To the colonial origins of geography

By proposing “ A new milestone in favor of a social and intellectual history of geography in colonial situations (P. 57), the authors of this book start from a double observation. On the one hand, the colonial empire, as a project and as a mode of development, is essentially based on geographic knowledge comprising, among other things, locations, cartographic and iconographic representations, the inventory of resources, the subset cuts of the territories and colonized societies. On the other hand, because of this usefulness, the geography which integrates into France at the end of XIX^e century quickly and permanently embodies a figure of “ colonial science “, Which makes it legitimate an epistemological reflection on the nature of its” colonial unconscious »(P. 57): Is it a colonial science in essence, belonging to a specific and carrier epistemology ultimately of a political discourse of domination ? Or does geography owe its colonial part, itself plural and heterogeneous, that in a sum of “ concrete interactions between the production of knowledge and the practices of power in colonial situations (P. 46) ?

A colonial history of geographic knowledge

The texts of historians and geographers gathered in the work describe places of production of colonial geographic knowledge (theses, geography societies) and the political and military uses of these knowledge. Plurality “ of the Colonial geographies, in terms of actors, content, aims, clearly appears to read these texts. Nevertheless, certain iconographic reasons (the figures of the “ native ) And intellectuals (the legitimacy of colonialism) are relatively constant from one source of knowledge to another, from exotic literature to learned monographs.

These contributions are part of a more epistemological reflection on the specificity of colonial geographic knowledge. By resituating geography from a perspective of history of science, Claude Blankaert criticizes the very notion of “ colonial science “, Which would involve in particular a coherent conceptual corpus and the aim of truly scientific knowledge. Colonial geography is indeed marked by a “ idiographical posture oriented towards the collection of useful data (Responding to institutional orders), for which information has more than the explanation. However, colonial geography is underpinned by an authentic reflection on the rationality of knowledge. Prove in particular the use of statistics as a privileged path of the inventory of the world, and above all a kind of “ sharing “Between travelers, simple empirical data collectors, and” scientists “, Which of their cabinets give shape and meaning to the raw material that the former transmit them. Another way to question the colonial foundations of geography is to examine the nature of the links between its three “ moments What are the geography of exploration, colonial geography and tropical geography. Colette Zytnicki offers an institutional reading of the transition between the last two, through the example of the teaching of colonial geography in Bordeaux between 1890 and 1948. The text clearly shows the ambiguity of a “ Sweet passage and without visible crisis »(P. 211) who sees changing titles (the Colonial Institute becomes the Institute of Overseas France, the theme of the” tropicality “Succeeds that of” colony ) But maintaining intellectual and institutional influences (the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce thus remains one of the essential partners of the new institute).

Between discourse of domination and scientific project

The debate between homogeneity and epistemological heterogeneity of colonial geography structures the historiography of relationships between geography and colonization. Pierre Singaravoulou identifies two competing readings. The first is mainly carried by Postcolonial Studies From the 1980s which designated geographic works as one of the privileged supports of the legitimization of colonial discourse. The reification of regional entities such as “ The Mediterranean ” Or “ Black Africa “, Oppositions between” center “(That is to say the metropolis) and the” periphery », Deterministic theories relating to tropical areas, literary representations of spaces» others »Either virgins or uncultivated, illustrate the intellectual continuities between a learned discourse of exploration and a political discourse of domination. From a perspective very marked by postmodernism, this critical reading requires the deconstruction of the discourse of geographers and their cartographic production (Eurocentrism of Mercator projection or the status of the Greenwich meridian, for example).

The second reading, to which most of the texts gathered in the book is attached, insists on the contrary on the great diversity of geographic speeches on the colonies and colonization, and uses in particular to social history to highlight the importance of vernacular knowledge and negotiations with the “ natives »In the construction of European geographic knowledge. It is a question of going beyond the globalizing reading adopted by the Postcolonial Studies and to contextualize geographic knowledge, even to recognize a certain “ modernity »Epistemological. Among other examples, the very structuring deterministic paradigm among Vidalian geographers has been questioned by the development of an analysis framework “ possible »More appropriate to development projects in the colonies. In the conclusive text of the book, Yves Lacoste thus recognizes that “ Geographical knowledge of the world “Has a heavy debt to colonial geography, which was” One of the intellectual investments in colonization most useful for the future of Third World Peoples (P. 241). It appears that the constraints of the field and the institutional imperatives which were confronted by colonial geographers led them to define criteria of “ geographic “Much wider than their colleagues” at the same time “ general practitioners », In other words to integrate into their analyzes an unprecedented variety of facts, which are no longer reduced to the description of geological and morphological frameworks. Thus, it is at its colonial component that geography owes in particular its openness to political phenomena, and it is this that tropical geography and development geography are the current heirs.

The limits of postcolonial studies of geography

We can regret that the contributions of Anglo-Saxon authors are not more abundantly represented in the work, in particular because Postcolonial Studies occupy a central position in the historiography of colonial geographic discourse, and that most of the contributions gathered in the book rather refer to a reading “ contextualizing »Colonial geography, opposed to critical systematism of Postcolonial Studies. It is therefore necessary to mention the text of Daniel Clayton, for whom colonialism and geography are so intimately linked that a simple critical history of geographic discipline is insufficient and must give way to a real “ therapeutic project (P. 220) aimed at expurging Western representations and scientific frameworks from their colonialist references. Clayton’s text presents itself as an introduction to postcolonial British geography. The author draws up a panorama of the multitude of objects and scientific approaches that compose it, and identify their points of convergence: reference authors (Edward Said, David Livingstone), fundamental questions (Eurocentrism, the conceptual couple identity/otherness), but also theoretical and methodological pitfalls. This last point is to be emphasized, because if Clayton clearly shows himself in favor of post-colonialist geography, he strives to explain the main weaknesses. Thus, no final response has been provided to the question of a geography such as “ Essence Eurocentric colonizing science (P. 225). Now this is a crucial question, because the very project of postcolonial geography is suspended from the possibility of a “ decolonization “Discipline, therefore to the existence of epistemological foundations” healthy ». Another possible pitfall of post-colonialism is textualism, as a focus on the only content of representations, without these being contextualized. Based on the hypothesis of a coherent imperial project, these approaches also tend to wrongly generalize observations made on specific colonial situations. Finally colonialism is too little thought of as a cultural encounter, an unequal certainly, but proceeding by reinterpretation and mutual fertilization more than by unequivocal taxation of a model. Therefore, “ The indigenous contribution is either left aside or subordinate to the criticism by being represented as a kind of background noise, or treated as a favorite object against which the colonizing West claims power, truth, civilization (P. 228).

The case studies gathered in the book provide, from the French example, a historical light on the reciprocal contributions of a science of space under construction and a colonial project in its political, economic and intellectual dimensions. The main interest of the book, however, is mainly due to what it nourishes a nuanced epistemological reflection on the colonial part of geography, as a sum of founding moments or as a consubstantial theoretical reference. This is a complex debate, the terms of which certainly deserved to be clarified, all the more usefully than the Postcolonial Studies are emblematic of postmodernist approaches which crystallize part of the very current controversies between continental and Anglo-Saxon geographies.