GEOG 3300
Space, Place & Scale
Department of Geography
York University
Fall Term 2011-2012
Week 4
Place and Displacement:
Postcolonial Geographies
Week 4
29 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
1
Approach
Descriptive
Phenomenological
Social Constructionist
Week 4
29 September 2011
Associated
Schools
Preoccupations with Place
-Regional Geography
(Richard Hartshorne)
-Early cultural
geographers (Carl Sauer)
-Spatial Science (1970s)
-‘ideographic’
-‘chorology’
-Regions and cultures
-Place as a thing: ontologically given
-Environmental determinism (although Sauer held that
culture transforms nature)
-‘Place’ remains largely undefined
Phenomenology
(Heidegger, MerleauPonty, Bachelard)
-Humanistic geographers
(Yi-Fu Tuan, Anne
Buttimer, David Seamon,
Ted Relph, Edward
Casey)
-experienced, ‘embodied’ or lived place
--’topophilia’ (Tuan)
-Home and dwelling
-belonging and attachment
-‘authenticity’
Place as primordial or Place as “mutually constituted”
by environment and culture
-‘romantic’? Naïve?
-‘Radical’ Geography
-Marxism (David Harvey
-Feminism (Gillian Rose,
Doreen Massey)
-Poststructuralism and
postcolonialism (Edward
Soja, Homi Bhabha,
Edward Said)
-Social determinism: places as socially constructed
-Spatial ‘turn’ in the cultural and social sciences
-Class, gender and race
-Transgression and resistance; power and privilege
-Postcolonial legacies
-‘ungrounded? Incoherent?
-What happens to ontology?
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
2
Colonialism
• Colonialism and imperialism:
– The process of expanding and controlling political territory:
empire-building.
– European colonial period: 15th-20th century (Portugal, Spain,
England, Netherlands, France, Germany, Belgium).
– Colonial motivations: territory claiming, resource exploitation,
economic expansion, cultural subjugation and/or religious
conversion.
– Settler vs exploitation colonialism.
– Colonial effects: slavery, genocide, war, cultural exchange,
economic expansion, technological advances.
• Decolonization: process of former colonies (re)gaining
independence [India, 1947; Senegal, 1960; Namibia, 1990]
• Neocolonialism (GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA; corporate multinationalism)
Week 4
29 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
3
Postcolonialism
• Postcolonialism: idea that legacies of colonialism persist long
after former colonies have gained independence
• Postcolonial scholars & writers respond to what they call the
‘logic of colonialism’
• Legacies: in politics, economic relations, culture (especially
literature, art, film), language, identity, international relations
• Postolonial scholars: Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952),
Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978), Gayatri Spivak, “Can the
Subaltern Speak?,” Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994)
• Postcolonial discourse: power and knowledge, literary studies
• Subaltern: those outside the post/colonial power structures;
oppositional voices
• Idea that colonizers need colonial ‘Others’ to reinforce their own
sense of identity
Week 4
29 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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The Challenge of Postcolonial Thought
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Spivak’s problem: “Can the Subaltern speak?”
Representing heterogeneity (Said vs. Bhabha)
Bell hooks: “marginality as a Site of Resistance”
Fanon on violence (ref: Algeria, Martinique)
Week 4
29 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
5
Postcolonial Challenges
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Cultural identity; identity politics
New dualisms: ‘the West’ vs Islam, the ‘East’, the Orient, etc.
Race and racism
Power and knowledge
In literature, the idea of mimicry
Hybridity and “third space” as consolation?
How fluid are the boundaries between colonizer and colonized?
Globalization: is contemporary economic globalization a new
form of colonialism?
• Is geography postcolonial? How do such perspectives influence
our understandings of space and place? How might the centre
be shifted?
• Is Toronto a postcolonial city?
Week 4
29 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
6
No History of Colonialism in Canada?
"We are one of the most stable regimes in history. ... We are
unique in that regard … We also have no history of
colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people
admire about the great powers but none of the things that
threaten or bother them.“
[Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Canada, comment made at
2009 G20 Summit in Pittsburgh.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/GCAG20Pittsburgh/idUSTRE58P05Z20090926]
Week 4
29 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
7
The ‘Door of No Return’
• Ile de Goree / Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal
• One (of many) slave transport sites on the west cost of
Africa
• House of Slaves / Maison des esclaves
Week 4
29 September 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portal_of_sorrow-senegal-01.jpg
Week 4
29 October 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
9
Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return
• Goree Island and the House of Slaves: the Door of No Return.
• Entire cultures reduced to fragments, impressions, myths, colonial
naratives (imposed)
• The loss of an entire history stolen, ruptured, ripped away
• Place as purely fictional: “I am constructing a map of the region,
paying attention to faces, to the unknowable, to unintended acts
of returning, to impressions of doorways.” (Brand, 19)
• The Door as a fiction
Week 4
29 October 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
10
The Map that Roared
• Matthew Sparke on The ‘map that roared’: critical
cartographies and postcolonial interpretations of place
• Sparke describes a native land claim trial and The
Historical Atlas of Canada as “cartographic negotiations of
the meanings of space, territory, and state jurisdiction.”
• Hegemonic and counterhegemonic tensions: relations of
power are inherent in all places and in all acts of placemaking
• Postcolonial theory and colonial legacies
• Derrida (indirectly), Edward Said, Homi Bhabha
Week 4
29 October 2011
GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale
Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris
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