Filed under: Conference Presentations | Tags: Edward Said, Imperial Subjects, Space
This is an adapted version of a conference presentation I gave at SUNY-Brockport in April 2008. The title of the conference was– “Reconsidering The ‘Orient” and ‘Occident’ in the 21st Century: Observing the 30th Anniversary of Edward Said’s Orientalism”
Imaginative Geographies: Some Theoretical Considerations
“The objective space of a house—its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms—is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel; thus a house may be haunted or homelike, or prisonlike or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here” (Orientalism, 55).
Introduction
This paper aims to explore the concept of ‘imaginative geographies,’ one that Edward Said memorably introduced in the first part of Orientalism. I will do so by engaging with two authors who use, critique and otherwise engage with Said’s work in order to set up a conceptual framework for the following papers in this panel. In this way, my paper presents Said’s theoretical understanding of imaginative geographies, by probing his writings in Orientalism. I then point to the ways in which his theoretical work relates to current geographical accounts.
The second part of the paper looks to two theorists who engage with Said’s influential theoretical contribution. I make brief stops in the fields of post-colonial theory, feminist theory, and cultural geography and their various intersections, in order to consider how imaginative geographies have been re-conceptualized. This last part of the paper looks to point to new horizons in our understanding of Said’s geographical imagination. While in Culture & Imperialism he pointed to how none of us are completely free from the struggle over geography, over territory, over space, and over place, and this continues to be evident in the Palestinian struggle Said so eloquently articulated, theorizing what precisely Said meant by geography is key in building on his work.
Imaginative Geographies
The second part of Chapter One of Orientalism is entitled: “Imaginative Geography and its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental.” In this section, Said argues that Orientalism relies heavily on the production of geographical knowledge in the imperial centre, since for him any representation of the Orient is necessarily spatial. Yet, beyond the techniques of mapping that underplayed the imperial project, he is interested in teasing out the cultural and symbolic domains of this geographical understanding, since it is the cultural politics of space and place that he is primarily concerned with uncovering. Thus, his is not a typical geographical undertaking, one that seeks to direct us to the cartographic techniques of what he calls the Orientalizing process. On the contrary, Said’s aim is to trouble common-sense understandings of space, in this case of the Orient, in order to destabilize the spatial, and might I add, racial order upon which Oriental knowledge is produced.
To further develop the tension between the material and symbolic that Said is looking to trouble, I will turn to the citation I gave at the beginning of the paper. Relying on Gaston Bachelard, Said uses the metaphor of the inside of a house to direct us to how objective spaces acquire a sense of intimacy, secrecy and security due to experiences that seem appropriate to it. He makes the rather provocative statement that the objective space of a house is far less important than what he calls, the poetics of space. Through such poetics, the space of a house, its material dimensions if you will, are endowed with imaginative value(s) through which a range of cultural meanings are attributed to a particular space. In this way, through this imaginative process, space gains a whole series of meanings that are otherwise not naturally embodied in any given material space. A house can be haunted, a city can be cosmopolitan, a nation can be evil, yet none of these meanings come to the space naturally. It seems Said wants to direct us to the processes through which material spaces come to be understood in relation to the symbolic.
Filed under: Conference Presentations | Tags: Colonial Present, Imperial Subject, Samuel de Champlain, Travel Writing
This is an adapted version of a conference presentation I gave at the Université de Laval’s annual graduate student conference in February 2008– “Commémorations: le Québec et les francophonies”
Samuel de Champlain’s Travel Writing: Cartography, the Making of the Imperial Subject and the Colonial Present
I visited Quebec City last year, when I was in the initial stages of forming my idea for my dissertation. I was here to do research for my supervisor, whose work involves a study of the creation of les écoles normales in the mid 19th century. At the time, I was moved by the romantic nature of the old city, as I had been on previous occasions. But that lingering feeling also led to some unease, a questioning of my understanding of the colonial heart of the city that beat quietly underneath its quaint charms. Working in these beautiful archives somewhere inside the maze of fortifications, I was unable to quell that unease.
With this in mind, I’ve been struggling to find ways to articulate my ambivalence, both deeply political and personal, with the ways in which Québec City, and specifically, the early colonial period, is imagined in French Canadian historiography. In order to do so, I’ve turned to some theoretical literature that I believe allows me to interrogate the colonial nature of the historical narratives celebrating the founding of the city, and as is most often claimed in relation to this, of French civilization in the Americas.
I do so with the backdrop of an important contemporary manifestation of colonial management having recently completed its purported mission: the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. Here, the racist and nationalist practices at the centre of the Québecois nationalist project were laid bare for all to see, coalescing nicely with the planning for the quatercentennary celebrations. While I won’t comment directly on these practices in my paper, I will discuss the formation of racial space, through which such national practices become possible.
First, I begin with a brief overview of some post-colonial and critical geography theory in order to explore the imperial subject’s constitution in the colonial encounter. Here, I provide a close analysis of not only the role Samuel de Champlain played in constituting the nascent imperial order of things, but also of the ways in which subsequent European subjectivities were formed in the colonial encounter. I do so by exploring some of Champlain’s travel writing.
Lastly, I finish with a set of questions about current academic trends in French Canada. I’m most interested in understanding how and why intellectual cultures in French Canada have been so pre-occupied with historical and social parameters that don’t consider wider intellectual trends, especially as this pertains to critical race and nation theories that abound in other intellectual environments.
Un-mapping The Imperial Subject
When imagining someone like Samuel de Champlain, as so many of us do, poised to discover new lands, and found settlements in the wilderness, it is important to consider what role this imaginary plays in constituting social and historical relations.
As I will be arguing, the vision of the imperial subject mapping and thus taming the unknown wilderness is a central figure in the imperial imagination, what Kathleen Kirby (1991) has called the Cartesian subject. David Harvey (1993:15), writing in another context, has also commented on the 16th century cartographic revolution. For him, the most salient aspect of this spatial re-imagining wasn’t the discovery and acceptance of new mapping techniques, but the transformation in the ways of thought of those who used them. Importantly, many post-colonial and feminist critics have explained how this subject was founded at the expense of racialized and gendered Others, in the case of Champlain, the original inhabitants of the north-eastern Americas. I want to underline here the violence inherent in this encounter, whether sexualized and gendered violence or racial violence, all of which relied on European epistemological frames that deemed original inhabitants inferior in a forceful civilizational imaginary, one in which cartography played a constitutive role.
