Cirrus@Austlit

Author's 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 content 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. (259)