This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Geography
Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.
--Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
Over the last three decades, as the field of postcolonial studies has grown, several postcolonial scholars have proven Said's statement, asserting the importance of geography to understanding colonial influence. This is only natural, given the very physical basis of colonial expansion on the land. As Blunt and McEwan have recently argued, postcolonialism and geography are “intimately linked:"
In the same year, 2002, Catherine Nash highlighted the fact that in the new millennium, postcolonial scholars had begun to pay more attention to "discursive and material legacies" of colonialism within the built world (223). She noted that critical attention to "geographical difference, interconnection, and spatial imaginaries of 'progress,' 'civilization,' and 'development,'" have brought attention to the "material geographies" of colonialism and colonial empires (223). The legacies of colonial practices with regard to land is something which continues to shape culture and policy in countries across the world today. As Nash points out, the myth that American Indians didn't fully or properly use the land, which became a driving legal excuse for why colonial forces could seize it, continues to do damage even now in the United States (Nash 223). As I will discuss below, Ralph Cintron likewise shows the ability of colonial discourses to continue to shape urban environments through the application of colonial logics to the mapping of space. We Americans routinely work and live within the persisting bounds of a colonial vision for the land and its use....their intersections provide many challenging opportunities to explore the spatiality of colonial discourse, the spatial politics of representation, and the material effects of colonialism in different places."
Such intersections of geography and studies of colonial influence often focus on visual aspects of the colonial imaginary. Mary Louise Pratt has taken a critical approach to colonial ideas of the land in Imperial Eyes, a book which examines Victorian travel writing as it embraces a rhetoric of discovery. Importantly, the entire act of "discovery"--here relegated to scare quotes due to the fact that those writing Victorian travelogues were writing about land that was already inhabited--is a visual one, according to Pratt. The discovered landscape is imagined as a painting, "estheticized" by the viewer who becomes master of all that he surveys (204-205). The extensive metaphor of a painted landscape therefore establishes a visual authority of appraisal over the land on the part of the imperial power whom the writer represents, and the act of "discovery" is finalized when he returns home. The land only fully comes into being for these Victorian writers when they return home and "make" it so through its entry into textual documents--when it is, for example, named on a map (204). Such visual logics are pervasive within a colonial understanding of the land as discoverable, seizable, and usable, and the map is a natural extension of the landscape metaphor, enabling the division of and claim to the "discovered" land.