Cultural geography: postcolonial cultural geographies

Abstract

Cultural geography continues to be a productive subdisciplinary area and broad interdisciplinary perspective. This is marked by the volume of published work, including new collections of recent research and critical introductions (Cook et al., 2000; Mitchell, 2000), and a new journal – Social and Cultural Geography – which supplements those already established. Much the same could be said of postcolonial studies, with its recent critical texts and introductory publications (Ashcroft et al., 1998; Gandy, 1998; Loomba, 1998; Moore-Gilbert, 1997; San Juan, 1999) and new journals – Interventions and Postcolonial Studies. As with cultural geography, the boundaries of what counts as postcolonialism are also fluid. There are obvious crosscurrents between cultural geography, postcolonial studies and other work on cultural identities, processes, practices, politics and social divisions. Debates within postcolonialism, for example, intersect with recent work on whiteness (Bonnett, 2000), and wider discussions about the nature of the ‘cultural turn’. Following my thematic strategy in these reports, I want to consider recent intersections between cultural geography and postcolonial studies, though this is an inevitably partial account focusing only on one, albeit prominent, theme within cultural geography and limited to English-language publications. As James Sidway has argued, since postcolonialism has been marked by attempts to expose and challenge western imperial practices of survey, mapping and classification, ‘any mapping of the postcolonial is a problematic and contradictory project’ (2000: 592). Yet postcolonialism as a theoretical framework and substantive direction is a significant feature of recent work in cultural geography, and critical geography more widely (Blunt and Wills, 2000). My focus is on the material and cultural geographies of colonialism and on the spatially differentiated politics of postcolonial belonging. Interestingly, both cultural geography and postcolonialism have been criticized along similar lines. Recent concerns about cultural geography’s ‘preoccupation with immaterial cultural processes, with the constitution of intersubjective meaning systems, Progress in Human Geography 26,2 (2002) pp. 219–230