Institutional Subjects

Question 1

Explain the colonial basis of geographical knowledge.

Answer 1

Africa was consistently presented as the most unknown and unknowable region of the world, as ‘nullity’’ (Barnett 1997)
RGS established its scientific credibility and prominence on the public stage through its clear association with the exploration of the African continent.
Geography was at the head of a ‘multi-faceted project to expand European hegemony’
Knowledge and scientific expertise involved in the expansion of the empire, subjugating other knowledges as it did.

Question 2

How were women involved in exploration?

Answer 2

Empire was ‘ a nostalgic space where men might escape the many domestic challenges to psychic coherence in a place where they could enjoy the pleasures of action unfettered by the challenge of feminism, socialism, or democracy (Kearns 2009)

Exploration often seen as beyond the capacity of women.

Women travellers, such as Mary Kingsley, often ended up upholding masculinity?
Presented herself as the first ‘Englishman’ to climb Mount Cameroon
Women arguably benefited from the economic and political subjugation of indigenous peoples and share many of the accompanying attributes of racism, paternalism, ethnocentrism and national chauvinism.

Question 3

How was masculinity implicated?

Answer 3

Masculinity reproduced in the ‘domineering view of the single point of the omniscient observer of the landscape

Question 4

Relationship between racialisation and geography?

Answer 4

Explorers promoted racial differences, with white as the norm against which other subject-positions were constructed.
Enforced Europeans’ monopoly over legitimate knowledge - written and graphical representation; denied validity as knowledge to modes of knowing that contradict the standards and conventions of European science.
Institutionally disciplined production of knowledge characterised by elision and erasure.

Claiming places as dark and thus requiring enlightenment through religion and science, enabled domination.

Question 5

Describe knowledge production in a postcolonial world?

Answer 5

The global market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material (“data”) to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa (Mamdani 2011).

• > Does the research that Africans do benefit African communities?
• > Does it reflect the priorities of African communities?

Question 6

What is postcolonialism?

Answer 6

‘Postcolonial approaches speak to the violence towards, and the marginalization of, postcolonial subjects and knowledges whose exclusion from metropolitan status is embedded in notions of cultural and racial difference’ (Radcliffe 2005: 292).

‘Postcolonialism provides a nuanced critique of western institutions’ spatial metaphors, challenging the ways dominant discourses come into being’ (Radcliffe 2005: 292).

Postcolonialism ‘is a project to disabuse social theory, and perhaps spatial theory of its claims to universalism’ (Robinson 2003: 650)

Question 7

Explain the decolonial critique of more-than-human geographies.

Answer 7

Sundberg (2014) criticizes the universalizing discourse of post-humanist geographies, such as Braun and Whatmore
‘More-than-human methodologies’ - Sundberg refers to as self-referential circle of Anglo-Eurocentred thinkers – silence about location and self, and about indigenous scholarship which articulates non-dualist framework