics of

postcoloniality also need to herald a clear and coherent ethical and political position on the

present. Whilst postcolonialism is an eclectic and provisional field of critical enquiry an

 21

ethical and political imperative ought to underpin a properly geographical understanding of

postcoloniality and postcolonialism as a disciplinary project. With this in mind, we might

draw on the philosophical and historical referents to the importance of place, the local, the

grounded and the performative in colonialism and postcoloniality. Chakrabarty‟s (2002)

elevation of the notion of „dwelling‟ in modernity and with the colonial past to an ethico-

political principle is instructive, as are the more recent writings of Derrida (2000, 2001) and

Spivak (2002) on dilemmas of hospitality and cosmopolitanism as they relate to

transnationalism and the lived experiences of migrants and asylum seekers. These issues are

important globally and not least in countries of the South and in Southeast Asia, where

transnational flows of people are increasingly significant. We might also consider empire‟s

unethical neglect and destruction of the colonial other‟s locational attachments (see, for

example, Mehta, 1999) and how this informs contemporary geopolitics and geoeconomics.

Exploring the ways in which native sovereignty is expressed, lived and performed in specific

locales can also foreground the agency of native peoples in contrast to the erasures of

dominant western cultures and romantic representations of victimry, tragedy and nostalgia

(Vizenor, 2001).

Concerns such as these are beginning to inform critical postcolonial geographies,

casting light on what a politically and ethically informed understanding of postcoloniality

might look like. The tactics for the political project of postcolonialising geography posited by

Robinson (this volume) are also interwoven in these concerns since they demand an

engagement with debates and practices from „the margins‟ and, in so doing, work against a

divisive geopolitics of knowledge.

 22

CONCLUSIONS

This paper has attempted to outline the major debates over and criticisms of postcolonialism

and to suggest ways in which geography might respond and add to their potentially radical

insights and effects. It has argued that this might be achieved by, first, exploring the

possibilities of a more productive engagement between material and discursive concerns;

second, related to this, by developing the intersections between postcolonial approaches and

issues of global inequality and the diverse lived experiences of postcoloniality; and third, by

developing the political and ethical possibilities of postcolonialising geographies. Despite the

caution surrounding progress narratives within geography, particularly about avoiding

universalising statements of progress, any kind of politics needs some notion of what progress

is (Rorty, 1998). As with anti-sexism and anti-racism, for example, we need to be able to ask,

and keep asking, what a meaningfully postcolonial geography might look like.

Postcolonial approaches demonstrate how the production of western knowledge forms

is inseparable from the exercise of western power (Said, 1978; Spivak, 1990; Young, 1991,

2001) and reassert the value of alternative experiences and ways of knowing (Fanon, 1986;

Thiong‟o, 1986; Spivak, 1987; Bhabha, 1994). They articulate some difficult questions about

imperialist representations and discourses surrounding lands and peoples „beyond the west‟

and about the institutional practice of western disciplines. They share a social optimism with

other critiques, such as feminism, which have helped generate substantial changes in political

practice (Darby, 1997, 30). While transforming unequal global relations by politics of

difference and agency alone is seemingly impossible, postcolonialism is a much-needed

corrective to the Eurocentrism and conservatism of much of western geographical thought.

However, postcolonial geographies perhaps need to engage with more material considerations

since, as Dirlik (1994, 356) states:

 23

…neglect of these renders impossible the cognitive mapping that must be the point of

departure for any practice of resistance and leaves such mapping as there is in the

domain of those who manage the capitalist world economy.

If the neglect of global economic inequalities and the lived experiences of postcoloniality

undermines the political imperatives of anti-colonialism, the potential of postcolonial

geographies lies in their abilities to interrogate the interconnections, and complex spatialities

of postcoloniality and to give proper attentiveness to dialogue and difference.

The latter is particularly important given that one of the central paradoxes of

postcolonialism is the charge that it has become institutionalised, representing the interests of

a western-based intellectual élite who speak the language of the contemporary western

academy while perpetuating the exclusion of the formerly colonised and continually

oppressed (Ahmad, 1992; Loomba, 1998; McClintock, 1992; Watts, 1995). There is, of

course, an inherent possibility that postcolonialism might become a new colonising discourse

and yet another subjection to foreign formations and epistemologies from the English-

speaking centres of global power. This is certainly how many critics in Latin America, for

example, have viewed postcolonialism (Klor de Alva, 1992; see also Ashcroft, 2000). As

Ashcroft (2000, 24) argues, however, rather than a new hegemonic field, we might see the

postcolonial as a way of talking about the political and discursive strategies of formerly

colonised societies and peoples. Again geographers are ideally placed in this regard and in

more carefully viewing the various forms of anti-systemic operations of global capitalism. As

Spivak (1990) argues, however, there is still a need for greater sensitivity to the relationship

between power, authority, positionality and knowledge. The paradox for many scholars

writing within a postcolonial framework about people outside their own cultural milieu is that

they are inevitably located in the global hegemony of western scholarship; in other words,
 24

western domination of the global economy of the production, publication, distribution and

consumption of information and ideas.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the organisers of and participants at the Geography and Postcolonialism

International Workshop for creating a friendly and stimulating environment in which to

discuss the ideas in this paper. I am grateful to participants at the Postcolonialising Geography

workshop at the Open University (November 2002), where these ideas were first presented,

for raising a number of thought-provoking issues. Finally, I would like to thank Ian Cook and

Jane Pollard and two anonymous referees for their generous and constructive suggestions. The

usual disclaimers apply.

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NOTES

i
Indeed this journal has been at the forefront of many of these debates (see Driver and Yeoh
(2000). Several innovative projects are also in progress in Asian universities; teams at the
Department of Geography (NUS), for example, are researching how cultural and social
geographies are taught and practiced in the region, how the region has been produced through
Cold War area studies and development discourses and imagining new theoretical frameworks
for understanding Southeast Asian geographies (Bunnell, pers. comm. 2002). Explicitly
postcolonial geographies are also being written from Southeast Asia (see, for example, Bishop
et al. (2003); Kusno (2000)).
ii
This raises questions about where postcolonial geography (which has its origins in an
engagement with the representational) ends and critical „development geography‟ (alert to
global inequalities) begins. This is worthy of further debate, but I argue for now that a concern
for material practices and spaces need not be disconnected from discourses, texts, imaginings
and counter-imaginings since there are fundamental entanglements between the two.
iii
Research on the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) union in Las Vegas is
particularly instructive (Rothman and Davis, 1999); see also Sherman and Voss (2000) on
immigrant unionisation in the San Francisco hotel industry. There are also new forms of
organisation emerging in many post-independence countries to ensure that the interests of
previously marginalized workers are placed on national agendas.