Gregory, Derek (1951-)

Derek Gregory is one of contemporary human geography's leading theoreticians. His early career was marked by critiques of location theory, spatial diffusion, and humanistic geography. In the 1980s, he introduced geographers to Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration, linking it to the tradition of time-geography. He also injected social theory into historical geography, including studies of the uneven spatiality of class struggle in England during the Industrial Revolution. Such studies of the origins of modernity enticed geographers to unveil its historically specific nature and reveal it as a particular power-knowledge configuration.

Gregory's exploration of postmodernism, including its general distrust of broad, overarching theoretical paradigms, raised the importance of spatiality to new heights: Geographies, he insisted, are not simply passive reflections of some aspatial social structure; rather, space is inevitably an active participant in the formation of social relations and their changes over time.

The book Geographical Imaginations, published in 1994, was a well-received elaboration on the ways in which seemingly different theoretical approaches reflected historically specific “scopic regimes,” ways of seeing and knowing the world that appear consistent and complete within their own frames of reference. Since the Enlightenment, Western social science, including geography, has subscribed to the notion of a Cartesian observer, who is detached, all-knowing, and objective, a view that led to what Gregory calls the “world-as-exhibition.” This notion underlies many seemingly disparate perspectives, including Marxism and positivist conceptions, and confers the power to know and define the world—both social and natural—on a rational, presumably male, all-knowing ego. Within geography, it was reflected in the triumph of abstract [Page 1381]space over lived experience, a position made possible only if representations of the world are held to be detached from the world they reflect. In contrast, Gregory argues that every theoretical position is necessarily incomplete and situated, linked to a power interest, and reflective of its utility in social life.

More recently, drawing on works concerning Orientalism, Gregory has focused on European colonial representations of non-Western spaces and peoples. As a power-knowledge relation, the active “geo-graphing” of various parts of the globe was an integral part of Western administrative control of colonized regions. The colonial geographical imagination demarcated space and brought alien territories into Western frames of understanding in a manner that drew critical boundaries between identities, the self and the other, whites and nonwhites, and so on. Empirically, Gregory's postcolonial work focused largely on the Middle East, particularly European and American representations of Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 19th century, as Egyptology became fashionable, Egypt occupied a central ideological position in the evolving self-conception of the West as both near and distant, foreign and familiar, ancient yet stagnant. Gregory reveals how Western imaginative geographies were laced with patriarchal, sexualized, and often racist imagery that effectively “othered” Arabs in their own lands as Egypt was thoroughly “geo-graphed” by a panopticonic foreign authority. In The Colonial Present, he extended postcolonialism into a critique of the so-called war on terror in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan, revealing it to be a war of terror against people rendered invisible by Western discourses that marginalize Muslims.

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