ABSTRACT
In a recent article in L’Espace Géographique, Jean-Marc Besse notes, almost with some surprise, that ‘one of the important references of [Anglophone] postmodern writers is the work of Michel Foucault, in particular the articulation between knowledge and power’ 1 (Besse 2004, 4). The fact that this is worth noting in an introductory article of a journal on postmodernism and geography articulates the gulf between Anglo 2 and Francophone geographies. This chapter on Foucault and Francophone geography explores the context of this comment and the corresponding fracture between two very different geographical traditions. It confronts, as Minca has put it, ‘the persistence of a sort of “parallel” geographical tradition that in France is still very much alive but (…) does not nurture a broad dialogue with the Anglo-American (“international”?) geographical universe, although it continues to exert significant influence on a number of European geographies’ (Minca 2000, 286; see also Staszak 2001; Chivallon 2003; Besse 2004). Paasi most recently explored the uneven geographies of knowledge production within geography, noting most convincingly that ‘binary divisions, such as Anglophone versus the rest of the world, thus hide that these contexts are in themselves heterogeneous and modified by power geometries’ (Paasi 2005, 770; see also Garcia-Ramon 2003). Simply acknowledging the breach between the two is intellectually unsatisfactory. The suggestion that there is an Anglo versus a Francophone space of (political) geography requires nuance and is explored in detail elsewhere (Fall 2006). Yet as a contribution to this wider discussion, this chapter offers one opportunity for a reflexive look at the production of scientific discourses by comparing different contexts, mindful of their internal complexities.
