Postcolonialism: Orientalism and the geographical imagination

This is the first of two articles that together outline of what use an understanding of postcolonialism can be for geography students. Here, I suggest that what has come to be known as ‘postcolonial theory’ offers students a valuable tool for a critical and inquisitive undoing of our received geographical knowledges, particularly in order to interrogate inequalities, power and privilege. This article briefly sketches the origins and underpinnings of postcolonialism in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), before using the example of India to stress how postcolonialism reveals both the colonial origins of material geographical space, and our more subjective geographical imaginations of such formerly colonial spaces. In the second article (to be published later in 2012), I discuss the production of postcolonial spaces and identities.