Postcolonialism and the Politics of Space: Towards a Postcolonial Analysis of Material Spatial Practices
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Russell West-Pavlov
Abstract
This article calls for a new orientation in postcolonial studies to the spatial material conditions of colonization, anti-colonialism and neo-colonialism In this article I contend that the focus upon problems of epistemology which gave postcolonial studies its intellectual strength, by displacing the older modes of attention to empirical history and political struggle, effectively pushed out of sight a range of material practices which had been described, albeit in the language of empiricism, by imperial history, and combated, often in predominantly pragmatic ways, by anti-colonial struggle. Postcolonial studies may need to recuperate the neglected history of material practices of space – the conquest of territory and its colonial exploitation – to which geographers have always paid detailed attention, from the perspective of an epistemologically informed and culturally inflected postcolonialism. Postcolonial studies would do well to retain the epistemological and representational insights to which it owes its extraordinary disciplinary impact over several decades, while refocusing upon the more elemental material – and thus spatial – issues which lie at its historical origins.
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Literature and the New Cultural Geography
- America/Deserta: Postmodernism and the Poetics of Space
- Postcolonialism and the Politics of Space: Towards a Postcolonial Analysis of Material Spatial Practices
- Literature, Travel and Geography: French Orientations
- Writing English Landscape History
- Placing Stories, Performing Places: Spatiality in Joyce and Austen
- Der Rhein: Poetik des Stroms zwischen Elementarisierung und Domestikation
- The Poetics of Geography in English-Canadian Literature
- Fated Landscape: Choropoetic Practice in Don DeLillo's Underworld
- The Traps: Bukowski as Interpreter of Cornered Lives
- Alexander Onysko, Anglicisms in German: Borrowing, Lexical Productivity, and Written Codeswitching
- Sabine Fiedler, English Phraseology: A Coursebook
- A History of the English Language, ed. Richard Hogg & David Denison; The Oxford History of English, ed. Lynda Mugglestone
- The Celtic Englishes IV: The Interface between English and the Celtic Languages, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram
- Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio
- Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553
- Sources of the Boece, ed. Tim William Machan with the assistance of A. J. Minnis
- The ‘Exhortation’ from Disce Mori. Edited from Oxford, Jesus College, MS 39, ed. E. A. Jones
- Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak
- Eingegangene Schriften
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Literature and the New Cultural Geography
- America/Deserta: Postmodernism and the Poetics of Space
- Postcolonialism and the Politics of Space: Towards a Postcolonial Analysis of Material Spatial Practices
- Literature, Travel and Geography: French Orientations
- Writing English Landscape History
- Placing Stories, Performing Places: Spatiality in Joyce and Austen
- Der Rhein: Poetik des Stroms zwischen Elementarisierung und Domestikation
- The Poetics of Geography in English-Canadian Literature
- Fated Landscape: Choropoetic Practice in Don DeLillo's Underworld
- The Traps: Bukowski as Interpreter of Cornered Lives
- Alexander Onysko, Anglicisms in German: Borrowing, Lexical Productivity, and Written Codeswitching
- Sabine Fiedler, English Phraseology: A Coursebook
- A History of the English Language, ed. Richard Hogg & David Denison; The Oxford History of English, ed. Lynda Mugglestone
- The Celtic Englishes IV: The Interface between English and the Celtic Languages, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram
- Innovation and Tradition in the Writings of the Venerable Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio
- Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553
- Sources of the Boece, ed. Tim William Machan with the assistance of A. J. Minnis
- The ‘Exhortation’ from Disce Mori. Edited from Oxford, Jesus College, MS 39, ed. E. A. Jones
- Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak
- Eingegangene Schriften
