The Dictionary of Human Geography (40 page)

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decolonization
The process, often long, tortuous and violent, by which colonies achieve their national aspirations for political independence from the colonial metropolitan power (cf. nationalism). Decolonization can be understood as the period of later colo nialism (Chamberlain, 1985). Modern colo nialism covers the period from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, and hence decoloniza tion is uneven in its geography and history. In the New World, which had been subjected to Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch colonial rule in the First Age of Colonialism, the first wave of decolonization occurred in the eighteenth century. In this regard, the so called Classical Age of Imperialism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was short, the first decolonizations of the second wave being achieved after the end of the Second World War. The two cycles of imperialism both concluded with a limited phase of decol onization, followed by the rapid collapse of empires and an irresistible push to political independence (Taylor, 1994b). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first challenge to the first wave of imperialism came in 1776, as British North American colonies declared independence. While Britain maintained its Caribbean and Canadian colonies, the Napoleonic upheavals in Europe so weakened Spain and Portugal that European settlers from Mexico to Chile expelled their imperial masters. By 1825, the Spanish and Portuguese empires were dead (cf. latin america). In the subsequent 115 years up to the Second World War, decolon ization was limited to Cuba in 1898 and two groups of British colonies: the white settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) granted internal autonomy and finally full sovereignty in 1931, and Egypt and Iraq after the First World War. The Second World War marked the death knell for european colonization: India?s separation from the British, Indonesia from the Dutch, and the remaining Arab mandated territories and Indo China from the French. The inde pendence of Ghana in 1957 marked an avalanche of liberations in africa, though the process was not complete until 1990 (Namibia). Between 1945 and 1989, over one hundred new independent states were created. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Decolonization is a process marked by the achievement of political independence, but the duration, depth and character of decolon ization movements vary substantially. In some African colonies, colonization was barely accomplished, and resistance movements of varying degrees of organization and institution alization attended the entire colonial project. In other cases, an organized anti colonial and nationalist movement came late, accompanied by a rapid and hastily assembled set of political negotiations in which it is clear that the metropolitan power wished to hand over the reins of power with utmost expedience (Nigeria). In others, it took a war of liber ation, a bloody armed struggle by leftist guer illas or nationalist agitators pitted against white settlers or intransigent colonial states (as in Laos, Vietnam and Zimbabwe). (NEW PARAGRAPH) One of the problems with analysing decol onization, as Fred Cooper notes (1997, p. 6), is that the story ?lends itself to be read back wards and to privilege the process of ending colonial rule over anything else that was hap pening in those years?. It should also be said that any account of decolonization presumes an account, or a theory, of colonialism itself: top down interpretations take colonial pro jects at face value, whereas the nationalist account denies any reality to the goal of modernization that the colonial state pur ported to bring. In general, decolonization is seen as either (i) self government as an outcome of negotiated preparation and vision from above by a colonial state apparatus, or (ii) as a nationalist triumph from below, in which power is wrested (violently or otherwise) from recal citrant colonizers. In practice, decolonization was an enormously complex process involving something of each, and shaped both by the peculiarities of colonialism itself and the particular setting in world time in which the nationalist drive began. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There are two forms of decolonization that rest on what one might call nationalist tri umph. The first is built upon social mobiliza tion in which a patchwork of anti colonial resistances and movements (many of which are synonymous with colonial conquest itself) are sown together into a unified nationalist movement by a Western educated elite (Malaysia, Ghana or Aden). Mobilization occurred across a wide and eclectic range of organizations trades unions, professional groups, ethnic associations bringing them into political parties and propelled by a lead ership focused on racism, on liberation and the sense of national identity of the colony, given its own history and culture. The sec ond is revolutionary Franz Fanon (1967 [1952]) is its most powerful and articulate spokesman in which the vanguard is not Western educated elites or indeed workers, by the peasants and lumpenproletariat. It rested upon violence and rejection of any semblance of neo colonialism. Decolonization rejected bourgeois nationalism (of the first sort); rather, as Fanon put it, ?the last shall be first and the first last. Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence? (1967, p. 30). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Both views depict nationalism as subsuming all other struggles and hence obscures and misses much history; both posit a True Cause, as Cooper (1997, p. 7) puts it, in which there is little truck with opposition. Mamdani?s (1996) enormously influential book on Africa makes the important point that decolonization posed the possibility of breaking with the traditional of European colonial indirect rule (what he called ?decentralized despotism?) in which African custom granted enormous powers to local systems of traditional (and therefore cultural) authority, and developing instead a sort of civic nationalism in which cultural politics did not play a key role. Most African states continued the colonial model in which African colonial subjects were granted racial equality and citizenship rights, but in which ?indigenes? were simultaneously a sort of bonus. In the historiography of the period, the nationalist road to self government tends to take for granted the depth and appeal of a national identity (cf. identity politics). It is precisely the shallowness of these nationalisms in the post colonial period that reveals how limited is the simple nationalist account of decolonization itself. In practice, decoloniza tion occurred in the context of all manner of contradictions and tensions between the national question and other social questions. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There is also a narrative of decolonization that has a singular vision, but from the side of the colonial state. It was the colonial bureau cracy, long before nationalist parties arose, that shaped self government on a calculus of interest and power derived from an older conception of colonial rule (New Zealand and Canada) as a stepping stone to Independence. In this view, Africa by 1947 had already been set on the road to decolonization this is a classic instant of Whig history in spite of the fact that the Colonial Offices typically saw early African leaders as schoolboys or dem agogues (Cooper, 1997). Another version of the dirigiste theory is rendered through the cold calculation of money and cost. It was the decision making rationale of accountants estimating costs and gains and who in par ticular gained against the backdrop ofimper ial power?s economic performance after the Second World War that sealed the fate of the colonies. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In all of these accounts for India as much as Indonesia or Iraq colonialism is as mono lithic as the explanations themselves. There is a reduction involved in seeing Indians or (NEW PARAGRAPH) Kenyans as colonial subjects or as national or proto nationalist actors. An alternative approach pursued by the so called Subaltern School (Guha and Spivak, 1988; see subal tern studies) sees colonialism as a contra met ropolitan project, moving against trends to exercise power under universal social practices and norms. It was ?dominance without hegem ony?. In other words, the hegemonic project of colonialism fragmented as colonial rule attached itself to local idioms of power. From this experience characterized by hybrid forms of identity, blurred boundaries and contradict ory practices, the process of decolonization must necessarily look more complex than simply self rule managed from above by the colonial state or mobilized from below by nationalist forces (cf. hybridity). mw (NEW PARAGRAPH)
deconstruction
A tradition of philosophical analysis and textual criticism begun by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 2004). Derrida engages the canon of Western philosophy from Plato through G.W.F. Hegel to Martin Heidegger, modern litera ture and art, and key social and political thinkers including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The general significance of Derrida?s work cannot be detached from the distinctive style of his writing: deconstruction works through the elaboration of particular texts, rather than creating concepts or general systems. The concepts associated with deconstruction dissemination, parasites, pharmakon, trace and others are like found objects, terms that turn out to have ambivalent meanings in particular textual traditions. As a ?method? of analysis, or a way of reading, deconstruction exposes unacknowledged implications in existing tradi tions. This systematically parasitical depend ence of deconstruction on other texts makes the application of any particular deconstructive motif a hazardous affair of partial validity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Derrida?s own work can be divided into an early phase of ?critical? deconstruction and a later phase of ?affirmative? deconstruction. Deconstruction first came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Although Derrida is often thought of as the quintessentially ?French? theorist, deconstruction has been most influential in the English speaking acad emy. In Of grammatology (Derrida, 1976), the basic lineaments of deconstructive ?method? are established. Derrida?s notorious claim that ?there is nothing outside the text? is really an interpretative rule, according to which reading is meant to follow the immanent patterns of texts rather than impose external criteria of interpretation (Barnett, 1999). In readings of Saussure, Claude Levi Strauss and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Derrida identified a recur rent tendency to render writing as a secondary, contingent medium for the expression of pure thoughts properly expressed in direct speech. Derrida calls this privileging of expressive speech over the risks of mediated communica tion logocentrism. He claims that it embodies a deep prejudice in Western thought in favour of the ideal of a disembodied, isolated subject hooked up to the external world by the fragile and untrustworthy medium of referential lan guage. In ?classical? deconstruction, this inherently normative evaluation of the rela tionship between speech and writing, orality and literacy, is subjected to critical analysis that leads to apparently perverse conclusions. If writing is able to act as a supplement to the pure form of expressive speech, then this logic ally implies that something essential must be absent from the pure form; it turns out that far from being a mere supplement, writing is a neces sary supplement to the supposedly pure form of speech. The analysis of speech and writing in Of grammatology exemplifies a general theme in deconstruction, whereby what is secondary, accidental or contingent is shown to be funda mental to the working of identities, meanings and systems. The point of this demonstration is not meant to be disobliging but, rather, to encourage a reordering of the terms of norma tive evaluation through which concepts are developed and deployed. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Derrida calls the assumption that phenom ena such as meaning or identity must have singular essentialist forms the metaphysics of presence. This term indicates the relevance of deconstruction to geography?s concern with spatiality and temporality. Deconstruction is indebted to Heidegger?s argument that Western thought has consistently privileged the present tense when trying to apprehend the nature of being, or ontology. By affirm ing the irreducible role of writing in the expression of thought, Derrida is arguing that all those aspects for which writing or textual ity stands spatial and temporal extension, and the dimension of difference that these imply are constitutive components of appar ently free standing entities such as the unified, self identical subject of philosophical reason. This is articulated by one of Derrida?s most important neologisms, the notion of differance (Derrida, 1982a), which refers to the move ment of spatial differentiation and temporal deferral that Derrida holds is the condition of possibility for any and all identity, punctu ality or unity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although Derrida?s work is most often thought of as a post structuralist radicalization of structuralist accounts of signification (see post structuralism), the concern with issues of presence, time and space indicates the degree to which deconstruction engages crit ically with phenomenology as well, including the works of Edmund Husserl, Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. Deconstruction points up the limitations of internalist, monological accounts of the self typical of phenomenology that privilege ?experience? as the primary modality of subjectivity. Moreover, rather than thinking of deconstruction as merely con cerned with the instabilities of meaning and signification, it is better to think of it as part of a broader revival of interest in rhetoric. For example, one of Derrida?s most influential contributions has been to popularize the writings of J.L. Austin on the performativity of language in use across social sciences and humanities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Deconstruction reached its institutional zenith in the 1980s, having become an ortho doxy in literary studies in the USA especially, although it was less well received in main stream English language philosophy. There is an identifiable shift in Derrida?s work from the late 1980s onwards towards a more ?affirmative?, although no less arcane, register of deconstruction. Less concerned with calling Western philosophy to task for its blindnesses, Derrida turned to the task of mining this same tradition for the traces of an alternative vocabulary of ethical concern and political responsibility (see also ethics). This shift coincided with a series of public scandals con cerning Heidegger?s Nazi affiliations and the anti Semitic wartime writings of Paul de Man, Derrida?s close friend and leading deconstruc tionist critic in the USA. In the wake of these controversies, Derrida?s writing undergoes an explicit ethical and political turn, focusing on a set of topics such as the gift, animality, hospitality, ghosts, friendship and forgiveness; as well as political topics such as sovereignty, democracy and cosmopolitanism. There has also recently been a degree of rapprochement between deconstruction and ?analytical? tradi tions of philosophy. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In geography, deconstruction has had a variable reception history. Derrida is rarely cited as a ?key thinker? on issues of space and place, yet he is a background presence in a number of intellectual developments in the discipline in the past decade and a half. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Deconstruction first came to prominence as part of debates about postmodernism, when it was invoked as an authoritative reference point for critiques of essentialism and founda tionalism in epistemology. This epistemological reading saw deconstruction externally applied to support arguments about the contingency of knowledge claims and the constructedness of phenomena. This construal of deconstruc tion owed a great deal to Richard Rorty?s pragmatism. In a number of fields, such as economic geography or critical geopolit ics, deconstruction is appealed to as a variant of ideology critique to help in debunking claims of objectivity and naturalness (see also cartography, history of). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The predominant anti essentialist, epi stemological framing of deconstruction has been supplanted by the more sophisticated focus on ontological issues. Doel (1999) pro vides the most systematic engagement with the spatial and temporal metaphysics of decon struction, laying out an alternative spatial gram mar of mobility, relations and foldings. post colonialism in geography has also been heav ily inflected by deconstruction. Derrida?s con cern with issues of reading, interpretation and context are intimately related to a wider critique of Western historicism (Young, 1990b). And, most recently, geographers have begun to engage seriously with the ethical and political aspects of deconstruction?s treatment of themes such as hospitality, responsibility, radical democracy, cosmopolitanism and sovereignty (Popke, 2003; Barnett, 2004b, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The ethical and political turn in deconstruc tion indicates that what is most at stake in deconstruction is neither epistemology nor ontology per se but, rather, a challenge to rethink the inherent normativity of theoretical reasoning. Certainly, any temptation to deploy deconstructive ideas as if they were social theoretical concepts is best avoided, not least because Derrida?s engagement with various traditions of metaphysical reflection is almost completely devoid of any mediation by socio logical or historical conceptualization that any such usage would require. In short, deconstruc tion might be much less new, original or dis ruptive than is often supposed. Deconstruction is not best thought of as either postmodernist nor post structuralist; rather, it lays is a prac tice of reasoning governed by the imperative of working through inherited traditions in critical, inventive and responsible ways. Deconstruction therefore continues a tradition of enlightenment critique, but with a dis tinctive flourish. cb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Critchley (1999); Derrida (1976, 2002); Royle (NEW PARAGRAPH) (2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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