Theoretical Musings

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.

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