Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism, often mistaken as a simple reference to the historical period following the end of European colonialism (i.e., that which happened after colonialism), is actually a research tradition, an approach, or even a paradigm in the social sciences and human geography that is concerned with the multiple impacts of colonialism as a cultural, economic, and political[Page 372] practice. First, it examines how, during colonial times, certain types of knowledge were produced to distinguish the colonizers from the colonized, that is, how a body of supposedly objective scientific data was collected to distinguish the colonizers from the colonized. Most important, this distinction always was a hierarchical one, placing the colonizing European powers above their colonized subjects. Second, post-colonialist work studies how this assigning of characteristics and values to entire civilizations meant that their identities, and the representations of their identities in the media (e.g., newspapers, school textbooks, exhibits, popular science literature), were shaped in ways that fit the interests of the colonizing power in establishing long-lasting negative stereotypes of colonized peoples. Third, postcolonial studies show how scientists, writers, and geographers were actively involved in the process of establishing, maintaining, and (later) defending colonial and postcolonial power relations.

As an account of knowledge production, postcolonialism is a critique of scientific, and thus also geographic, practices that first emerged during colonial times. In other words, it serves as a methodological critique that looks at the role of the geographer in the field and his or her relationship to the subjects of research. Postcolonial work especially targets the predominance of social Darwinist research during the colonial period and examines its role in naturalizing and justifying the exploitation of certain people on the basis of their race, gender, or sexuality. For example. at the beginning of the 20th century, the American Museum of Natural History in New York had live exhibits of Inuit from Greenland to depict the racial inferiority of what the museum referred to as a species. In London, a Hottentot woman by the name of Sara Baarthman was displayed and studied (even after her death) due to the large size of her buttocks to illustrate the so-called racial abnormalities of African people. In contrast to such cases where colonizing powers try to reinforce certain stereotypes of others with the help of scientific studies, even the formerly colonized have used stereotyping of former colonizers to support their agenda. In Zimbabwe, for example, President Robert Mugabe has sought to restrict the citizenship rights of gays and lesbians, arguing that such expressions of alternative sexual identity run counter to native traditional cultures in Africa. Thus, a former colony has acted here against what it perceives as the permissive attitudes fostered by colonial powers and uses the stereotype of the colonizer to reinforce a representation of its own original and native culture. All of these examples show how scientific work by the colonizers and the colonized has been used to establish notions of the ostensible normality of the former versus the ostensible abnormality and inferiority of the latter, and geographers have made significant contributions to uncovering these representations.

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