Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 93located people’s identities and beliefs in impersonal ‘discursive grids’ thatvaried from society to society over time. Finally, inspired by literary criticEdward Said’s Orientalism (1978), post-colonial critics argued that colonialpower operates not simply through armies, violence or the law but throughrepresentations of colonial subjects. These representations ‘construct’ howcolonial subjects are seen (and see themselves), which implies that‘de-colonisation’ is as much a cultural project as a physical act of theWest withdrawing from its former colonies. Together, postmodernism,post-structuralism and post-colonialism drew attention to the politicsof representation: that is, to who constructs what depictions of the world forwhat reasons and with what consequences.These three ‘posts’, together with a dissatisfaction with Marxistgeography and the first wave of feminist geography, allowed a number ofoppositional, identity-based branches of human geography to emergeduring the 1990s.These included gay and lesbian geography, anti-racistgeography, geographies of children and the disabled, subaltern geographiesof the non-Western ‘Other’, and a second-wave feminist geography attunedto the differences among women.Where Marxist and first-wave feministgeography had created a ‘social left’ – that is, a left-wing human geographyconcerned with redistributing wealth between social classes and the twogenders – the 1990s saw the rise of a ‘cultural left’ in human geography. 7This cultural left was concerned with those many groups who are ascribedmarginalised or stigmatised identities and, specifically, with how thephysical and symbolic content of certain spaces (e.g. the home, the street,the city) reinforced those groups’ marginality. Geography’s cultural leftargued that both power and resistance in society extend well beyond eitherclass or gender. Its rise to prominence in the human side of the disciplinecan be placed in the context of the so-called ‘New Left’ in North Americaand, more generally, the proliferation of ‘new social movements’ (NSMs)in the West from the mid-1970s onwards. Both the New Left and NSMswere an attempt to broaden the moral and political ambitions of leftwingersaway from a rather exclusive focus on (male) workers, class issuesand trade union politics (Box 2.5).What, it may be asked, has all this got to do with nature? In Chapter 1,I mentioned nature’s collateral concepts: that is, the other ideas (like ‘race’)through which ideas about nature find expression. I recall this here becausehuman geography’s de-naturalising sensibilities of the 1990s wereextended not only to the non-human world but to those things considered