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Andrew Sluyter (Geography, LSU) Winner of the
2004 James M. Blaut Award. Sluyter,
Andrew. 2002. Colonialism and
Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and
Applications. Lanham: Roman and
Littlefield. This is a
particularly important book in that it presents a comprehensive geographical
theory of colonisation and landscape that articulates how the scope and
magnitude of colonial landscape transformations have ensured their continuing
consequences for some of our greatest challenges today. The book’s premise is that inadequate
theorization of process results in misformulation of policy, and that the
persistent colonizer’s model of the world continues to diminish our ability
to address effectively the global challenges we face in the postcolonial
present—development and conservation efforts are inextricably linked to
history and prehistory. The book is a
reformulation of a number of articles that have appeared over a decade in
various journals, most notable being the Annals of the Association of
American Geographers. It modifies
a triangular framework first used by Peter Hulme, incorporating native,
European, and landscape elements, and the relationships between them. Most importantly, the book eloquently
illustrates how processes relating elements are both material and conceptual
because people transform elements through labor and categorization, with
resulting patterns influencing practice and thought. To illustrate, as Europeans took control of
territory formerly occupied by native people, whose numbers plummeted at
contact, native land-use practices contracted, and vegetation changed. This material transformation of the
environment resulted in the European conceptualization of a pristine
wilderness inhabited by savages. The
abundance of land in the hands of few natives who were deemed to be unskilled
provided early Europeans with further justification for colonization,
facilitated by the introduction of livestock.
In effect, the argument is that non-natives did not see what natives
were doing; they saw what they were not doing. Challenging
both those who argue that livestock degraded the landscape and those who
argue that the landscape was degraded before livestock were introduced, this
book demonstrates that conceptual parameters manifested in documents and maps
became self-ratifying categories, materially precipitating the very landscape
they erroneously described by visually validating their own conceptual
parameters and erasing precolonial ones.
It ends with a chapter devoted to the notions of Bruno Latour
concerning modernity and categorization, and it goes to great lengths in
discussing both in the context of the future of geography: we cannot be
modern even though we try to be. This book
should have an impact well beyond cultural and political ecology, on geography
in general, and more broadly on the humanities, social sciences, and
interdisciplinary environmental fields.
Its intellectual scope, theoretical innovation, and analytical vigor
follows in the spirit and accomplishment of Blaut’s own Colonizer’s Model
of the World. Moreover, Colonialism
and Landscape addresses the very theme that Blaut addressed in that and
other publications: the need to understand long-term material/discursive
processes rooted in the colonial period or risk that they continue to
undermine sustainable development efforts in the postcolonial present. Furthermore, the book brings the global
research of both Blaut and Edward Said down to earth by grounding their grand
theory about places in the transformations of the actual landscapes that are
a central component of those places.
The opinions of idealists aside, ideas about places such as Blaut’s
colonizer’s model of the world and Said’s Orientalism must relate to actual
places at the scale of the people who create their landscapes. In her review
that appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
Caroline Desbiens noted: “Sluyter has given us a very rich exploration of a
case study…as well as several tools for rethinking the connections between
space, colonial practice, and landscape transformation.” Colonialism and Landscape is a most
deserving book, and Andrew Sluyter is a most deserving recipient of the Blaut
Award. Written by W.E. Doolittle. Posted 7.6.2004. Thanks
from Andrew Sluyter Thank you to all
the By way of
acknowledging and building on his contributions to the discipline, Antipode is publishing a special issue
that should be of interest to I also want to acknowledge the
community of scholars who make up All the best, Andrew |
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Page last updated October
6, 2005 |
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