Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
not make much sense.... India marked a greater cultural disjunction, travel-
ing eastwards, than did the various Mid-Eastern lands with those bordering
in 'Europe'.”
The discursive division between the West and the Rest largely took place
through a series of simplistic dichotomous oppositions that collapsed a vast
array of diverse societies on either side, portraying Europe as white, prog-
ressive, powerful, rational, democratic, and superior, and the “Orient”—a
slippery term that changed in meaning over time—as nonwhite, feminine,
traditional, static, mysterious, irrational, despotic, and, logically, inferior.
European technological superiority was everywhere heralded as both a means
and a legitimation of domination over non-Western peoples (Headrick 1981).
Orientalism framed the Western encounter with other cultures by discursively
marginalizing non-European cultures, depriving them of the capacity for
dynamism, a notion implicit in many conservative views of the world-system
even today. Wolf (1982) argued that Western culture often represented non-
Westerners as “people without history,” i.e., as timeless, changeless societies.
This project involved folding spatial di
erences into temporal ones, or as
McGrane (1983:94) elegantly stated, “
beyond
Europe was henceforth
before
Europe.” Orientalism was thus not just an assertion of di
ff
erence, but of
superiority and inferiority, and formed an ethical cartography of power and
knowledge essential in representing Europe's Other as in dire need of being
colonized. Similarly, Pratt (1992) maintains that the European conquerors,
narrators, travel writers, and other producers of discourse selectively incor-
porated the vast variety of non-Western landscapes, many discursively natur-
alized as feminine, into the masculinist, Western grid of knowledge. However,
if we avoid the modernist emphasis on space as a passive surface in which the
active, masculine, Western colonizer “discovers” the passive non-Western
Other, the colonial project becomes instead a meeting of histories, an encoun-
ter of di
ff
ff
erent trajectories, a collision of positionalities (Massey 2005).
Folding time and space in the Renaissance
and the Enlightenment
The expansion of capitalism on a worldwide basis inevitably entailed far-
reaching changes in European constructions of time and space. Broadly,
Europe's scienti
c and intellectual revolution occurred within the context of
the rise of what is generally referred to as “modern” culture, a term that has
su
fi
ered much for its popularity. Modernity means many things, but above
all it re
ff
ects a comfort with constant, perpetual change (Berman 1982).
Historically, modernity was intimately associated with the rise of the com-
modity; both re
fl
fl
ected di
ff
erent facets of the rising bourgeois order. Thus, the
fl
flourishing commerce within Europe propelled to the fore the new capitalist
consciousness, one in which money became the measure of all value. The
invention of double-entry accounting in Florence, for example, represented the
imposition of a mathematicized visual order as much as the rationalization
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