Postcolonial Geographies (Writing Past Colonialism Series)

254 Pages·2003·16.18 MB·English

by  Alison Blunt

Postcolonial Geographies
ALISON BLUNT
CHERYL MCEWAN,
Editors
Continuum
POSTCOLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES
WRITING PAST COLONIALISM
Series Editor: Phillip Darby, University of Melbourne
The leitmotif of the series is the idea of difference - differences between culture
and politics, as well as differences in ways of seeing and the sources that can be
drawn upon. In this sense, the series is postcolonial. Yet the space the series
opens up is one resistant to new orthodoxies, one that allows for alternative and
contesting formulations. Though grounded in studies relating to the formerly
colonized world, the series will also extend contemporary global analysis.
Books in the series:
The Fiction of Imperialism
Phillip Darby
Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology
Patrick Wolfe
POSTCOLONIAL
GEOGRAPHIES
ED ITED B V
ALISON BLUNT AND
CHERYL IVICEWAN
continuum
NEW YORK • LONDON
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503
First published 2002
© Alison Blunt, Cheryl McEwan and die contributors 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any
information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-8264-6082-8 (hardback)
0-8264-6083-6 (paperback)
Typeset by Aarontype Limited, Easton, Bristol
Printed and bound in Grear Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan
PART I POSTCOLONIAL KNOWLEDGE AND NETWORKS
Introduction to Part I 9
1 POSTCOLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES 11
Survey—explore—review
James D. Sidaway
2 CONSTRUCTING COLONIAL DISCOURSE 29
Britain, South Africa and the Empire in the nineteenth century
Alan Lester
3 IMPERIALISM, SEXUALITY AND SPACE 46
Purity Movements in the British Empire
Richard Phillips
4 INQUIRIES AS POSTCOLONIAL DEVICES 64
The Carnegie Corporation and poverty in South Africa
Morag Bell
PART II URBAN ORDER, CITIZENSHIP AND SPECTACLE
Introduction to Part II 83
5 THE EVOLUTION OF SPATIAL ORDERING IN 85
COLONIAL MADRAS
M. Satish Kumar
6 GEOGRAPHIES WITH A DIFFERENCE? 99
Citizenship and difference in postcolonial urban spaces
Mark McGuinness
7 (POST)COLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES AT 115
JOHANNESBURG'S EMPIRE EXHIBITION, 1936
Jenny Robinson
8 EXPLODING THE MYTH OF PORTUGAL'S 132
'MARITIME DESTINY'
A postcolonial voyage through EXPO '98
Marcus Power
vi C=OIM-rEIMTS
PART III HOME, NATION AND IDENTITY
Introduction to Part III 149
9 MINING EMPIRE 152
Journalists in the American West, ca. 1870
Karen M. Morin
10 EARTHLY POLES 169
The Antarctic voyages of Scott and Amundsen
John Wylie
11 'WHERE ARE YOU FROM?' 184
Young British Muslim women and the making of 'home'
Claire Dwyer
12 BELONGING AND NON-BELONGING 200
The apology in a reconciling nation
Haydie Gooder and Jane M. Jacobs
Notes 214
Bibliography 216
Notes on Contributors 235
Index 238
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
3.1 Regulation in the British Empire 47
Source: Sentinel, February 1888:14
3.2 Regulation in India 56
Source: Sentinel, March 1888:27
3.3 Regulation at Bareilly 57
Source: Sentinel, March 1888:26
5.1 Ethnic composition of Madras City 90
5.2 Occupational distribution of Madras City 91
8.1 The EXPO '98 site, Lisbon 141
Adapted from Visao, 1998
9.1 Sara Lippincott (Grace Greenwood), 1879 157 157
Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 43: 303
9.2 Miriam Leslie (n.d.) 158
Reproduced courtesy of the New York Public Library
9.3 'Miners refreshing themselves with ice-water in the 162
1,600-foot level.'
Source: From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, XLVI
(30 March 1878): 61. Underground scene in a Comstock mine
Reproduced courtesy of the Huntington Library
9.4 'Nevada miners': scene at Gold Hill, Nevada, c. 1865 163
Reproduced courtesy of the Huntington Library
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INTRODUCTION
Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan
Writing about his early life in Jerusalem, Cairo, Lebanon and the USA in
his memoir Out of Place, Edward Said explains that, 'Along with language, it is
geography - especially in the displaced form of departures, arrivals, farewells,
exile, nostalgia, homesickness, belonging, and travel itself — that is at the core of
my memories' (1999: xvi). The story that Said tells of his early life is a spatial
story, weaving together memories of place and displacement, dislocation and
dispossession, exclusion and exile. While he has explored elsewhere the
imaginative geographies of Orientalism, the contrapuntal geographies of culture
and imperialism, and the politics of place in the Palestinian struggle, Said's
memoir is a deeply personal geography that traces the inescapable, and often
fraught, interplay between a sense of place and a sense of self. But, as Said
shows, senses of place and self are neither fixed nor bounded, and while both are
located at local and individual scales, they also exceed these immediate limits.
By writing that 'just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is
completely free from the struggle over geography' (Said, 1993:7; also see
Gregory, 1995), Said points to the intensely political nature of place and to the
complex intersections of both place and politics with identity. Postcolonial
Geographies addresses the ongoing struggle over geography as both discourse and
discipline and investigates the intersections of place, politics and identity in
colonial and postcolonial contexts. Each chapter seeks not only to decolonize
the geographical constitution and articulation of colonial discourses in both the
past and present, but also to decolonize the production of geographical
knowledge both in and beyond the academy.
Postcolonialism and geography are intimately linked. Their intersections
provide many challenging opportunities to explore the spatiality of colonial
discourse, the spatial politics of representation, and the material effects of colo-
nialism in different places. As Ashcroft et al. put it, 'Every colonial encounter or
"contact zone" is different, and each "post-colonial" occasion needs ... to be
precisely located and analysed for its specific interplay' (1998: 10), so geography
should clearly lie at the heart of postcolonial critiques. 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, geographical
ideas about space, place, landscape and location have helped to articulate dif-
ferent experiences of colonialism both in the past and present and both 'here'
and 'there'. And yet, although an increasing range of geographical teaching and
research is located within a broadly postcolonial context, there have been
few sustained discussions about what might constitute a postcolonial geography
(although see Blunt and Wills, 2000; Clayton, forthcoming). At the same time,
although spatial images such as location, mobility, borderlands and exile