Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 representation of the world has been termed “worlding” by certain theorists or “geo-graphing” by others, literally the writing of global political space. To examine this will require asking philosophical questions about how cultures construct meanings, how these meanings are central to the development of state institutions, how states develop geopolitical cultures, what debates and traditions characterize these geopolitical cultures and how these cultures operate on a daily basis, at “high” or formalized sites, like in universities and think tanks, and “low” sites, like in newspapers, films, magazines and popular culture. It also requires thinking through the relationship between geopolitical discourses and foreign policy institutions and practices. And it requires thinking about the relationship of these discourses and institutional practices to process of globalization and transnationalization. More specifically, the term was used in the twentieth century to describe the broad relationship between geography, states, and world power politics. In the conventional conceptions that dominated the twentieth century, geopolitics was a panoptic form of power/knowledge that sought to analyze the condition of world power in order to aid the practice of statecraft by great powers. Embedded within the imperialist projects of various states throughout the century, geopolitics generated comprehensive visions of world politics. Our imaginative geography for the processes of cultural intervention has been shaped by the long tradition of efforts to forge effective political formations in times of global crisis, efforts with transnational ambitions that have profoundly shaped the history of the 20 th century— including, in particular, the legacies of anti-colonial movements and other internationalist thought. The global war prison can simply be framed as a dispersed series of sites where sovereign power and bio-power productively struggle for a room for action. In a situation like this, terms such as “clash of civilization”, “permanent war” and “cultural dichotomy” become concepts that incited critical speculations on the importance of geography. As a result, more attention has been paid to the spatial paradigm in the scholarly as well as artistic or fictional works. This tremor is characterized by a rhetorical address which shows how various individuals see their positions with broader political realities. This, of course, navigates those questions and interventions regarding the politics of space in providing a critical voice on contemporary concerns of the oppressed individuals and minorities. “Imaginative Geography”, Geopolitics and Postmodern Condition: The recent postmodern turn and concomitant reconceptualization of space in social theory have encouraged numerous investigators, cultural theorists especially, to augment, even to replace, material with metaphorical space; one whereby “geographical imaginations” play constitutive roles in space - society relationships. A leading contributor has been Edward Said, who aims at refashioning spatial sensibilities not only in traditional “geographic” terms but in a broader epistemological sense. Committed to transgressing established borders, Said invites us to imagine new topographies, in which units heretofore deemed separate -- cultures, professions, realms of experience -- become inescapably hybrid and interpenetrating, or what he terms as “intertwined histories and overlapping territories”. It can be noted that for Said history is not “preordained” since it can be influenced by ideas and not by economics alone, as maintained by orthodox Marxists. He believes that all events and ideas are historicized and contextualized in time and place, and universal ideas are part of the hegemonic exclusion in which imaginative geography has been a key-factor. This explains why he considers the vitality of language as a dramatic and active social construction that plays a material role in creating the social history of the world. In this regard, Culture and Imperialism is significant for its global range and scholarly references that give the reader a wellresearched and imaginatively recreated history of the last two centuries of European imperialism, Vol. II. Issue. III 116 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 stretching from Romanticism to the contemporary postcolonial/postmodern scenario, with the intervening period of nationalist struggles of modernism. Said has contended that “stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.” (xii) In essence, and in light of Said’s concept of imaginative geography, there is this question which goes beyond Said’s critique of Orientalist/colonialist and imperialist discourse to a wider range of postmodern and transnational bondings: If postmodernist theory gloats in difference, hybridity and indeterminacy, how can it answer the proposition that inequality among races is reduced only to “difference” and pluralism, and how can geography become a free human space? In order to relate space to culture, Said has directed our attention to the “privileged role of culture” in directing our geographical map, and insists that “the extraordinary global reach of classical nineteenth-and early- twentieth century European imperialism still casts a considerable shadows over our own times” (5). Said’s concept of imaginative geography celebrates a postmodern receptivity in the sense that it rejects the idea of an enclosed space. “I have kept in mind the idea” argues Said “that the earth is in effect our world in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually don not exist. Just as none us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from struggle over geography, that struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms , about images and imaginary (7). With the presence of infinite possibilities of meaning, reality almost certainly begins to crumble. However, to say that postmodernist views of history are nihilistic is to miss the main argument: no one has ever denied that history can be written. Postmodernists do not ignore logical arguments, verification and archival research. But neither do they maintain that all interpretations are valid. Postmodernism only asserts that there is never only one meaning. Postmodernists question the efficacy of truth since they believe that actuality is only a historical and cultural fabrication. They are not of the view that history is only creative fiction, as is commonly assumed, or that every perspective on the past is as valid as the other. According to Sad, this is “a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience (7). “Truth” and “representation” are the two postmodern concerns that flashed throughout his critical and theoretical works. He incessantly shows his disavowal of the Orientalist (mis)representation and (mis)conception of the other people, regions and cultures. Therefore, an imagined spatial and cultural distinction has been created by Orientalsit discourse that reduces human geography into a space of inequality and difference rather a space of hybridity and intertwined partnership. Said has speculated on this issue in the following lines: this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word “arbitrary” here because imaginative geography of the “our land—barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our own minds; “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from “ours.” … The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural ones in expected ways. Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is “out there,” beyond one’s own territory. All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the un-familiar space outside one’s own. (Orientalism 54) Vol. II. Issue. III 117 September 2011
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