Beyond the European province: Foucault and postcolonialism

Abstract

The colonization of most of the free world between the 16th and 21st centuries has brought not only territorial but also epistemic and historiographical violence and domination. The end of formal occupation has not signalled the withdrawal of colonial categories, procedures and technologies of rule, nor has it beheaded Europe as the sovereign subject in deference to which many postcolonial histories and geographies are constructed (Chakrabarty 2000). Whilst Michel Foucault has provided many of the tools that are necessary to unpick the power-knowledge relationships of post-Enlightenment Europe, especially in their spatial groundedness, his silence on the colonial construction of European modernity and the mutual constitution of ‘metropole’ and ‘periphery’ is astounding. This chapter will begin by examining the haunting presence of colonialism in Foucault’s writings and will then explore how geographers have tried to commune with our discipline’s colonial past and postcolonial present. The use of Foucault in the work of Edward Said and the Subaltern Studies Group will be investigated to suggest a movement towards an analysis of the lived and the governmental that chimes with much existing geographical research into the postcolonial. The path I tread here is only one of the many routes through a field of study that could span, at least, Alexander the Great to George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and every country on earth whether as a colonized, colonizing, or indirectly influenced nation. Postcolonial forces operate at every scale, from trans-national flows of capital or bodies, global imaginary geographies, national stereotypes, urban remappings, to domestic routines and individual psychology. Postcolonial theory itself is a complex mix of theorists, including Homi Bhabha, Jaques Derrida, Franz Fanon and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Moreover, Foucault has been used to analyze