Geography, Spatiality, and Racialization: The Contribution of Edward Said

Audrey Kobayashi Department of Geography, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario Canada K7L 3N6

For anti-racist geographers, Said’s greatest comme contenant ou comme décor pour la «race », contribution has been to provide some of the plutôt que de voir dans la spatialité une forme de Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 intellectual tools to advance the political project relation humaine, basée sur une double action of overcoming the effects of a millennium of d’établissement de la distance et de la proximité. racialization. His recognition that the geographi- La pratique de racialisation implique l’acte cal imagination is fundamentally based upon a fondamental de créer de la différence en mettant colonial history of the construction of the racial- l’Autre à distance, tout en établissant une relation ized Other has coincided with the development of de domination. Les concepts de distance et de an interest in racialization by critical geogra- négation élaborés par Jean-Paul Sartre permet- phers. Both geographers and cultural theorists tent une compréhension complexe et historique- have for the most part, however, relied upon a ment située de la spatialité. Saïd contribue plus notion of “space” as either a container or a efficacement à une appréhension de la spatialité setting for “race,” rather than viewing spatiality comme relation humaine dans son œuvre anté- as a form of human relationship, based on a rieure, Orientalisme, où il ne parle pas d’espace, double action of establishing distance and prox- que dans son œuvre ultérieure, Culture et Impé- imity. The practice of racialization involves the rialisme, où il le fait. Le premier ouvrage donne fundamental act of creating difference by setting le champ libre à la re-mise en perspective de la the Other at a distance, while setting up a rela- géographie des relations humaines. tionship of domination. Jean Paul Sartre’s concepts of distance and negation allow for a Mots-clé s : Edward Saïd, Jean-Paul Sartre, complex, historically situated understanding of racialisation, spatialité spatiality. Said contributes most effectively to understanding spatiality as human relationship in his earlier work, Orientalism, where he does not In March, 1979, Edward Said had what he discuss space, than in his later work, Culture and terms a “rather forlorn experience.” At the Imperialism, where he does. His former contribu- invitation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Les temps tion provides scope for re-projecting the geogra- moderne, he travelled to Paris to attend a phy of human relations. seminar on Mid-east Peace. A year before his death, Sartre was ailing and frail and uncom- Key words: Edward Said, Jean-Paul Sartre, municative. Said left disappointed, after two racialization, spatiality days of “turgid and unrewarding discussions” during which what Sartre did contribute La contribution d’Edward Saïd à 1a prise de consisted of pre-scripted banality. And yet, conscience des fondements de l’imaginaire Said retained his admiration for Sartre’s géographique dans l’histoire coloniale de la “heroic public politics,” his refusal to be construction d’un Autre racialisé, a coïncidé avec taken in by the “mediocre attainments” of le développement d’un intérêt pour la racialisa- French post-structuralism, and his “immense tion chez les géographes critiques. Cependant, la sprawl” as a public intellectual (Said 2000). plupart des géographes et les théoriciens de la Said reveals much of himself in this brief culture se sont fiés à une notion de l’« espace » reminiscence. He is at once a little grumpy,

The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 7, No 1-2 (2004) 79–90 © 2004 by AWG – The Arab World Geographer, Toronto, Canada 80 Audrey Kobayashi impatient with intellectual politics that fail to relations of power, such as racism, might be produce outcomes, and at the same time disrupted. The challenge to the discipline is to reverent of the power of ideas to animate build theoretically upon Said’s work in gain- political goals. Perhaps Said’s most enduring ing a stronger sense of how the geographical quality, and one with which he also credited construction of the Other takes place and, at Sartre, was his absolutely uncompromising the same time, to show that spatial under- commitment to both political change and standing plays a part, but only a part, in the intellectual rigour. Small wonder that he was political process through which we might act disappointed, then, that Sartre seemed to have in overcoming racialized human distances.

misplaced both in his later years. Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 For anti-racists, Said’s greatest contribu- The Trouble with Space tion has been to provide some of the intellec- tual tools to advance the political project of The concept of space invites ambiguity and overcoming the effects of a millennium of abstraction. Everyday use of the term usually racialization. His exposition of the extent to evokes one of two notions. The container idea which the geographical imagination is funda- is an interesting abstraction used blithely and mentally based upon a colonial history of the frequently, despite the fact that theories of construction of the racialized Other is now relativity have long since debunked its canonical among critical geographers, who conceptual origins. The container implies generally profess a diachronic relationship exterior control, the power to bound, define, between the historical construction of geog- curtail. Alternatively, the other notion of raphy as a disciplined expression of the colo- space is in creating distance, room, separa- nial imagination, on the one hand, and tion between things, cutting things off from present-day inequalities, both global and one another. It is a modern notion of power as local, expressed as racial, gender, national, possibility, infinity, expansion, or more and class differences re-inscribed within prosaically, the luxury of not having to share contemporary imaginaries to condition cramped quarters with others. The 1960s pop current lived experiences, on the other concept of “personal space” perhaps best (Morin, 2004). Racialization is one of the exemplifies this notion of space as an expres- processes through which inequality is sion of individualism and alienation. constructed, by establishing distance between Among geographers, Doel (1999) claims the dominant European and the Other, while that the influence of post-structuralist think- at the same time connecting their respective ing has resulted in a “schitzoanalytical” places in such a way that that the “here” and approach to space, as the plastic, de-centered, “there” of imperialist relations are deeply hybrid space of the “new” geography runs imbrocated. parallel to a bounded, gridded, and measured This paradox of the simultaneous spatial science, reflecting all the dualisms of construction of distance and proximity in the contemporary academy as well as the racial–spatial relations is profoundly reminis- dualisms of power that mark most human cent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s depiction of all relations. Ironically, each stream would view forms of human connection as both distance the other as abstract; one because it bends and and relationship, a “double” or “return” reconfigures the notion of space to an infinity movement, to borrow loosely from Gregory’s of contingent possibilities, the other because (1994, 111) terminology. In this short paper, I it reduces space to lines and grids. One repre- attempt to juxtapose Sartre’s concept of sents the post-modern nightmare of losing spatiality with Said’s account of the control; the other, the modernist nightmare of geographical imagination, in an attempt to instrumentalism. Both notions of space are cast light upon how historically constituted impossible; yet both are also part of the

The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe 7, no 1-2 (2004) Geography, Spatiality, and Racialization: The Contribution of Edward Said 81 history of the contemporary world. Informed by the Sartrean notion of Some geographers have sought a “third- “nothingness,” space is nothing: no thing. It space of dialectical relief ” (Doel 1999, 120; is, rather, that which comes between things: Soja 1996; Pile 1994; Strohmayer 1997), as nothing, because it is, like a point, an infinity the space in which new ways of being/think- of the particular. Or, conversely, it is that ing are created, opened as places re-config- which distances things: nothing, because it is ured and morally re-charged. The thirdspace infinite in its emptiness, its capacity. Nothing concept carries its own double movement is empty. Well, this definition perhaps seems through both geography as discipline and overly abstract. It could lead to the conclusion

geography as what-happens-in-the-world. that space is a useless concept as it is Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Doel attempts to work through the contradic- employed in contemporary life, a linguistic tions within his own epistemic thirdspace, by leftover of Euclidean thinking that should be moving geographers away from both the junked from our vocabulary. But the phenom- instrumentalism of spatial science and the enological preoccupation with nothingness representationalism of many post-structural- from which this definition derives makes the ist theorists, to make of geography the event concept of nothingness a necessary possibil- of spacing, what he calls a process of ity of some thing, or any thing, and of human “abstraction concretization” The develop- being. That is why Sartre wrote Being and ment of a non-dualistic notion of space is of Nothingness as a prelude to his historical course theoretically well established in criti- treatises. cal geography, guided by many of the How so? Sartre’s attempt to define noth- thinkers whom Sartre had also influenced, the ingness was also an attempt to overcome most important being Lefebvre (1991) and Hegel’s discussion of Nothingness as the Foucault (esp. 1977; see Gregory 1994; “Scholastic universal,” a “pre-ontological Benko and Stroymayer 1997; Doel 1999, for comprehension,” (Sartre 1977, 17) a kind of reviews). Allen (2000) suggests a humanistic nothingness reified, and also, therefore, basis for understanding space as relation- beyond human comprehension, an absurdity. ship.Gregory cites Ewald’s (1992) characteri- Sartre built instead upon the work of Heideg- zation of Foucauldian space as “supple, ger (especially 1938),2 and his famous interchangeable, without segregation, indefi- dictum, “Nothing nothings” (see Sartre 1977, nitely redundant and without exterior” (qtd. 17, tr. note). That is, Nothing presents itself as in Gregory 1994, 138). Space without exte- the possibility of being, that which is rior, of course, is also one without interior, sustained by and which sustains, which but not without spatiality, a continuous surrounds and is surrounded by, being. It unfolding separated by nothing, and Gregory “enables us to form … a theory of non-being takes great care to make this point clear.1 which by definition separates” (Sartre 1977, The paradoxical quality of space is 19. It is not pre-ontological, then, but onto- something not to be overcome but rather logically synchronous. Upon this notion of played out, placed, and interrogated for the human possibility presented in Being and ways in which it conditions human life, an Nothingness, Sartre, in Critique of Dialecti- observation that was lost on neither Sartre nor cal Reason, which has received hardly a Said. Both in their way wrote that paradox glance by geographers (but see Boyle in into an understanding of the distance through press), constructed a sophisticated—and which the racialized body is placed. Sartre’s unfinished—theory of human historical philosophical ideas of spatiality were more development. sustained, of course, and so I digress briefly, Fundamental to Sartre’s history is the in an attempt to clarify his ideas as a basis for idea that human relationship is a question, a discussion of Said. if you like, of degrees and qualities of

The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe 7, no 1-2 (2004) 82 Audrey Kobayashi separation, of distance. This theme has been are not the self but that invoke (or imagine) expanded upon by many writers as the basis the self in order to assign qualities to the for an ethics of human relationship (e.g., other, a point that, as I shall illustrate below, is Arendt 1958; Buber 1975). Buber’s notion of fundamental to Said’s work. Further exam- the basic impetus for human (social) life as ples of such human experience are “absence, the capacity, and the necessity, to set others at change, otherness, repulsion, regret, distrac- a distance in order to enter into relationship is tion … an infinite number of realities which perhaps the best extant statement of the are not only objects of judgement, but which twofold nature of human spatiality; and it are experienced, opposed, feared, etc., by the

contains both the humanity and the inhuman- human being and which in their inner struc- Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 ity of the racialization paradox. If geogra- ture are inhabited by negation …” (Sartre, phers believe, as I do, that the process of 1977, 21). Negation—that which is not me— racialization is fundamentally spatialized, can thus be read as the first—but by no means then the ways in which we theorize “space” the last—principle of racialization. matter very much. Of course, a critical examination of Sartre follows his discussion of Nothing- Sartre’s phenomenology, as outlined in Being ness almost immediately with a discussion of and Nothingness (1977) would find much distance, a point that has been largely ignored fault with the mystical way in which he pres- in most of the literature, precisely, I think, ents the interior construction of the self, a because it is geographers who would be most problem that is significantly, but not likely to notice, and they have hardly noticed completely, addressed in the subsequent two- Sartre at all. The concept of distance, Sartre volume Critique (1982), where he asserts a claims, is both a simple concept of the sepa- material interpretation of human being as ration between two points and a much more thoroughly socially and historically challenging concept of the quality of that constructed. Notwithstanding, my aim here is separation: to show that Sartre provides an important opening for a geography that overcomes the Will someone object that the idea of distance is dualism inherent in the concept of space. To psychological and that it designates only the avoid reification, space needs to be defined as extension which must be cleared in order to go only liminality, that is, as the opening up of from Point A to Point B? We shall reply that the possibility in which spatiality is immediately same negation is included in this to clear since present, with no thing in between. Spatiality this notion expresses precisely the passive resist- thus overcomes the posteriority of space.3 If ance of the remoteness (Sartre 1977, 20). we think of spatiality as distance (separation) filled, the project of understanding spatiality Human reality, then (again following becomes synonymous with that of what Heidegger) is ‘remote-from-itself’… it arises Sartre later calls “the complex fact of ‘accu- in the world as that which creates distances mulation-outflow’” (1982, 172). The and at the same time causes them to be compelling metaphor of outflow as the mate- removed” (Sartre 1977, 20) Furthermore, it is rial construction of historical/geographical “useless to attempt to reduce distance to the relations provides a starting point for under- simple result of a measurement” (Sartre standing landscapes peopled (Kobayashi 1977, 20-21). Sartre uses distance, thus, as an 1989), and for the necessity of understanding example of one of the many forms of human the setting-at-a-distance of the racialized experience that are lived as negation, or, in colonial other; not of the construction of the plainer language, are the result of under- other in space, nor even as the construction of standing others (and by extension, things or space-as-inhabited, but of spatiality as the places that occur at any distance) in terms that form of human relationship, established

The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe 7, no 1-2 (2004) Geography, Spatiality, and Racialization: The Contribution of Edward Said 83 through the construction of distance as differ- (“lack”) of the colonial power, and whereby ence. If Sartre’s notion of distance is also seen as a condition, or perhaps a precondition, of [t]he subjects of the discourse are constructed geography, it is the accumulation–outflow within an apparatus of power which contains,in that concerns us most as geographers. both senses of the word, and ‘other’ knowledge— Before moving on to Said, I need to make a knowledge that is arrested and fetishistic and brief reference to the most significant way in circulates through colonial discourse as that which Sartre’s notion of distancing has been limited form of otherness that I have called the used as a basis for understanding racializa- stereotype (77–78).

tion, in the work of Frantz Fanon. Sartre’s Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 (1963) recognition of European racism and Like that of so many other social theo- its role in colonialism in his famous preface rists, Bhabha’s notion of spatiality is implicit to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) rather than explicit, despite his profession to was shattering in its impact upon white Euro- “locate” culture. But his use of the spatial pean thinking when it was first published in metaphors of imagining the Other provides French in 1961. Fanon’s influence on Sartre an appropriate starting point for considering was also profound, both in encouraging how Said does the same. Sartre to become more political in his stance toward Africa and in affecting his writing. For Said on Space his part, Fanon drew deeply upon Sartre’s philosophy, even though he ultimately found In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said their difference, their distance, too great, and defines the reciprocal relationship between they parted ways over their views of Algeria.4 “narrative and social space” (chapter 2) to When I suggest above, therefore, that Sartre’s show that the social, political, moral, and notion of distance is a reasonable starting economic realities of empire are enfolded in point for understanding spatiality, this is not cultural representations, each constitutive of to accept—at least in its totality—Sartre’s the other. He engages in “contrapuntal read- subsequent work on racialization. ing,” which “means reading a text with an Several geographers have remarked understanding of what is involved when an recently upon the significance of Fanon’s author shows … that a colonial sugar planta- work for understanding colonialism and tion is seen as important to the process of racialization as spatiality, and within these maintaining a particular style of life in works, the Sartrean notion of distance lurks England” (78). He thus captures colonial beneath nearly every word. Sullivan (2001), spatiality as simultaneous distance and rela- for example, argues for the need to under- tionship, depending upon, as Gregory (2000, stand raced spatiality through the lived body. 325) notes, “spatial connectivity and juxtapo- Pile (2000) depicts Fanon’s geography as one sition.” that is primarily about location and situation. Ironically, however, where Said (1993) Fanon’s famous story of an encounter with a takes up the specific topic of “social space,” white boy (in France), is therefore one of his definition of space seems fairly conven- displacement, which depends upon the tional and abstract. Clarissa and Tom Jones, creation of distance between France and for example, both involve “a practical narra- Martinique.5 tive about expanding and moving about in In a different key, Bhaba (1994) (draw- space that must be actively inhabited and ing directly upon Fanon, Foucault, and enjoyed before its discipline or limits can be Lacan) describes what he calls “scopic accepted” (Said 1993, 93). Space here has a space” as a discursive process through which troubling pre-ontological status, like a blank the colonial other is situated as the negativity slate waiting to be filled in before its can

The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe 7, no 1-2 (2004) 84 Audrey Kobayashi invoke its agency. The concept of space is them in one way or another dependent upon the taken up again some pages on in this section, perceived character and destiny of a particular with this claim: “The appropriation of geography (Said 1993, 93). history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give Thus the picture becomes more complex the novel its force, include the accumulation if we read the geographical, like all forms of and differentiation of social space, space to narrative, as an act of projection, imagining be used for social purposes” (93). Said goes the other and thereby asserting colonial on to describe how Kipling’s Kim opens up power. To do so, however, requires that we

what geographers would now call a kind of create more recursivity than Said seems to Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 thirdspace, moving between the “differently have granted between geography as natural ordained spaces” of the natives and the Raj. condition and Geography as a project and Much has been written about Kim’s hybridity projection of colonial aims. To get beyond the and about Kipling’s authorship of a racialized prosaic notion of space, we need to examine empire (Jackson and Kobayashi 1996). For his notion of spatiality, although that is not a present purposes, however, the concern is term that Said employs. with what seems to be a pre-discursive qual- To do so means taking some liberties to ity of space and, more broadly, geography. connect Said’s thoughts. He closes this Said (1993) goes on: section on social space with three points that go considerably beyond the more instrumen- Underlying social space are territories, lands, tal view that appears in the above quotations. geographical domains, the actual geographical First, the “spatial differentiations so apparent underpinnings of the imperial, and also the in late nineteenth-century novels do not cultural contest. To think about distant places, to simply and suddenly appear there as a passive colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all reflection of an aggressive ‘age of empire’, of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The but are derived in a continuum from earlier actual geographical possession of land is what social discriminations already authorized in empire in the final analysis is all about (93). earlier historical and realistic novels” (Said 1993, 94). Within what Said calls “narrative The notion of geography depicted here is space,” the injustices of what he calls “social of a much less complex thing than most criti- space” are given legitimacy, validating the cal geographers would seek; it is a possibility, other’s already established inferiority on the a condition, upon which a fully inhabited grounds of colonial benevolence. This point social context is imposed. His more prosaic is important if we are to understand the rendition of geography-as-space, as historical context in which notions of the presented here, depicts little more than a subordinate Other are discursively passive layer in the construction of colonial constructed, whether through the novel or the relations. That geography contributes to a geographical text as narrative, but it requires more complex social whole, however, is clear another order of projection to see the produc- from the next point: tion of social space as itself a discursive act— as Foucault and others have made clear—in Imperialism and the culture associated with it which the narrative is embedded. affirm both the primacy of geography and an A second point, however, comes closer ideology about control of territory. The geographi- to capturing the recursivity of spatial rela- cal sense makes projections—imaginative, carto- tions. In Dickens’ Bleak House, he claims, graphic, military, economic, historical, or in a there is a “very strong spatial hereness general sense culture. It also makes possible the imparted to the hierarchy [of family, property, construction of various kinds of knowledge, all of nation]” (Said 1993, 94; emphasis in origi-

The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe 7, no 1-2 (2004) Geography, Spatiality, and Racialization: The Contribution of Edward Said 85 nal). Ideological values, positive and/or nega- of this observation, it is important to recog- tive, are confirmed through a spatial position- nize that the project of colonialism involved ing of the narrator that extends beyond the the construction of the other body, not only metropole: “[W]hatever is good or bad about the assignment of the Other to a particular places at home is shipped out and assigned place. Indeed, the separation of the act of comparable virtue or vice abroad,” but only visualizing from the act of placing risks the under the assumption—using the example very objectification that lies at the heart of the provided by Ruskin—of England’s “pure colonial vision. In this respect, Said credits race” (94–95), and, by extension, the impu- both too little and too much to the literary

rity of the other. narrative: too little, because he falls short Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Said’s (1993) third point is that (here at least, although he does not in other writing) of noticing that the act of narrative is such domestic cultural enterprises as narrative simultaneously the placing, spacing, and fiction and history … are premised on the record- construction of the body, and thus goes ing, ordering, observing powers of the central beyond (as well as before) the validation of authorizing subject…. To say of this subject, in a the othered body in more than a metaphorical quasi-tautological manner, that it writes because it sense; but too much, because the literary can write is to refer not only to domestic society imagination also needs to be positioned as but also to the outlying world…. [as] modern more than representation. In being so careful, Western societies … shape and set limits on the in fact, to specify that his analytical emphasis representation of what are considered essentially is on representation rather than “geographical subordinate beings (95). space,” Said perhaps glosses over the impor- tance of the relationship between the two. It is telling that, although this point ends A close reading of Said’s treatment of Said’s section on social space, the already space, then, reveals a fairly prosaic notion of weak theme (of space itself) is lost entirely in space as possibility, to the extent that empty this last passage. What remains, however, is space prefigures the social, as well as prod- the very important notion of the author as uct, to the extent that it is socially trans- central, powerful, and privileged. If I can be formed. It is, therefore, more than simply a forgiven for reading between the lines here, container but not fully involved in the narra- this notion is very much one of a spatialized tive process,because it is always rendered out colonial relationship, and much closer to the of the full play of spatiality. Things happen to Sartrean notion where emphasis is not on the and on space, but in Culture and Imperialism, abstract notion of space as distance, but on Said fails to capitalize upon the transition spatiality as the quality of the distance from space to spatiality. He recognizes the between the dominant and the subordinate. power of distance in constructing narratives Said’s failure to provide a more complex of the Other, but not of the process of setting- story of spatiality carries, inter alia, the at-a-distance as an important part of defining distinct danger that the hegemonic eye of the the Other through particular spatial qualities. narrator (whoever s/he may be) becomes the I would not want the closeness of this read- universal eye, a “disembodied mind’s eye” ing, however, or my obsession with uncover- (Nast and Kobayashi 1996, 81–83), distanced ing in detail Said’s thinking on space, to from its objects by more than just the nautical occlude the very significant possibilities that miles that separate the colony from the entre- exist in Said’s work for a fuller understand of pot. For, albeit that Said establishes colonial racialization as a form of distancing that representations within an ocularcentric Euro- establishes spatiality. Just as I had to project pean vision that constructs the Other from a considerably beyond Sartre’s basic definition distance, and notwithstanding the importance of human relationship to establish a definition

The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe 7, no 1-2 (2004) 86 Audrey Kobayashi of spatiality, however, a similar extension of played a pivotal role in piquing the European Said’s work is required. In other words, read- imagination to view the Orient as “a ing Said through the lens of spatiality is more geographical space to be cultivated, than simply mapping one notion upon harvested, and guarded” (Said 1978, 219). another, one more movement between two Said was very careful to be specific about his forms of narrative but, rather, constitutes a focus on representation and on the specific process of spatialization. That concept is form of representation constructed by the more fully developed in Orientalism (1978). professional Orientalist, whose power derived largely from his very professional

Orientalism, Geography, and Spatiality status. But he also made connections between Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 that professional “scopic space” and the The above discussion of Culture and Imperi- wider geography that is of greater concern to alism could be charged with reading Said in us here. Like Fanon, he was concerned with the “obdurately conventional (linear)” location and distance. On the one hand, it manner that Gregory (2000, 309) admonishes made a difference that “England was really against. Just so; for that is what Said’s discus- there,” and as a result there was a “qualitative sion of “social space” invites. But Oriental- difference in spatial attitudes” (Said 1978, ism, unfettered by the unhelpful notion of 211) between Britain and France (which was space, holds much greater promise for an not there). Further, personal experience, the understanding of spatiality. This work is most situation of the Orientalist within the Orient, important, of course, for placing what Said is a crucial part of its construction. On the calls the “imaginative geography” (1978) of other hand, however, situation is only a the Orient within intellectual history. His complicating factor because “within a text reference to geography, here, means the there has to take place a metamorphosis from actual scholarship, on the part of both profes- personal to official statement; the record of sional and amateur geographers, through Oriental residence and experience by which which the Orient—and its “Orientals”—was Orientalism in general and later Orientalists imagined as a place. Nonetheless, he saw the in particular can draw, build, and base further role of geographers as imagining geography, scientific observation and description” (Said that is, an externally constituted space: 1978, 157). “There” is never simply there; “There is no use pretending that all we know “there” is a recursive relationship between about time and space, or rather history and being in situ and text, in which the effects of geography, is more than anything else imagi- distance occur in a variety of ways to help to native” (Said 1978, 55). To the extent that it corroborate the increasingly common Orien- falls under the geographical imagination, the talist vision. For “[t]o be a European in the Orient becomes a didactic principle, involv- Orient always involves being a consciousness ing a cultural imposition of “corrections upon set apart from, and unequal with, its raw reality, changing it from free-floating surroundings” (Said 1978, 157). Distance, in objects into units of knowledge” (Said 1978, other words, is not only constructed accord- 67). ing to its culturally specific meaning(s), no Said’s enduring contribution is to show mere measurement of the number of kilome- in considerable detail how the imagination of tres from A to B, but is also that which makes the Orient by the West occurred through a differentiation possible, whether in the same variety of discursive media and over a consid- place or separated by thousands of kilome- erable period of time. The Orient was, above tres. Looked at in this way, it is much more all, an invention, legitimized and given helpful to speak not of two individuals (one of greater power because it was invented by the Occident, one of the Orient) occupying professional Orientalists. The geographer the same space, but of the distance that sepa-

The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe 7, no 1-2 (2004) Geography, Spatiality, and Racialization: The Contribution of Edward Said 87 rates them, the spatiality of their relationship. Said and Sartre, it is that by understanding As Said (1978) goes on to explain in detail, it spatiality as the form of human relationship, is the intentionality of the writer, he who one that depends upon distance as a relative imagines difference, which is important in indicator of power and the capacity to de- constructing the relationship of difference, humanize the Other, we understand that it is through the “sheer egoistic powers of the only through such distance that the violation European consciousness…. In all cases the of and violence upon the body of the Other is Orient is for the European observer …” possible. (158).

While admitting that it requires an Concluding Projections Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 extrapolative reading, I find Said’s implicit sense of the construction of the Other as a I hope that this limited re-reading of Said racialized inferior much more productive of provides some basis for linking his work to an understanding of spatiality than his more that of thinkers such as Fanon and Sartre, for explicit writing on space. Read from a whom spatiality is the basis for an ethics of Sartrean perspective of distance as spatiality, human relations. All three were profoundly there is much more scope for a geography of humanist. Said shows to what extent the poli- colonial racialization. Said anticipates some tics of colonialism and imperialism have of the most important themes that are now depended upon a geographic imagination that almost taken-for-granted in the anti-racist can never hide behind a mask of disinterested literature:6 that the other, while imagined by culture. If the emphasis on the concept of colonial power as difference, is no figment, spatiality seems somewhat scholastic here, it but lives the reality of racialized subordina- is not; for if scholars are to make any differ- tion; that the power of knowledge and ence to bloody politics and to the racialized language are both constituted by and notions upon which they are usually based, it constituent of colonial relations (a point that will be because their ideas are not only rele- is also discussed at great length by Sartre); vant but also theoretically rigorous. No one and that the places occupied by the European has made that point more cogently than power and the Others are separated by a vari- Edward Said, in both his life and his writings. ety of forms of distance at the same time that As geographers, it behoves us to think not they depend upon the power of modern only about the ways in which Said’s notion of modes of production to bring them into prox- the Oriental Other has influenced contempo- imity. Violence is perhaps the ultimate exam- rary racializations but also about the spatial- ple of how the social distance established ity of that notion. To understand spatiality as through colonialism can be a precondition for human relationship is to begin to map the way allowing proximity to do harm.7 All three toward a future in which the bloodiness of the points depend upon a notion of spatiality that past is overcome. is no thing it itself—no container, no abstract Before concluding, I should make a grid—but rather a form of relationship number of, probably insufficient, caveats. imbued with a racialized imagination. That The danger of going back, as I have done with imagination has a history and geography, Sartre, to foundational works in the history of which inform what Gregory (2004), has thought is that one necessarily misses all the recently called the “colonial present,” marked ways in which that work has been re-lived, re- by “[m]appings of engagement and estrange- worked, re-conceptualized in between. With ment” (256), and provides the modern justifi- apologies to all those, only a few of whom are cation and narrative field upon which the cited here, who have been involved in just bloody violence of geopolitics is waged. If I such readings, my explicit and limited point learn anything from the combined work of in doing so is to show that Sartre’s concept of

The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du monde arabe 7, no 1-2 (2004) 88 Audrey Kobayashi distance, largely overlooked in the literature geographical literature. Over the past couple on “space,” provides a very helpful basis of years, there has been a proliferation of arti- upon which to overcome the dualism—in cles on “spatiality,” far too numerous to some of Said’s work and commonly in the review within the scope of the present article. geographical literature—between space and In general, the argument goes something like spatiality. Said’s magnificent influence in the following: Geographers now think of shaping the geographical imagination of the space as a much more complex, fluid, contin- racialized colonial body resonates with gent, hybrid, contested, changeable thing than Sartre’s notion of spatial relations. I also they once realized. Humans have a dialectical

recognize that Said’s writing was massive and relationship to space in that they change and Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/awg/article-pdf/7/1-2/79/1449676/arwg_7_1-2_818u1k3056748880.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 reached a wide variety of audiences, his are changed by it. The qualities of space are sprawl more immense than that he attributed referred to as spatiality. So, “space spaces” to Sartre. I chose to emphasize his two most (see Derrida 1986). This interpretation would famous works both because they are most be fine if meant in the Heideggerean sense of often cited by geographers and because— Nothing, space as no thing; if there were only especially in the case of Orientalism—they spatiality as that quality that is carried with have been most influential in contemporary and enacted in the construction of every thinking about racism. But the passion of his thing. It would be fine if we could resist the politics lies elsewhere. compelling idea that space and spatiality are I close by referring to one of the last distinct, but everywhere in the geographical things that Edward Said published before he literature, and nowhere more so than in died, and one of the most geographical. Here Lefebvre’s (1991) monumental discussion of is spatiality, distance, and violence in a land- space, that distinction is reified. That reifica- scape of alienation: tion will always occur, I argue, as long as “space” is understood as nominative. The wall does not simply divide Israel from a 2 Heidegger is of course known for his own putative Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 idealisms and their totalitarian implications, borders: it actually takes in new tracts of but deserves significant credit for his influ- Palestinian land, sometimes five or six kilometres ence on later figures trying to work through at a stretch. It is surrounded by trenches, electric the relationship between spatiality and expe- wire and moats; there are watchtowers at regular rience. His work has accordingly undergone intervals. Almost a decade after the end of South something of a revival in the recent “material African apartheid, this ghastly racist wall is going turn” See Brown (2001). up with scarcely a peep from the majority of 3 Sartre uses the term “posteriority” very effec- Israelis, or from their American allies who, tively in discussing the relationship between whether they like it or not, are going to pay for being and nothingness, to overcome the prob- most of it. The 40,000 Palestinian inhabitants of lems created when one half of the dyad is the town of Qalqilya live on one side of the wall, viewed as prior, or essential, a problem found the land they farm and actually live off is on the especially in the work of Hegel (see Sartre other (Said 2003). 1969, 16). 4 There is a voluminous literature on the rela- Said’s vision was of a very different tionship between Sartre and Fanon. In terms geography, a world re-spatialized. of the construction of “race,” both philosoph- ically and politically, see Bernasconi (1996) and Kruks (1996). Notes 5 Pile’s (2000) account of Fanon’s spatiality 1 Much has been lost, however, in the transla- does not address the question of distance, but tion of the concept of spatiality in the wider it points to the importance of such a project.

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6 Nowhere are these themes better developed Jackson, P., and Kobayashi, A.1996. Narratives of than in the work of Collette Guillaumin, who empire: British and Canadian readings of builds on Sartre, Fanon, and Said but goes Kipling’s colonial empire. British Journal of beyond all three to create a feminist account Canadian Studies 11(2):199–205. of racialization (see Guillaumin 1995). Kobayashi, A. 1989. A critique of dialectical 7 This is a rather blunt example, but of course, landscape. In Remaking human geography, in contemporary warfare, distance has again ed. A. Kobayashi and S. Mackenzie, 164–84. been redefined and proximity is no longer London: Unwin Hyman. required to kill. Kruks, S. 1996. Fanon, Sartre, and identity poli-

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