(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE

CHAPTER 5: (POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE

summary from Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics

Gregory illustrates the connections between domination and normalization of nature as both imaginative and material, embedded in and giving substance to both concepts and practices. Postcolonialism seeks to recover the impress of colonialism on the series of representations, practices, and performances of cultures in the constitution of the world. This culture underwrites power and power elaborates culture through the discourses encased in apparatuses produced by interacting networks of individuals and institutions, and naturalizing certain modes of being in the world. One such discourse is the imaginative geographies that construct and calibrate the distances between colonizer and colonized. In this double process, the colonized are defined by their lack of the colonizer’s qualities, and commanding the colonized to present themselves as intrinsically colonial subjects. These colonial productions of space were connected to the production of nature. Nature was not only dominated, as the rape of mother earth, but it was domesticated as a reproduction of “normal” nature of the temperate zone that Europe is familiar with. Vital in this colonial production of nature is ‘enframing nature’, that is, the ‘reality’ of the world is created through the practices that represent our picture of what the objective, enduring structure of the natural world really is. Burton’s description of Tangyanika is picturesque and portable literal construction of a painting that is ordered, and imbued with the prospect of colonial progress. The colonial understandings of the natural world also produces this order to an unordered system through discourses of hydrology, the translation of nature into mathematical formulae, where local knowledge has no place. This also occurs as culture becomes naturalized into economic modeling of people as self-interested actors and the inherent rationality of the market. In representing new colonial cultures and landscapes, colonial powers sought to both find affinities and parallels to their landscapes, but also to radicalize and exaggerate differences, making colonial worlds “familiar by their very strangeness”. Two themes emerge from this discourse, the representation of Eden before the fall as in the Caribbean, and the pestilential landscape as in South Asia. These two themes became entangled, and yet tropical landscapes continued to frustrate all attempts of ordering and control, and instilled fears in the colonial powers of the possibility of becoming hybridized, or creolized. Thus in the many massacres that occurred during colonial rule, the landscape was destroyed by the familiarity of fire, and the threat of “brute nature” was staved off by the violation, torture, and murder of the people attached to that landscape. The only way to live in a terrifying environment, is to inspire terror yourself.