ABSTRACT
In her book Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, Jane Jacobs (1996) poses one of the most significant questions for contemporary human geography: ‘Can the spatial discipline of geography move from its positioning of colonial complicity towards producing postcolonial spatial narratives?’ (p163). Here she points both to the intimate relationships between geography as a formal academic discipline and European imperialism that have been explored in recent work on the historiography of geography (Barnett, 1998; Bell, Butlin and Heffernan, 1995; Godlewska and Smith, 1994; McEwan, 1998), and looks to the future direction of human geography informed by postcolonial perspectives. This chapter is written with Jacobs’ question in mind. My response is that yes, geography can move towards producing postcolonial spatial narratives, but not in any simple, easy or uncomplicated way. Postcolonial perspectives are important for human geography and geography is important to questions of postcolonialism, but bringing them together is necessarily challenging as well as productive for both. Postcolonialism, as I will argue, destabilises some of the certainties of geography. At the same time, geography differentiates global perspectives on colonialism and directs attention to the materiality of colonial and postcolonial processes, something that has been relatively neglected in comparison to the analysis of colonial and postcolonial writing and visual representations. While the term postcolonial is sometimes used to mark a time period after the end of colonial rule, or to describe the social, cultural and political characteristics of societies shaped by colonialism, postcolonialism describes a complex and debated set of analytical and theoretical perspectives, variously informed by feminist, Marxist, post-structural and sometimes psychoanalytic theories, which critically explore the histories and geographies of colonial practices, discourses, impacts and legacies. Despite the different theoretical tools and focus of interest within this growing interdisciplinary field, its core concerns are the centrality of colonialism to the patterns of global power from the early modern period to the present, and the construction of the identity of the ‘coloniser’ as well as the ‘colonised’ through often racialised ideas of difference. Postcolonialism is both historical and contemporary in its focus, interrogating the historical geographies of colonisation as well as challenging their continued effects in the present. A critical engagement with colonialism and its continued legacies is central to postcolonialism.
