Cultural geography : an account

In this chapter I have offered a 'cultural geographic analysis' of subject matter that is central to the concerns of scholars of race, culture, modernity and colonialism. In this endeavour, I have used an orientation in cultural geography to inject a 'situated' perspective into a story of the shifting ontologies of race, nature and the human. This, it bears emphasizing, is to do something more in methodological terms than introduce a 'case study' from a site on imperialism's globe at 'location x'. Such a barely reworked positivist notion of the 'case study' tends to imply that 'location x' is an example of a more generalizable theory. Speculatively, such a framework here might be Enlightenment othering" where the 'data' of diverse places and time-periods in Europe's imperial projects are 'read off' as instances of unfaltering power and superiority. But Australia is interesting precisely because such a logic did not unfold seamlessly there; indeed the particular time/space conjuncture of that continent" specifically, the emphasis placed by colonial observers on the 'extremity' and 'remoteness' of the continent" played a key role, I have argued, in structuring some highly influential concepts of human difference.