The Postcolonial Critique of Liberal Cosmopolitanism
It is one thing to go after the abstractions of Kant’s ethical cosmopolitanism but quite another to take on the philosophy and practices of liberalism. But this is precisely what a group of postcolonial writers, inspired by Eric Stokes and culminating in the works of Dipesh Chakrabarty and, above all, Uday Singh Mehta, have done so brilliantly with respect to the ideas and practices of nineteenth-century British liberalism in India. Mehta puts it this way: “Liberal theoretical claims typically tend to be transhistorical, transcultural, and more certainly transracial. The declared and ostensible referent of liberal principles is quite literally a constituency with no delimiting boundary: that of all humankind. The political rights that it articulates and defends, the institutions such as laws, representation, contract all have their justification in a characterization of human beings that eschews names, social status, ethnic background, gender and race.”1
The individualism it contemplates is deracinated, universal, given over, in true Kantian fashion, to a cosmopolitanism of reason and rational action. This remains as true today as it did in the eighteenth century. It was exactly in this spirit, for example, that President Clinton could greet China’s admission to the World Trade Organization with the comment that it opened up China to the rule of law (as if China had no preexisting body of law). And it was, as we have seen, the liberal tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith that Bush invoked in his Whitehall speech defending his politics of spreading liberty and market freedoms everywhere. Liberalism is vigorously expressive of a universal ethic: it refuses to privilege (at least in principle) any particular spatial or temporal context: “By rendering nature and the encounter with it sentimentally inert, Locke denies locational attachments as having any individual significance in relation to political identity. The sentiments in a person ‘coming from’ or ‘belonging to’ a place, and of those sentiments being constitutive of his of her identity, are all deemed politically irrelevant. . . . By not acknowledging natural or geographical distinctions along with their corresponding emotional attachments as having any political value, Locke and much of the subsequent British liberal tradition cannot give credence to the claims of territoriality that undergird most political identities and nationalisms.” 2
The facts of geography and anthropology are occluded, if not actively repressed, within liberal theory (and its derivative discourses such as economics) because they are judged irrelevant to the universality of its basic conceptions. The geographical and anthropological conditions only become relevant at the moment of application. But reflection on actual outcomes reveals a problem: how could eminent liberals, such as J. S. Mill, hold onto their pristine liberal ideals while denying the right of self-determination and basic liberties such as representative governance to India? How could they insist that it was perfectly right that India remain under the tutelage of British imperial rule, and why did it take such a long struggle for Indians to gain their independence from a supposedly liberal empire? As in Kant’s case, we find that the devil resides in the otherwise occluded anthropological and geographical details. “The details structure the outcome,” notes Mehta, “without of necessity violating the presumed inclusionary vision.” For Mill in particular, Mehta argues, local conditions “placed limits on the scientific aspirations of legislation and theory in general.” So what was it about these “local conditions” that justified such limitations?3
Exclusion from the benefits of self-governance could be justified in two ways. Under the first, a particular space and people were demonized or declared “savage” or “barbarian” and in extreme cases, as with the indigenous populations of North America, considered so close to nature as to be beyond incorporation into any concept of a civilized world. In the extreme case (such as that which Clayton describes for Vancouver Island) this means the erasure of all mention of indigenous populations as having an existence, let alone political organization or rights.4 A territory is depicted as empty and open for settlement by those colonists who could justify their rights to property by mixing their labor with the land in a true Lockean fashion. Descriptions of native practices, insofar as they were bothered with at all, provided discursive and ultimately legal support within the liberal framework for a politics of dispossession of those considered to be “unworthy savages.” Since native populations were deemed to be part of nature, and since the subordination of nature to the god-given imperative to be fruitful and multiply was central to “our” holy mission on earth, then the domination of native populations was both legitimate and noble.
The second modality, which became more general in India, was to treat the indigenous population as not yet educated or mature (the Kantian phrase is apt) enough to justify inclusion in the liberal regime of power and rights: “India is a child for which the empire offers the prospect of a legitimate and progressive parentage and toward which Britain, as a parent, is similarly obligated and competent. For both the Mills and Macaulay this point is the justification of denying democratic rights and representative institutions to Indians, along with various other imperial interdictions. The idea has a distinguished pedigree and in the liberal tradition originates in Locke’s characterization of tutelage as a necessary stage through which children must be trained before they acquire the reason requisite for expressing contractual consent.”5
This “infantilizing” of whole peoples is a common enough trope. The French took up the idea with a vengeance in the wake of the French Revolution by arguing, as did Boissy d’Anglas in 1796, that the immaturity and laziness of the colonized peoples mandated that they forever “remain content with being subject to wise and peaceful government by just and humane men who are enemies of tyranny.”6 Rockefeller appealed to it as the basis for neocolonial interventions in Latin America (in particular, Venezuela, which just happened to have oil) in the early years of the twentieth century. It was registered within the liberal tradition at the turn of the twentieth century as “the white man’s burden.” It continues to be expressed, though less openly, in contemporary languages of development aid or Peace Corps missions, and the whole discourse of “backwardness” and “underdevelopment.” It has been a serious problem in Marxist internationalism and radical developmentalism as well: consider the seriously flawed Sandinista approach to incorporation of the Atlantic Coast Mesquite Indians into Nicaraguan development in the 1980s and the disastrous consequences that followed as the CIA cynically exploited Mesquite Indian discontent to parlay it into the Nicaraguan “Contra” movement. The politics of such infantilization are implicit in Kant’s depiction of Enlightenment as a condition of human “maturity” of judgment (or “maturity of their faculties,” as J. S. Mill put it). Either way, the effect has been, Mehta concludes, to embed a politics of exclusion into the heart of nineteenth-century European liberal theories and practices with respect to empire. The trace of such exclusionary practices exists throughout the whole history of liberal capitalism, and it taints the contemporary neoliberal project as well.
This poses a deeper analytical and epistemological problem concerning the role and positionality of historical, anthropological, and geographical knowledges (“the details”) in giving rise to such exclusionary political outcomes. For Chakrabarty, J. S. Mill’s refusal to grant self-governance depended purely upon the historicist argument that “Indians or Africans were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves. Some historical time of development and civilization (colonial rule and education, to be precise) had to elapse before they could be considered prepared for such a task. Mill’s historicist argument thus consigned Indians, Africans and other ‘rude’ nations to an imaginary waiting room of history. In doing so, it converted history into a version of this waiting room.” 7
Since Europe (or “the West” more generally) was always progressing faster, it was then easy to justify prolonging everyone else’s stay in the waiting room indefinitely. Mehta partially concurs with this argument: the conception of history and progress lies at the root of the problem. “Cosmopolitanism,” he writes, “without the problematic of universal history generates and aspires to an ethics, but it does not issue in a program of paternalism and interventionist collective action.”8 It was only when Kant inserted the idea of universal history into his argument—the idea that “man makes himself” and that temperament can give way to character—that cosmopolitanism came to depart fundamentally from the purely ethical cosmopolitanism of the Stoics. J. S. Mill distinguished himself from Locke’s liberalism in exactly the same way. The idea of historical progress and of leaders and followers produces exclusions that can last in perpetuity.
Chakrabarty’s answer to this dilemma is to “provincialize Europe.” There are, he argues, separate spaces apart from Europe (such as India or Bengal) within which separate and equally valid temporalities/histories hold. Progress may proceed differentially and unevenly, but there is no waiting room to which any one people is confined. Chakrabarty makes no attempt, however, to justify the existence of the distinctive spaces to which he appeals, treating geographical entities such as India or Bengal as self-evident, and conveniently ignoring the substantial evidence that the very idea of “India” was itself a British imperial construction (albeit subsequently nurtured and nuanced by the rise of Indian nationalism). Mehta agrees that there are “multiple and extant temporalities and life forms” in different places. But he goes further than Chakrabarty by seeing anthropological and more particularly geographical conditions and knowledges as integral to understanding how imperial rule came to be justified within liberal theory. In somewhat tortuous prose (always an interesting indicator of a certain conceptual difficulty) he argues for “a hermeneutics of spatially contemporaneous life forms whose differences, at least a priori, exist on the same ontological plane and must therefore be understood in terms of a relationality of heterogeneous spatial simultaneity and not homogeneous temporal linearity.”9 I think he means by this that space is discontinuous, social, and relational, and that it is just as important as time in the shaping of political identities. The smooth Euclidean/Newtonian (to which I would add Kantian) space and time that frames both liberal theory and universal history was an erroneous fiction that permitted Mill “to imagine the world as a connected and smooth surface, uniformly available to a fixed grid of knowledge.” The occlusion of anthropology and geography within liberal theory and practice then becomes the problem. According to Mehta, the question of space and geography “rarely gets raised to the level of theoretical attention.” Political theory is confronted with the problem, as Kant would put it, of “particulars for which the general has yet to be found.”
Oddly, Mehta ignores entirely the substantive work, some of it by geographers, that has paid a great deal of theoretical attention to questions of space and geography. The failure to register any of these findings in his analysis can, of course, be dismissed as yet another lamentable example of disciplinary myopia, but it unfortunately has some very substantive effects, for it is exactly at this point, and perhaps for this reason, that Mehta’s argument begins to go seriously awry. He repeatedly points to the deficiencies of a liberal theory that is unable to appreciate the significance of place, locality, and geography to political identity formation: “Liberals have failed to appreciate that territory is both a symbolic expression and a concrete condition for the possibility of (or aspirations to) a distinct way of life, and that in the modern epoch it gathers together many of the associations through which individuals come to see themselves as members of a political society. To invoke a metaphor prevalent in early liberal theorizing, territory is the body of the polity, which, not unlike the human body, marks the perimeter within and through which its identity is constituted and the specific expression of its autonomy is molded.”10
Liberals, as a consequence, “were unable to recognize and appreciate the political integrity of various nonconsensual societies.” The empire they built was therefore almost predestined to encounter some form of parochialism and nationalism as a political response. Even when oppositional “nationalists invoked the language of liberal universalism, they alloyed it with the textured realities of locally imagined and physical landscape. And geography was often their more powerful tool.”11 The language here is interesting. We find, once more, the Kantian (and even Foucauldian) “condition of possibility” argument opened up, but its potentiality as a point of critical engagement is immediately interred within a deeply problematic biological metaphor with dangerous associations to social Darwinism. This metaphor of the body politic is not without its possibilities, but used uncritically it can all too easily lead us into the nether world of fascism. In Mehta’s case, the turn is toward a consideration (and a rehabilitation in many ways) of Edmund Burke (that great opponent of the French revolution and of the British empire). Burke, we are told, did not eschew universals, for he held that “territory or place is a fundamental condition of collective and individual political identity. Moreover, it constitutes the ground through which notions such as duty, obligation, order and freedom come to have the political meaning that they do.” Burke, according to Mehta, “takes seriously the sentiments, feelings and attachments through which peoples are, and aspire to be, ‘at home.’ This posture of thought acknowledges that the integrity of experience is tied to its locality and its finitude. . . . By doing so, it is congruent with the psychological aspects of experience, which always derive their meaning, their passionate and pained intensity, from within the bounded, even if porous, spheres of familial, national, or other narratives.”12
Again and again in his impassioned attacks upon the British imperial presence in India, Burke invoked the facts of geography as he saw them as a primary rhetorical strategy to deny the legitimacy of British occupancy. Writes Mehta: “territory or location is both a metaphor and an important physical fact that captures the psychological and emotional conditions of individuals viewing themselves as members of a distinct society. . . . Both history and geography, notwithstanding the contestations that attend them, facilitate the creation of that sense of bounded togetherness, through which itself the notion of sharing in something comes to be effective and available to normative and institutional modification.”13
In a brilliant series of reversals, Burke sees the British imperialists as the wild and unruly children, incapable of mature engagement with the merely different, let alone the radically unfamiliar: “Burke’s cosmopolitanism does not rely on the strategy of aligning societies that are in fact contemporaneous in their affective attachments, along a temporal grid that moves them ‘backward’ on account of their difference, so as to give a linear coherence to the idea of the progress. Once one recognizes, as Burke does, that human experience gains its density from the passionate commitment that a life form produces, then the challenge of cosmopolitanism is to understand these forms as contemporaneous ways of being in the world.”14
From this perspective Burke constructs what Mehta calls a “cosmopolitanism of sentiments.” There is much that is seemingly positive in this argument. It would not be hard, for example, to assimilate the idea of such sentiments into Nussbaum’s quest for cosmopolitanism as an ethos and as a moral standpoint; as we shall see later, this is how Anthony Appiah arrives at his conception of a “rooted cosmopolitanism.” But much depends on the nature of the sentiments expressed. And on this point there is much that is deeply problematic in Mehta’s argument: the appeal to permanence and the supposed “integrity” and “finitude” of place-based experience; the absolute spaces within which such sense of belonging has its provenance; and, above all, the “singularities” of place and geography that Burke believes can be negotiated only by “mature” adults engaging in free conversations. Mehta, to his credit, recognizes that Burke nowhere explains “the psychological and cognitive operations through which place comes to acquire its crucial relation to identity.”15 In earlier setting up some relational propositions regarding the nature of space, and in recognizing that boundaries can be imposed that have nothing to do with affections or any sense of dwelling, Mehta also indicates that territories may have porous borders and therefore a fluid rather than permanent meaning. And in appealing to Frantz Fanon’s view of place as “the zone of occult instability where people dwell,” Mehta temporarily concedes the inherent instability of all geographical and anthropological attachments. But these nuances get lost in the overall argument. Mehta, understandably appreciative of Burke’s attack upon imperial rule in India, fails to see that Burke’s favoring of entailed inheritance (the “rights of true-born Englishmen”) over universal rights provided—as Arendt, for one, points out—“the ideological basis from which English nationalism derived its curious touch of race feeling” as well as its “later obsession with inheritance theories and eugenics.”16 Mehta ignores all such potential pitfalls and drives remorselessly to a conclusion: “Human beings are not born blank slates; instead they inherit a mass of predispositions from an unfathomable past bounded by the variations of time and place. It is the emplacement within these points of reference that gives to individuals, and to communities, a sense of their integrity and self-understanding from which alone life can be, and is, richly experienced—indeed, from which alone moral action is possible.”17
Read as an absolute conclusion this is nothing short of appalling, given the emphasis upon integrity and unfathomability, and, above all, that it is from this exclusive positionality of community in place alone that moral action is possible. This is, to put it mildly, disempowering of all other forms of critique based in any universals (such as justice or human rights) whatsoever. Chakrabarty, for his part, recognizes the danger and neatly sidesteps it. While he holds, on the one hand, that “the universal and the analytical produce forms of thought that ultimately evacuate the place of the local,” he recognizes, on the other hand, that “we need universals to produce critical readings of social injustices.”18 Without this last perspective it becomes impossible to condemn exclusionary communitarianism and even fascist violence. That Mehta should take such a position appears odd, since he also coauthored a perceptive article critical of the activities of Shiv Sena, a local nativist-turned-religious-nationalist movement in Mumbai, generally blamed for the extraordinary violence in 1992–93 in which more than a thousand people (mostly Muslims) were killed and perhaps hundreds of thousands more were forced to flee the city during months of violence and rage.19 This is not, I imagine, the kind of “moral action” that Mehta would either support or condone. But how can we criticize Shiv Sena’s own sense of integrity and self-understanding except by appeal to moral precepts that arise outside of its enclosure within that place and its members’ claims to being the only authentic inhabitants of Maharastra? Mehta has unwittingly substituted Burke’s racially charged concept of localized entailed inheritance (Kant’s sense of the gens) for Mill’s paternalism.
The sentiments Mehta expresses here are very Heideggerian. He actually reads Heidegger as “deeply Burkean” in his sensibility.20 This embrace of Heidegger is not unique to Mehta. In recent times it has acquired considerable purchase among postcolonial thinkers more generally. Chakrabarty, for example, also seeks to understand the experience of liberal empire by triangulating between the polarities of Heidegger and Marx, using the former to evoke all the facts of geography and the fragmented temporalities that the liberal imperialists as well as, in Chakrabarty’s view, the Marxists so fatally ignore. There is, these authors seem to propose, no other way to compensate for liberal or socialist universalism and by extension Kantian failings other than by leaping straight from the Kantian frying pan into the Heideggerian fire. Why Heidegger’s thought is privileged as the way by which the obviously pertinent facts of geography can be incorporated into political theory remains somewhat of a mystery.
Mehta suggests that the pertinent facts of geography can be subsumed under the political and psychological significance of “place and history as constitutive of human identity.” Concerns of this sort, whether inspired by Burke or not, are common currency even among conservatives. Desirous of conserving hierarchies and genealogies of power and privilege, many conservatives are concerned to preserve the social, cultural, and ecological milieus that nourish such social relations. Any threat to these milieus must therefore be taken seriously and, if possible, resisted. From this perspective, the geographer Carl Sauer, writing in 1938, constructed a blistering denunciation not only of Spanish colonialism but of the subsequent ravages and depredations of capitalist neocolonialism throughout Latin America. Complaining that “in our impatience to get at universals” we grossly neglected “the complexities of our own natural history,” Sauer characterized the “expansion of European commerce, peoples and governments” as initiating a “tragic age” in which over a mere century and a half “more damage has been done to the productive capacity of the world than in all of human history preceding.”21 In the wake of World War II he quieted his critique, almost certainly for political reasons, only to return to it in The Early Spanish Main, a book that Anthony Pagden characterized (in his introduction to a later edition) as a major contribution to understanding the dark side of the Columbian exchange. Sauer was no romantic. He understood that societies change and evolve. The tragedy, in Sauer’s view, was that the rich possibilities in the region were so “ruthlessly and idiotically thrown away,” in large part because of Columbus’s “lack of understanding not merely of where he was but of the possible consequences of his being there.” Far from being a great geographer, Columbus was an ignoramus who initiated “a pattern of conquest and settlement that was repeated all over Spanish America” with disastrous and tragic consequences—consequences “that we, for all our scientific rationalism, have done very little to rectify.” Sauer opened up themes that later became more common currency in the works of Pagden, Walter Mignolo, and other Latin American scholars, the lesson being that the Latin American experience, while quite different, has been just as authentically and destructively postcolonial as that of South Asia.22 The South Asian scholars who defined the postcolonial field have, Mignolo argues, no privileged experience of how Enlightenment reason and liberalism worked to their own detriment and certainly should have no lock on postcolonial theorizing (an interesting case of how the geographical circumstances of knowledge production have a distinctive role to play in theory construction). But it is also worth noting that the critical and anti-imperialist perspectives of a traditional geographer like Carl Sauer, writing in the 1930s, have been totally ignored in the postcolonial literature.
There is, interestingly, a left-wing version of this same argument, most clearly represented in the antiglobalization movement and its theorists. In the “postdevelopmental theory” of Arturo Escobar, for example, we find the obvious objection that the universals of Western developmentalism and neoliberal globalization are far too insensitive to local difference and that much of what passes for fair trade is neocolonial in structure and therefore exploitative in the extreme (particularly with respect to the extraction of natural resources). We also find a total rejection of all universal developmental models in favor of local, place-based initiatives out of which real alternatives to a globalizing capitalism can supposedly be constructed. Escobar proposes “a reassertion of place, noncapitalism, and local culture against the dominance of space, capital and modernity that are central to globalization discourse,” in the belief that this will “result in a theory of postdevelopment that makes visible the possibility for reconceiving and reconstructing the world from the perspective of place-based cultural and economic practices.” Escobar appeals to the “novel debates” that have been generated around the theme of economy and place, in which “place is asserted against the dominance of space and noncapitalism against the dominance of capitalism.” Place is here conceptualized as “the other” to the space of globalization. A discussion of place is presumed to “afford an important perspective towards rethinking . . . the question of alternatives to capitalism and modernity.”23 But this immediately raises the questions of how we can reasonably construe space and place as in some way oppositional concepts, and why space might be linked to liberal theory, globalization, and modernity, while place is the terrain of its oppositional other. And while Escobar guardedly cautions against “reifying places, local cultures and forms of noncapitalism as ‘untouched’ or ‘outside of history,’” there is nevertheless an overwhelming tendency to regard “local models of nature and the economy, and the social movements linked to them,” as the unique source of postdevelopmentalism. In this Escobar comes close to embracing Mehta’s appalling vision of place-bound sentiments as the sole acceptable form of moral judgment. These are, clearly, issues that need to be debated. But it is also clear that the geographical conceptual apparatus deployed—in this instance, the proper relation between space and place—has a key role to play in formulating political understandings as well as transformative possibilities.
Burke’s appeal to the facts of geography “as he saw them” as the fundamental argument against British imperialism and Mehta’s endorsement of Burke’s position likewise raise the question as to what, exactly, those facts might be and how they may best be represented and theorized. If, after all, Columbus was so disastrously wrong, why should we assume that Burke was any more right about India than Bush was about Iraq? On this point there is another story to be told from the postcolonial world that simultaneously supports and subverts Mehta’s contentions, while seriously challenging the opposition between space and place set up in Escobar’s account. India, as a coherent geographical entity, was, according to Matthew Edney, very much a British imperial rather than indigenous conception. The fundamental moment in this definition was the mapping of the subcontinent by British surveyors. Mapmaking
was integral to British imperialism in India, not just as a highly effective informational weapon wielded strategically and tactically by directors, governors, military commanders, and field officials, but also as a significant component of the “structures of feeling” which legitimated, justified and defined that imperialism. The surveys and maps together transformed the subcontinent from an exotic and largely unknown region into a well-defined and knowable geographical entity. The imperial space of India was a space of rhetoric and symbolism, rationality and science, dominance and separation, inclusion and exclusion. Its horizontal spatial boundaries, which enclosed, divided, and so gave political meaning to an otherwise homogeneous space, merged imperceptibly with the vertical boundaries of the empire’s social hierarchies. The empire might have defined the map’s extent, but mapping defined the empire’s nature.24
The triangulation of India was about constructing and imposing spatial order. In accepting the Kantian separation of space from time, it eviscerated all signs of history and collective memory. It created a new knowledge of India that was crucial to the colonial disciplinary apparatus. “The British engineer-surveyor looked at the Indian landscape as a surgeon looks at his patient, as an item to be thoroughly investigated, measured and prodded so that maladies and imperfections might be identified, understood, adjusted, controlled, and so cured.” The subtext was that British culture was “rational, liberal, precise and proper,” as opposed to Hindu conceptions—for example, of spatiality—that were considered by the British to be mystical and cosmological even when mathematically and geometrically elegant. Part of the British project was to “free the mind” of the Hindus “of the fetters of unreasoning belief,” and to that end the Hindus were invited to submit to the logic of the maps the British had made of them, to abandon all sense of their own history, and to take on that “structure of feeling” that every true-born Englishman was supposed to possess. The British aim, in what most concede in the annals of cartography to be a magnificent achievement, was to produce a single, uniform cartographic archive that could be used for rational and effective rule (including, of course, the extraction of wealth through taxation). However, the information the British produced “did not represent a perfect, empirically known truth, as they thought it did, but instead constituted contested knowledge of a socially constructed reality.” It was not that the British falsified, but that their spatial conception of the world—Newtonian and Cartesian—produced a particular kind of homogeneous, universal, and ahistorical knowledge (“managed and controlled in London”!) that was partial in what it could represent:
The rational uniform space of the British maps of India was not a neutral, value-free space, it was a space imbued with power relations, with the fact that the British controlled (or had the power to control) the land depicted and that they could impose India-wide legislation and reforms in a manner impossible for earlier rulers. Imperial space was a space of boundaries . . . rationalized and fixed by the force of imperial adjudication. In this respect imperial space used boundaries as a mechanism for equating abstract space with the concrete reality of territory. In a major conceptual reversal, boundaries were no longer vague axes of dispute (frontiers) between core areas of Indian polities, but were configured as the means whereby these core areas were now defined. Political territories were no longer defined with respect to the physical features that characterized them or which bounded them; they were not defined by the complex “feudal” interrelationships of their rulers. The British suborned the character of those territories to a mathematical space even as they reduced political structures to the “rule of law.”25
To administer a place called India through the perspective of the map was to administer a population that supposedly had no history, memory, or any other mark of identity save location within the grid of a uniform Euclidean space imposed cartographically upon a far more complicated space. How Indian nationalists took all of this apparatus to construct their own sense of national identity is a major story of Indian colonial and postcolonial history. They could not and indeed would not abandon the map. Their task was to find some way to fill the map they were inheriting and refill it with a meaning that was distinctly their own, even as it replicated part of that “structure of feeling” that the British legacy imparted. Herein lay the origins of a powerful constructed myth of Indian statehood, a myth that to this day has enormous power in the Indian political consciousness. Broken into fragments, as Partha Chatterjee points out, the myth of nationhood within the cartography that the British left behind conjoins the Indian sense of space, place, and geography with a peculiarly abstract and modernist understanding of time and history.26
While Kant was anticolonial in principle, his rationalist vision of a spatial ordering quite separate from temporalities and from histories proved eminently adaptable to British imperial and colonial rule. It was, therefore, by no means as value-free and neutral as it seemed. The deracinated theory of liberalism proved even more pernicious when brought to earth with the aid of a cartographic reason that treated of space as abstract, universal, and absolute. In that context, and that context alone, the idea of geography and place as a potential source of an oppositional politics makes sense. But it is curious that so many postcolonial thinkers concerned with the Indian case would resort to Heidegger for sustenance. Clearly, the kinds of “geographical facts” that Burke had in mind, and that Mehta also invokes, to say nothing of the space-time world of myths and origins that Heidegger presents, are very different from the spatial rationalities of Descartes and Newton. But this is not the only kind of oppositional thought as to the salience of place and geography. Indeed, the danger lurks that postcolonial theory will rest secretly imprisoned within a cartographic image of India bequeathed by British imperial rule, all the while trying to stuff it full, as it were, with hefty doses of Heideggerian mythology.
That this is not the only path to take is best illustrated in the “cartographic” essays of Chandra Mohanty. She points out that there is plenty of work still to be done to decolonize postcolonial theory itself. While hers begins as a distinctively feminist and to some degree universal quest to recognize and undo the ways “in which we colonize and objectify our different histories and culture, thus colluding with hegemonic processes of domination and rule,” she refuses the idea of a universal feminism in favor of negotiating a path between a “debilitating ossification of difference,” on the one hand, and the fluid relationalities of power and struggle that result in both real and conceptual “cartographies of struggle,” on the other.27 Her cartography is neither fixed nor held hostage, as it is in Mehta’s case, to some “unfathomable past bounded by the variations of time and space.” And this cartography is radically different from that which was imposed by imperial rule. Place (and “home” in particular) is vital to how we both construct and understand the world, but the cartographies of struggle that we construct are not imprisoned in any fixed space (if only because, as we move house from, for example, country to city, we often encounter radically different experiences and understandings of the world as we change locations). Furthermore, solidarities and alliances (key political terms in Mohanty’s formulations) can be and are built across space, turning fixed boundaries into porous borders in such a way as to realize feminist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist struggles through the uneven geographical development of political dynamics. In her case, the pursuit of freedom is not located inside a fixed geography. It entails, rather, the construction of an entirely new and different geography (practically as well as conceptually) around relational principles of belonging that entail a completely different definition of space and place to that contained either in the Kantian or the Heideggerian schemas. While the oppressions of the British form of cartographic reason are palpable, there is no point articulating a false resistance to these by resort to Burkean and Heideggerian formulations that, in their own way, are just as oppressive. Whichever way we look, therefore, we find a deep significance to how we build our conceptual cartographies and make our actual geographies. And at the center of this effort lies the theoretical and practical conundrum of how we can and should understand the evidently problematic relation between space and place.