Postcolonial Geographies

Abstract

Post-colonial is a qualifier that identifies both a context – that is, a country, a city or a polit ical regime after independence from colonial rule – and a theoretical and epistemological perspective on that same or related contexts. Such a perspective not only looks for and makes explicit the conditions of oppression and domination pertaining to colonialism but, crucially, aims at deconstructing the knowl edge forms associated with the latter and, in the process, integrates the viewpoint of the oppressed or the colonized. The first is essentially a political and historical marker for describing a period or a place, while the second is an ontological shift to see from the eyes of the hitherto invisible, racialized or exoticized, and integrate their worldviews into a more complete, non-Eurocentric anal ysis. In the latter sense, ‘post-colonial’ is not merely an adjective but a mode of knowing, and it is the epistemological basis for the field of knowledge known as post-colonial studies, with its ‘impulse to invert, expose, transcend or deconstruct knowledges and practices associated with colonialism’ (Sidaway, 2000, p. 592).