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.

To develop this idea further, Said also demonstrates how this same process operates in relation to time. He argues, in this section of Orientalism, that seemingly settled temporal markers such as “long ago,” “the beginning,” and “at the end of time” are useless unless they’re endowed with some additional meanings. For example, for a scholar of Medieval Europe, “long ago” has a much different meaning than for an evolutionary biologist, in much the same way that my sense of the material space of my childhood home is qualitatively different than my father’s. Consequently, Said would have us think through how space and time converge together to form a particular understanding of the Orient. In his words: “For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away. This is no less true of the feelings we often have that we would have been more “at home” in the sixteenth century or in Tahiti” .

But what does this have to do with Orientalism, and Said’s determined attempts to underline the power relations at the heart of the imperial order? To answer this, I’d like to highlight two key features of Said’s imaginative geographies. The first feature comes through in the last citation I provided. In it, he refers to the dramatization of distance and difference involved in the imaginative geographical process. Key to Said’s theorization, is the folding of difference through a series of what geographer Nicholas Blomley calls spatializations, or a set of geographical markers such as grids, surveys, and territories, among others.

Said argues that these partitions and enclosures work to more clearly demarcate a familiar space that is “ours” from one that is “theirs.” To illustrate this, he gives the example of a group of people living on a few acres of land who set up boundaries and call the territory beyond these boundaries the ‘land of the barbarians.’ Clearly this distinction is arbitrary, in that it does not depend on the so-called barbarians to acknowledge the our land-barbarian land distinction. Said goes on the explain that it is thus enough to set up the distinction in our minds: they become they and us becomes us in relation to territory, and perhaps other factors such as social, ethnic and cultural markers.

Considering this, I would argue that the heart of Said’s geographical project lies in his explication of how distance itself is not fixed, in the same sense as the corridor or closet in the inside of our homes, since the idea of distance is created and made intelligible through cultural practices, such as the poetics of space, where, as in the first citation I provided above, “the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here.” Consequently, Said lays out the cultural practices that produce Western knowledge about the Orient throughout Orientalism.

Fragments of the second key feature of the concept of imaginative geographies that I’d like to highlight can also be found in the last citation, when Said gestures to how imaginative geography can “help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself…” As we all know, Said argues throughout Orientalism that far from being an innocent project of imperial meaning-making, Orientalism has helped to produce European imperial subjects. Thus, the role imaginative geographies play in forming a sense of place through understandings of belonging and non-belonging in space, also forcefully produce a sense of self, an imperial identity. For Said, there is an intimate connection between the spatialities of various imaginative geographies and the production of identity. One could say, in a gesture to Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, that space and subjectivity are mutually constitutive, in that subjects define a particular space in the ways Said discusses, and a given space produces particular subjects.

So, living in Paris, for example, I may have a particular, historically-specific way of imagining and practicing my city (how I see the city in relation to others, what I believe can happen in different parts of the city, who I see as belonging, etc) which helps to constitute the space, but the space of the city also helps to define what type of subject I can be (what kind of neighbourhood I can live in, who I see everyday, where I go to shop, to play, etc). It is this interplay between space and subjectivity that I want to highlight here in relation to Said’s notion of ‘imaginative geography,’ before continuing with two uses of this concept in geography and post-colonial theory.

Other considerations

In my opinion, cultural geographer and post-colonial theorist Derek Gregory has most usefully theorized Said’s notion of imaginative geography through a series of book chapters and journal articles dating back over a decade. I’d like to highlight one key point from his work, one I find particularly exciting theoretically.

Building on Said’s work on the production of distance, sameness and difference, Gregory proposes that we see imaginative geographies as performative, in the sense that “[they] produce[s] the effects that [they] name[s].” In this way, space is not just a material domain, as in the walls of the house I presented above, but more to the point, space is a ‘doing’. And in this vision of space, performance necessarily creates newness, however conditional and precarious, which allows one to know spaces differently. Gregory uses the work of Judith Butler to frame the creative possibilities of performance, which in her words, are a way of being “implicated in that which one opposes, [yet] turning power against itself to produce alternative political modalities, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not ‘pure opposition’ but a difficult labour of forging a future from resources inevitably impure.” In Gregory’s understanding, one gets to produce a given space through its performance, so that distance, for example, comes to mean very different things depending on how one performs space. I would argue that this understanding of space as a ‘doing’ moves us beyond an understanding of space as primarily imagined, since it also concretely points to the practices that produce a given space.

For example, I might have an idea of a given space, let’s say Chinatown. Typical racialized understandings of this space include a focus on peculiar foods, non-western restaurants, perhaps even illegal activity and a general busy-ness. I enter into the space with these understandings in mind, so that I perform them in the way that I enter the space, what I do in the space, and then how I exit the space. For instance, such performances could include buying particular Asian products, and eating at a given Chinese restaurant. These performances of space allow me exit the space having experienced it for what I perceive as its difference, rendering it distant from my own experiences. In this way, I perform the imagined geography of Chinatown, in much the same way that the West performs the Orient

I am aware that I’m nearing the end of my presentation, but before wrapping up, I’d also like to run though another influential use of Said’s concept by feminist geographer Sarah A. Radcliffe. I believe this rendering of Said’s work is particularly useful for the discussion that will follow on this panel.

Radcliffe has productively used the concept of ‘imaginative geographies’ to think through how particular national geographical configurations are constituted. She explains that state structures and practices, such as national education, are often at the forefront of creating and maintaining imagined geographies. In this way, state schooling presents citizens-to-be with the official version of a national geography through an understanding of national borders, and important internal geographical and topographical features such as rivers, mountains, and provincial or state boundaries.

Alongside this official nationalism, popular, non-formal geographies are produced and circulated, through such vehicles as films, television, novels, the internet and others still. Consequently, any national imaginative geography must necessarily be informed by official and popular accounts of national space. As she explains, “The need for citizens of the nation to place themselves imaginatively within a ‘known’ territory, and to possess a ‘geographic common sense’ of belonging are part of the processes which produce and sustain nationalisms” .

Radcliffe’s understanding of the national dimension of geography overlaps rather nicely with Said’s understanding in that she borrows the concept of imagined geographies from his work and links it up with Benedict Anderson’s work on nationalism. In her case, she looks to the particular narratives that explain the territorial evolution of the state as an important component of national imagined geographies. For example, such stories could highlight a given border dispute or the loss of territory as key factors in the development of a particular national consciousness. In the case of Canada, I propose that a central theme of our national imagined geography is that we are a vast northern country, a land of expansive territory and cold weather.

This in and of itself is hardly notable, but as Radcliffe points out, national identity rests upon imaginative geographies, so that this image of Canada also helps to produce an image of the hardy, enterprising Canadian settler, braving the harsh landscape to carve out a new place for Europeans. Thus, Radcliffe highlights the relationship between national subjectivity and imagined geographies in such a way that theoretically it becomes possible to think through imagined geographies in disparate national contexts.
In any case, I believe Radcliffe builds nicely on Said’s concept by focusing quite specifically on the national dimension of imaginative geographies. What are some of the most common national geographies here in the U.S.?

Conclusion

This brings me to the end of my presentation throughout which I set out to explore four key theoretical points.

First, I presented Said’s idea of the production of distance through imaginative geographies. Distance, difference, and sameness all go into the production of place, or how a given space becomes associated with notions of belonging or non-belonging. Second, I discussed the relationship between ideas of space and the production of identities. My aim here was to demonstrate how space and subjectivity are mutually constitutive. Third, through looking at Derek Gregory’s work, I sought to explain the importance of seeing space as a performance, as something subjects ‘do’ in the everyday. Lastly, Sarah Radcliffe shows us how it is possible to use Said’s concept of imagined geographies at a national level to explain particular national geographical articulations.

Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Sunera Thobani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2007. 384 pages.

Sunera Thobani’s Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada stands out as an important contribution to the burgeoning field of critical Canadian Studies. In it, Thobani develops an exciting theoretical framework for explicating the relationship between national and racial subject formation that productively builds on the works of well-established Canadian scholars such as Himani Bannerji, Sherene Razack, and Eva Mackey. What Thobani calls the ‘exaltation process,’ or the process delineating the specific human characteristics said to distinguish the nation and its national subjects from others, stands out as an innovative theoretical contribution to the fields of critical nationalism, race and post-colonial studies more broadly. As such, anybody conducting research or teaching in the fields of Canadian nationalism, and especially, the constitution of national subjects, will find this book provides a useful approach.

Thobani begins her study with a thorough introductory chapter that lays out her theoretical project. She explains, in clear language, that her work uses Foucault’s theorization of subject formation within modernity, premised on the dual process of subjection and subjectification. However, eschewing the full and enthusiastic embrace of Foucault that has long been in vogue in certain circles of contemporary social theory, Thobani plots out how Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty in relation to subject formation, for example, in such works as The History of Sexuality vol. I & II, must be re-worked in any analysis of colonial relations.

To illustrate, she productively draws on the work of Achille Mbembe and Frantz Fanon, whose accounts of colonial violence figure prominently in Thobani’s post-colonial theorization. In Mbembe’s work on sovereign power, what he calls ‘necro-politics’ over colonized populations is enacted through the capacity to dictate “who may live and who must die” (12). Thobani argues persuasively that this conception problematizes Foucault’s understanding of the self-constituting practices of the subject, since different modalities of force relations than those present within the European imperial centre, the site for much of Foucault’s historical work, govern colonized populations. “The colonial world,” Thobani explains using Fanon’s explication of the colonial encounter, “emerged as a world divided: on the one side, a world of law, privilege, access to wealth, status, and power for the settler; on the other, a world defined in law as being ‘lawless,’ a world of poverty, squalor, and death for the native” (38). Thobani demonstrates how in order to theorize such colonial governmentalities, one must engage in genealogical work that interrogates distinct colonial forms of power, a task Thobani sets out to accomplish throughout this study.

Having demonstrated the necessity of conceiving multiple forms of sovereignty and subsequently, multiple processes of subject formation in colonial contexts, Thobani is able to lay the groundwork for her novel re-working of processes of subject formation.
Thobani does so, for instance, through an exploration of the role the law has played in exalting Canadian national subjects, in which she skillfully demonstrates how the violence of colonialism transforms into legal structures. Drawing on theorists as diverse as Walter Benjamin, whose “Critique of Violence” famously proclaimed that “something rotten in law is revealed,” and Giorgio Agamben, whose recent works on the figure of homo sacer and the “state of exception” have advanced highly influential conceptions of the relationship between law and violence, she explicates how Western forms of sovereignty are in fact racialized forms of power enacted in the colonial encounter, as per Fanon’s work on colonialism.

While Thobani offers a strong theoretical discussion on the relationship amongst violence, law and the making of national subjects, the true strength of her discussion is in clarifying how all of this works in the Canadian national context. For example, in explaining the formation of the reserve system, she persuasively argues that the Canadian state erased indigenous peoples from the landscape, emptying them of their human status, in a process she calls “humanitas nullius” (50). In doing so, the Canadian sovereign created ‘Indians’ as a new category of human life, juridically erasing the existence of indigenous nations (e.g. Haudenosaunee, Salish, Anishnabe, etc), since indigenous forms of sovereignty openly challenged Canadian claims to land. Law then comes to define who is worthy of the land, in this case, law-abiding national subjects, rendering indigenous claims superfluous, or indeed, against the law. In this way, the Canadian nation was conceived through racial violence, and the continual suppression of indigenous sovereignty has become the necessary condition of Canadian sovereignty. Thus, throughout Thobani’s analysis, the racial dimension of this national subject comes through clearly. In her words: “The sovereign institutionalized the subjugation of Aboriginal peoples, and the nation’s subjects, exalted in law, were the beneficiaries of this process as members of a superior race […]” (61). Therefore, according to the legal regime put in place, one becomes Canadian through persistent participation in, and tacit approval of indigenous dispossession, which, in the Canadian context, has become a naturalized feature of the colonial order, as evidenced by recent responses to the indigenous struggles in Tyendinaga, Sharbot Lake, and Caledonia.

While I cannot find fault in her analysis of how exaltation works through the law, I do wonder what effect consigning indigenous peoples to a liminality between Agamben’s zoë and homo sacer, essentially wide open to the law’s many violences, has on setting the terrain for indigenous resistances to such violences. Given precisely the diverse historical and contemporary forms of resistance organized against Canadian state sovereignty by indigenous peoples, and ongoing efforts to assert indigenous forms of sovereignty, I believe Thobani’s work, particularly in this section, would benefit from a more sustained engagement with indigenous responses to such enduring encounters.

In my opinion, one of Thobani’s strongest contribution lies in her empirical investigation of two national public consultations that took place in 1994: the Immigration Policy Review (IPR) and the Social Security Review (SSR). Using such theorists as Ghassan Hage and Sara Ahmed, she persuasively argues that these reviews provided nationals with a platform to express the prevalent anti-immigrant discourse of the time. In fact, she demonstrates how the reviews, notably the final reports, exemplify a “racially charged contemporary presentation of immigrants” (199) that scholars would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

Drawing on Hage, she demonstrates how by constituting themselves as ‘masters of national space,’ nationals are able to view racial others as objects requiring management or even control. This exaltation of nationals as those who govern national space can be done through the law, as we saw above, or can also be accomplished through such state-based practices as national reviews or commissions, through which nationals come to define themselves in relation to racial others.

Thobani’s analysis here concludes by providing the reader with what she sees as the results of the two reviews. In the first place, the reviews reproduced understandings of Canadians as white nationals, despite the ever-increasing racial diversity of the population. Secondly, they rendered legitimate the unequal citizenship rights of racial others, and even upheld the possibility of increasing restrictions on citizenship rights in the future. In this way, the reviews are a telling instance of the exaltation of national subjects in that they fixed the national subject as the bearer of a higher order of humanity in relation especially to racial others.

Besides a critical introduction to the process of exaltation, Exalted Subjects presents a solid argument for understanding the making of national subjects. Such work allows us, for instance, to plot the genealogy of the Canadian national subject, a project to which Thobani has notably contributed. While her analysis is strongest when engaging with empirical cases, she is nonetheless able to weave a compelling narrative, one that makes a particularly useful contribution to the literature.

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.

Having said that, what I want to do now is materialize this imperial encounter, through a historical and geographical exploration of Samuel de Champlain’s travel writing. I have American geographer Kathleen Kirby to thank for much of the conceptual work here.

As I suggested above, the Western subject during the Renaissance sought to define itself by cataloguing Others (women, natives, etc). Samuel de Champlain, himself deeply embedded in this ontological relation between the utterly unknown, threatening horizon beyond European shores, and the known, stable set of relations behind him in Europe, re-articulates these gendered and raced relations by rendering the landscape intelligible, knowable in the imperial imagination. Rajchman, relying on Foucault’s idea that spaces are designed to make things seeable in a specific way, reminds us that spatialization plays a fundamental role in the constitution of the subject (1991:82). And from there, we could interrogate not what is seen, but what can be seen in any particular social and historical configuration. So then, what could Champlain see? And what role did this vision play in constituting the imperial subject?

In looking to his first travelogue, Les Sauvages, Voyage de Sieur de Champlain 1603, we see typical cartographic renderings. This is Champlain describing the coast two months after leaving Honfleur in Normandy. It is May, 1603:

The excerpt continues in such a way, with Champlain describing the physical characteristics of the Atlantic coast with great detail. The impressive series of dates and measures with which Champlain engages his readers lends itself quite usefully to the rational, disembodied cartographic project. As Derek Gregory, discussing colonial modernity, has suggested, this enframing process entails setting up and treating the world as a picture, which has the effect of truthfulness (Braun, 2002:60), whereby the representation is understood as encompassing the true structure of the world. By disciplining subjects through dividing, deploying, schematizing, tabulating, measuring, and etc, the cartographer exemplifies the colonizing power of such knowledge (Gregory, 2000:315).

Throughout his texts, as Kirby explains, Champlain repeats this colonial gesture, making as little outward judgment as possible. Another important aspect of this story that would be far-too-easy to overlook is how such descriptions can also be read as portends of the crisis in male imperial identity, in that the dread of engulfment, as Anne McClintock has called it (1995:27), is everywhere present in the feminized landscape. It is as if without recourse to conquest, Champlain himself would be emasculated, lost in the proverbial wilderness, without bearings. Therefore, it is in minutely describing the landscape that the imperial subject regains a sense of mastery over his surroundings.

Even in describing the original inhabitants of the Americas, Champlain falls into this cartographic imagination. This excerpt is from an encounter he had with what he calls the Algonquins, near Tadoussac, on June 9th, 1603:

Again, we see Champlain applying the newfound techniques of cartography to his descriptions of indigenous peoples, but in this case, he makes use of a number of adjectives to describe his object. In fact, his fascination with the feminized indigenous body stands out as a clear example of the ambivalence of Champlain’s undertakings: he at once inferiorizes the native, treating them childlike, but then seems desirous of the female ‘other.’ Importantly, through this technique of naming the body, he renders people visible in the European imagination. The last example I want to give is from two weeks later, June 23rd, 1603. In it, Champlain returns to describing the landscape, this time around Québec City:

Thus, in these three excerpts, we see one of the key features of the nascent science of mapping, European cartography: the cartographer, in this case, Samuel de Champlain, removes himself from the landscape. He describes what he sees as if he is not actually there, in fact, as if nobody is there. As we saw above, even when people are described, it is as objects on the landscape. By constructing such discursive formations, as Foucault would call them, Champlain is able to frame himself as the knower, the ‘master’ of his environment, thus occupying a secure and superior position in relation to it.

In Kirby’s words: “Champlain is able to maintain the ideal of an encapsulated, independent space for his subjectivity that will be the hallmark of Cartesian…[subjectivity]” (1991:48). While this in itself might seem hardly notable, what is, in my opinion, noteworthy here, is the way that this spatial imagination, where the imperial subject is detached from the surrounding space, allows this subject to see himself as in control of the space, in other words, as able to manage it, to name it, to fix it in the imperial imagination. And as Nicholas Blomley (2003) explains, by enframing himself as a subject among objects, both bodies and landscapes, on the horizon, he manages to conceal mapping as an ordering device, which has a crucial consequence. As Sherene Razack (2002:3,12) has pointed out, the Cartesian subject, of which Champlain is a prime example, is the inventor of Terra Nullius, the well-known legal doctrine of empty, uninhabited lands, first developed in the 16th century, and later applied in the 18th century to facilitate imperial expansion. According to this doctrine, indigenous peoples were deemed to not exist if they were not Christian, agricultural, commercial or simply, not sufficiently evolved (Culhane, 1999).

In other words, what I am presenting as the undeniable power involved in the cartographic exercise goes un-remarked by Champlain and his fellow imperial discoverers, who see themselves involved in a quasi-scientific endeavour. Mary Louise Pratt (1991), herself writing about imperial travel writing in Latin America, has called this process the ‘anti-conquest,’ in which figures like Champlain claim an innocence in the violence of imperialism due to their ability to separate themselves from the landscape as disembodied subjects, and more importantly, through the way they are able to construct their task as one of pure description, as an objective representation of reality. Leading feminist critic Donna Haraway (1988) has called this the ‘god trick of infinite wisdom,’ where the disembodied subject purportedly views the world from above, masking the fact that what one sees is always partial and culturally mediated.

And my question, on this point, is 400 years later, to what extent does our work recreate this notion of anti-conquest or the ‘god trick’ in understanding figures such as Champlain? Besides a whole series of maps and settlements, what other knowledge about our surroundings and the relations within it did Champlain put into motion?

I hope that through this analysis we can see how the ability to map a space, to fix it, enables its authors to powerfully constitute both the space in question and the subjectivities formed through the process involved in mapping the space. And because colonization was from the start organized hierarchically, as I mentioned earlier according especially to racial understandings that subordinated indigenous peoples to Europeans, Champlain sought to influence and possess the world he came across, while resisting with great effort being influenced by this outside world. In this way, Champlain’s cartographic work could be seen as an attempt to get away from America and its inhabitants, to keep it ‘outside’ himself, despite his frequent trips between Europe and the Americas.

The solid lines that Champlain drew between himself, the land, and the people who inhabited it, reinforced and reproduced the lines between European white subjects and racialized Others. As Razack (2002:12) reminds us, “[Champlain’s] sense of self is directly derived from controlling rigid boundaries and specific practices of knowledge production to create racial space, that is, space inhabited by the racial Other.” In this way, we can see cartography playing a similar role as 18th and especially 19th century scientific racism, for example, which also sought to delimit the lines between the white subject and his racial object.

Conclusion

The main point I have been trying to make here is that as academics we must challenge the ways that subjects come to see themselves as innocent in violence, and one useful way to do so is by un-mapping the geographical imagination behind imperial adventures. To remember Champlain as a hero, himself innocent of the violence both within territories he helped to settle, and also in the broader European imperial projects, is to lose sight of the difficult genealogical work that must be done in regards to French Canadian historiography.

The imperative for such genealogical work has become ever-more pressing with such colonial practices as last fall’s Bouchard-Taylor Commission, where the racial order in Québec was consistently re-articulated.

At the beginning of her analysis of Canadian peacekeeping, and particularly of what has come to be popularly known in Canada as the Somalia Affair, Sherene Razack uses a well-known poem by Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ to set the stage for her analysis:

Take up the White Man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child (xi).

This poem not only acts as an apt metaphor for Canadian peacekeeping in Razack’s analysis, but also serves to locate her discussion throughout this study. What Razack is arguing, quite convincingly following a very thorough look at a wide range of documents related to Somalia and Canadian peacekeeping more generally, is that the encounter between Canadian peacekeepers and peoples of the Global South, in this case in Somalia, but more recently in Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan is a colonial encounter that is, in her words, “overdetermined by race” (6). As a colonial encounter, it inserts itself into broader national narratives about the civilizing role of Canadians called forth to bring peace, order, and democracy to corners of the world that are decidedly inferior, and thus, in dire need of help. She suggests that, in fact, this de-historicized narrative makes violence inevitable, since it is through violence against subjugated bodies that this fanciful national myth is actually constituted. She also reminds us how Canadians have actually been produced as national subjects through the violence done against indigenous peoples and people of colour, and that this history has in turn shaped the peacekeeping encounter. In this way, the spaces of here and there are markedly linked.

Why then, should we look at peacekeeping, such a cherished symbol of Canadian kindness and decency, in these terms? Razack believes that the strength of thinking about peacekeeping violence as colonial violence is that in this way it implicates us all, since it is done in our names in the first place. It no longer becomes about a few bad apples tarnishing the entire bucket, as she explains, but it is about dismantling the national narratives that set out our innocence and benevolence, our innate abilities as humanitarians, by probing their productive functions.

Razack uses national archives, popular media sources, testimony from the federal commission of inquiry into the Somalia Affair, various criminal and military trials, canonical literature (see Kipling and Conrad), and, of course, numerous academic sources to build her case. And while it might make for an at-times dizzying array of source material, in the end I would argue that she is able to use it all productively to dismantle several central myths in the contemporary making of Canada.

Among many other cases, Razack uses the example of General Roméo Dallaire, a well-known Canadian peacekeeper on the international stage, to illustrate her argument. Dallaire is the Canadian soldier who, at the height of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, was left with a skeletal UN force unable to quell the surrounding violence (recently captured in the film Hotal Rwanda, featuring Nick Nolte playing Dallaire). Powerless in the face of great evil, or so we are told, he returned to Canada a broken man traumatized and suicidal. Razack is not interested in exhaustively reviewing his role in the unfolding events or to probe the extent of his trauma, but instead focuses on how his story, and those of other traumatized peacekeepers like him who served in Somalia, has entered the national narrative. How, when violence travels from South to the North, is it largely “forgotten and forgiven, erased and de-raced” (7)? Razack suggests that it is in seeing Canadian soldiers as the victims of genocide, as overwhelmed by the absolute evil in places like Rwanda or Somalia, that this narrativized version of events takes place. This way, people from the South are rendered ‘speechless,’ an act that is accomplished because the horror is unthinkable and unknowable precisely because it takes place outside of history (22).

Razack asks us, in the case of Rwanda: What of Belgian colonizers’ role in creating the native-settler divide between the Hutu and Tutsis? What about the French army’s role in prolonging the struggle, or of the UN’s role in doing the same? These are of little relevance, since the story has now become one of traumatized Northern soldiers returning from a place of savageness, badly broken. And in a telling example pointing to the colonial nature of the encounter in Somalia, those Somalis murdered, tortured and otherwise abused by Canadian peacekeepers are made to take the blame for the soldiers’ trauma, since it is their very being that facilitates Canadian peacekeepers’ fall into madness, an old colonial trope. It is here that Razack so courageously implores us to recognize that this narrative is only intelligible through race, since the trauma can only be read if one accepts that Somali bodies are always already constituted as a threat, even when this threat is a 9 year-old boy looking for water, as was often the case in Belet Huen, where Canadian peacekeepers were stationed (the front cover of the book is an image of the military chaplain guarding several young boys, bound and blindfolded in the scorching 40 degree weather, accused of just this).

And yet, Razack points out that even as the racial nature of the encounter is everywhere evident, it disappears in the law and in national memory. As such, in the end it becomes a story of innocent Canadians duped by our military, and the very madness of Somalia. Once again, it is a story of Canadian victims, even though the entire Affair came to the attention of Canadians through the gruesome images of Canadians peacekeepers posing for so-called trophy photos with the mutilated and murdered body of Shidane Arone, only one of several victims of Canadian torture, abuse and ultimately, murder, as she so painstakingly demonstrates. This will to forget peacekeeping violence is no better demonstrated than in the conclusions of the federal commission inquiring into the ‘Somalia Affair,’ which stated rather confidently that the “victim is Canada and its international reputation” (144).

Of course, Razack is herself constructing a narrative that while compelling, at times points to her inability to account for obvious discrepancies. The relative weakness of her argument, at least in relation to the points I mention in the two previous paragraphs, lies mostly in her inability to explain why certain soldiers engaged in such acts of peacekeeping violence, while many others did not. She herself struggles with this same question on several occasions throughout the text. As such, the link holding her story together is at times tenuous, as is the case with the national narrative she seeks to dismantle, something she unfortunately fails to explore more in-depth. She could have avoided this by perhaps developing her methodological approach more clearly. What she calls the ‘case-study’ approach is by no means a settled concept, and her unpacking of it left me with more methodological questions than answers.

Another key point that fails to be properly addressed, at least theoretically, is Razack’s understanding of the national subject. While Razack makes a strong case for seeing the peacekeeping story as one about “race and the masculinities that make the nation white” (7), she offers very little insight into the processes through which differently-positioned subjects enter and are interpellated into this narrative. While I agree that colonial violence does implicate us all, it is no coincidence that Razack chooses not to look at how it implicates us all differentially, since this would undoubtedly complicate her rather neat storyline.

Another of this book’s shortcomings, related to the last, lies in its failure to consider the multiple ways in which some national subjects resist the narratives under study. It is true that Razack spends some time reviewing the anti-racist, anti-colonial interventions at the national inquiry and how the commissioners subsequently silenced these, but this story of resistance does not follow through her entire analysis. A more thorough investigation of the ways in which national subjects negotiate their relationship to these national narratives is needed.

Finally, at times Razack usefully gestures towards how the global economy plays a role in further exacerbating old and emerging colonial relations, as evidenced by her discussion of how IMF and World Bank policies, with the help of Canadian corporations for example, have impoverished many of the nations of the Global South where peacekeeping operations take place. However, never does she enter into a deeper theorization of how some of the new and emerging neo-liberal features of the global economy have led to what she is calling the “New Imperialism,” much in the same vein as David Harvey (2005, monograph by the same title) has, but with less focus on its material practices. In any case, a more thorough consideration of how the global political economy in fact helps to construct places in need of ‘peacekeeping’ in the first place, especially as this relates to Somalia, would have strengthened her analysis.

However, in returning to the strengths of Razack’s work, I would like to highlight her constant re-appraisal of the shifting moral ground in relation to peacekeeping interventions. Instead of washing her hands at the question of when and under what conditions one should intervene in acts of genocide or state-sponsored violence, Razack delves fully into this question. This is a refreshing act of candour in an academic world often loath to go beyond simply critiquing national policies. The basic question she returns to is: What exactly does it mean to act morally in situations of genocide and mass murder?

Razack’s answer to this answer is complicated, but stands out for its intellectual and ethical clarity. She suggests that it is not simply enough to stay home while events like those that occurred in Rwanda unravel before our very eyes. But we musn’t rush to the rescue either, since this only re-inscribes dominant national narratives of helpful Northerners bringing civilization to the savage Global South. A story of dark threats and white knights that renders whole categories of people superfluous and becomes an easy story of good versus evil.

It is here that Razack usefully introduces the work of Hannah Arendt to illustrate the dangers of this too-easy ‘thoughtlessness,’ or what she summarized, relying on Arendt, and speaking directly to contemporary debates, as the “repetition of simple truths meant to convince us that we are locked into a moment in history when the ‘axis of evil’ must be defeated at all costs” (162). She suggests that it is through this thoughtlessness, entered into in this case through national mythologies of good and kind Canadians specially suited to help others, that people come to see evidence of brutal violence, in this case peacekeeping violence, as simply ordinary. The answer, in Razack’s opinion, is to leave behind our national dreams of innocence and practice what Lisa Malkki has called “historicized humanism” (150). That is, we must think about how we get involved in international and national events using what she calls an anti-colonial approach, since this will allow us to get beyond moments of acute crisis. While Razack does not fully develop this anti-colonial concept, she does offer some insight into what it might look like.

She strongly suggests that a moral position worth holding would be to, “put ourselves back into history, rendering ‘evil’ thinkable and finding out how we have produced it” (12). In other words, an anti-colonial approach “begins with the premise that we are not bearing the white man’s burden” (164). Otherwise, as she has very skillfully argued throughout, we engage n a relentless collective pursuit at redemption that remakes us as colonizers and innocent national subjects.

Of course, how one goes about doing this work remains a difficult question. There is obviously little political support for the adoption of an anti-colonial approach, as suggested by Razack, since colonialism itself is popularly understood in Canada as something benign that happened in the past. As she readily points out, her ‘solution’ is no solution at all, since it offers no quick-fix. Therefore, in this context, Razack’s argument on the colonial nature of the peacekeeping encounter has most likely fallen on deaf ears in policy circles, for instance, since her approach not only calls for a revamping of peacekeeping policies, but for a fundamental shift in how Canadians see themselves in relation to others, especially people in/from the Global South. However, I believe this last section on the morality of intervention nicely frames her overall argument, since it spells out what exactly is at stake in continuing on the peacekeeping path we have set out, especially as this relates to the national subjects who are constituted by such encounters.

In the introduction to her thorough investigation of the ways in which travel writing helped to produce subject positions for diverse individuals within imperialism, Mary Louise Pratt relates two stories: the first, the story of her strange rural Canadian connection to Dr. David Livingstone, the infamous English missionary, through a letter hanging on her pharmacist’s wall; and the second, the story of the early 20th century discovery of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Quechua and Spanish-language 1,200-page political and historical manuscript to the King of Spain in the Danish Royal Archives in Copenhagen. At first glance, these two stories seem to hold little in common aside from a very broad relationship to imperial history. However, throughout this seminal work, Pratt manages to bring such disparate experiences of imperialism together to forge a meaningful engagement with and re-assessment of “the vast, discontinuous and over-determined history of imperial meaning-making,” (4) the major goal of her work. As such, she positions herself politically in the burgeoning movement to decolonize knowledge with a marked commitment to a de-centering of the Western eye and a rethinking of the relation between centre and periphery.

The starting point for the book is the mid-18th century, a moment, Pratt claims, that denotes a shift in European consciousness, when bourgeois forms of subjectivity and power were consolidated and a new territorial phase of capitalist expansion began. The theoretical lens she develops to accomplish this task is that of “transculturation,” a concept she borrows from ethnography. For her, this concept demonstrates how metropolitan cultures were shaped by the periphery: “…[the metropolis] habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis- beginning perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself” (6). This was undoubtedly a groundbreaking approach to the study of imperialism at the time of publication, since it promised to shed light on resistance and the productive nature of imperial discourses.

As such, this framework provides a meaningful encounter with the diverse forms of data Pratt tackles throughout this book. In particular, her discussion about the process of “creole self-fashioning” (113) that she develops in Part II stands out as a strong theoretical contribution and re-working of the relationship between the centre and the periphery, since it illustrates some of the ways in which the metropolis and periphery work in an unequally structured dialectic relationship. However, I would argue that overall, the concept of transculturation remains relatively under-developed. As an example, much of Pratt’s focus is on canonical European travel texts, an aspect of her work that limits her ability to engage with forms of resistance in the periphery and the constitutive dimensions of such configurations in forming European subjectivities. When she does explore such instances, as in the case of creole self-fashioning, she focuses primarily on European colonists’ influence on European subjectivities, thereby marginalizing the role of indigenous and African peoples’ resistance in reformulating the metropolis. I believe a more sustained focus on such counter-narratives, especially for their potential in contributing to Pratt’s goals of de-centering the European imperial eye, would have proven fruitful.

In my opinion, her strongest contribution comes in Part I, where she traces the development of a new version of what she calls Europe’s “planetary consciousness,” one that develops through interior exploration and the rise of universal categories of natural history. She argues persuasively, through an analysis of Linnea’s The System of Nature and writings from Europe’s first major international scientific expedition (the La Condamine expedition), that these new forms of bourgeois knowledge (e.g. science) displaced old forms and became basic elements constructing modern Eurocentrism (15).

She does so in Chapter 3, for instance, by laying bare the relationship between the development of natural history writing, the systematizing of nature, and imperial expansion, through a juxtaposition of the pre-Linnaen travel writing of Peter Kolb and the writings of three prominent 19th century natural history writers: Anders Sparrman, William Paterson and John Barrow, all of whom wrote about their travels in South Africa. She proceeds to demonstrate how, by their very objective and disembodied stance, the latter writers facilitated imperial expansion.

Subsequently, this analysis allows Pratt to build on her key concept of “anti-conquest,” which she defines as “the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony” (7). It is in the figure of the naturalist that Pratt is able to most effectively illustrate how the protagonist of the anti-conquest is most often surrounded by an aura not of authority but of innocence and vulnerability. This comes across most clearly in the ways that natural history formed a particular style of travel writing that aimed at territorial surveillance, appropriation of resources, and administrative control. In this way, Pratt masterfully demonstrates how one must consistently read seemingly innocent forms of knowledge production for what they produce, including in this case, how they form European subjectivities.

Part II, “The Re-Invention of the Americas,” also stands out as a strong piece building on Pratt’s attempt to decolonize knowledge. In it, she points to the ways that knowledge about the Americas underwent a significant transformation following the writings of Alexander von Humboldt in the early 19th century. Through his work, America was re-defined as young, new and ready for development, as a way to legitimize Europe’s neo-colonial project. At the same time, creole elites, such as Andrés Bello and Domingo Sarmiento, refashioned metropolitan understandings of the periphery to meet their own interests, drawing heavily on Humboldt’s writings. In this way, Pratt calls Humboldt a transculturator, since he transported to Europe knowledge American in origin, thus producing European knowledges infiltrated by non-European ones. In the end, Pratt argues convincingly that such reformulations facilitated capitalist expansion in Latin America at a time when Europe was searching for new markets, not coincidentally enriching the creole elite whose interests this process of transculturation solidified.

Pratt’s consideration of the gendered dimension of travel writing in this section is also noteworthy. On the one hand, male “capitalist vanguardists” wrote primarily about exploitable natural resources and focused on how European capital could help elevate the Americas out of its atavistic past. On the other hand, female “exploratrices sociales” often undertook more overtly political concerns, such as labour issues, but still from an imperial vantage point, even though in the case of the exploratrices, this meant a return to domestic space as one of safety and grounding, a feature clearly not common among the male vanguardists. However, besides these telling observations about the outward-looking, disembodied and purposely apolitical male writers and the inward-looking, unabashedly political and embodied female writers, Pratt has very little to say about what effect these gendered forms of knowledge production had on imperial meaning-making. Other notable works, such as Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather (1995) and Sara Mills’ Discourses of Difference (1991) have engaged with the ways that gender impacts on both male and female imperial subjects in a much more sustained manner. This could have also been a very fruitful direction for research and analysis here, but remains relatively unexplored.

Perhaps part of the reason this gesture towards gender is lacking is the sheer magnitude of Pratt’s undertaking. While her impressive grasp of a wide array of documents leads to a scope and breadth usually unseen for such works, it nonetheless translates into a notable lack of depth, which is particularly evident in the last part of the book (Part III), which stands out as a mixed bag of analysis providing very little theoretical continuity with the previous sections.

Despite this, the reasons why Imperial Eyes still remains an important work in contemporary cultural theory, 15 years after its initial publication, are quite clear. Pratt’s major theoretical contributions include the widely used concepts of the ‘contact zone’ and ‘anti-conquest,’ both of which are staples in fields as diverse as literary, post-colonial and cultural studies, as well as in anthropology, geography, and history. While her concept of transculturation has not caught on in quite the same way, I would argue that her general approach to understanding imperial relationships between centres and peripheries has made an indelible intellectual mark. What stands out most for me in considering her intellectual contribution is the way she meaningfully contributes to debates about the formation of subjectivities and selves in relation to imperialism, all while keeping her eye on unmasking discourses often understood as anti-imperial, or in the very least, altogether neutral. This can understandably be a difficult task, but Pratt approaches it with vigour and aplomb.