Chapter 5
(Post)Colonialism and the
Production of Nature
Derek Gregory
All three terms in my title are contested concepts, but in this short essay I have
had to make choices. I begin by describing the characteristic emphases of
postcolonialism, an intellectual approach and a political project that had its
origins in literary and cultural studies but which has since spiralled out across
the field of the humanities and the social sciences as a whole. One of its central
concerns has been the production of what Edward Said calls 'imaginative
geographies' as one of the enabling conditions and material effects of colonial
rule. Its analysis of their construction and consequences has for the most part
been concerned with productions of space and has had comparatively little to
say about productions of nature. In this chapter I try to show how postcolonial
theory might intersect with ideas about 'social nature.' More specifically, I
identify two major constellations of meaning and practice that have been woven
around culture-nature as part of the formation of a distinctively colonial
modernity: the domination of nature and the normalization of nature. As we
will see, each is at once elaborately imaginative and acutely material, embedded
in and giving substance to images and texts, practices and performances.
Postcolonialism and its Imaginative Geographies
'Postcolonialism' can mean many things. If, like the postmodern, it is used
to identify an historical period, you might be surprised to find that many
writers have argued that its beginning ought not to coincide with the end of
formal colonialism. Such an approach not only runs the risk of concealing the
ways in which colonial norms and forms extend into the present, but it also
fails to account for the historical reach of the postcolonial once it is also
understood, like the postmodern, as a critical strategy (in other words, it fails
to explain postcolonialism's preoccupation with interrogating colonialism). The
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 85
l
r - - - - - - - - - - - - elaborates ---------,1
• production of meanings representations
CULTURE • circulation of meanings through practices POWER
I
•legitimation of meanings performances r
L .------------underwrites----------'Figure
5.1: Culture and power
most productive response to these concerns may be to trace the curve of
the postcolonial from the inaugural moment of the colonial encounter. Moreover,
there have been many different colonialisms, so that this arc is inscribed
in different histories and different geographies. All have been made in the
shadow of colonialism, but they have been made in the shadows of other
formations too, which makes it important to avoid the sort of explanation
that reduces everything that subsequently happened to the marionette movements
of colonialism. Even so, its impositions and exactions have often been
lost from view - suppressed or simply forgotten - so that one of the central
tasks of postcolonialism is to recover the impress of colonialism: to retrieve
its shapes, like the chalk outline at a crime scene, and to remind ourselves
of the living bodies they so imperfectly summon to presence (Gandhi,
1998).
That act of recovery is difficult: it is partly for this reason that postcolonialism
has accentuated (some critics would say aggrandized) the power of theory,
because theory in its critical mode can challenge our 'commonsense,' taken-forgranted
understandings. In this case, theory can help to reveal the ways in
which colonialism is still abroad in the world. Postcolonialism theory, like any
other sort of theory, is partial and situated, however, and no matter what some
of its architects and advocates might claim, it does not offer a complete survey
of the (post)colonial condition. In this essay I will be concerned with its
characteritic cultural emphases, but this does not mean that I am indifferent to
its points of connection and contention with other theoretical systems, most of
all with political economy and political ecology.
A central concern of postcolonialism is to elucidate the relations between
culture and power. It aims to do so in such a way that culture is seen not as
superficial, or as a screen for supposedly more fundamental (which for its
critics typically means politico-economic) relations, and above all not as a
'reflection' of the world. Culture is seen instead as a series of representations,
practices, and performances that enter folly into the constitution of the world
(figure 5.1).
Postcolonial theory often seeks to map the circuits through which culture
underwrites power and power elaborates culture by working with the concept
86 DEREK GREGORY
of discourse. A discourse is a specific, collective series of representations,
practices, and performances through which meanings give the world its
particular shapes - their forms and norms. This implies that discourse is
inherently productive, generative, and 'object-constituting': or, as Prakash
(1995: 202) puts it more directly, "discourse does not restrict or distort
knowledge but generates, encodes and arranges it in diverse forms and locations."
It doesn't do so by magic. Discourses have their own rules and protocols
about what can properly be regarded as knowledge, but these conventions are
grounded. By this I mean that they are encased in apparatuses - in books
and journals, in instruments and equipment, in interactions and procedures which
are produced and reproduced through interlocking networks of individuals
and institutions, and their physicality, materiality, and durability help to
naturalize particular ways of being in and acting in the world. This is extremely
important because it means that discourse is always about more than the
production of representations, and this explains why practices and performances
appear in figure 5.1.
These are general characterizations. One of the preoccupations of a specifically
colonial discourse is the production of imaginative geographies that
construct and calibrate a distance between colonizing and colonized societies:
constructions that "help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by
dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is
far away" (Said, 1978: 55). What is crucial about this process is that it is
asymmetrical. Said frames his critique of Orientalism with an epigram from
Marx that says it all: "They cannot represent themselves; they must be
represented." In other words, colonial discourse confers the power to represent
upon the agents of colonizing societies, who are supposed to have the selfevident
right, critical capacity, and even bounden duty to exhibit otherwise
inarticulate or inchoate subaltern populations before the gaze of metropolitan
audiences. Imaginative geographies are thus orderings in the double sense of
both bringing an essentially external order to colonial societies - subaltern
populations are defined by their nominal 'lack' of attributes which are present
in and valorized by metropolitan societies - and of commanding their members
to make themselves present as intrinsically colonial subjects. But there is
nothing axiomatic or automatic about this, whatever colonial discourse might
claim. Subaltern populations are neither silenced nor silent, and colonizer and
colonized are drawn into a reciprocal and contradictory process of 'transculturation.'
In consequence, the production of colonial knowledges ofother cultures
- through the spiral of representations, practices, and performances - also
depends on the active involvement of those other cultures.
Seen like this I expect it is not very difficult to see how postcolonial theory
intersects with ideas about 'social nature.' Here, for example, is the French
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss gazing down on the landscape of central
India from an aircraft:
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 87
When the European looks down on this land, divided into minute lots and
cultivated to the last acre, he experiences an initial feeling of familiarity. But
the way the colours shade into each other, the irregular outlines of the fields
and the rice-swamps which are constantly rearranged in different patterns,
the blurred edges which look as if they had been roughly stitched together,
all this is part of the same tapestry, but - compared to the clearly defined
forms and colours of a European landscape - it is like a tapestry with the
wrong side showing. (Levi-Strauss, 1992: 132-3; emphasis added)
This extraordinary passage captures the reflexes of colonial discourse with raw
precision: the European gaze on another landscape from a distance; the uncanny
reflection of the European ideal that yields to the imperfections of the alien
landscape; and, finally this other 'culture-nature' revealed as an image in a
mirror. To Levi-Strauss this other 'culture' and its 'nature' lack the order and
clarity of his own European landscape.
Yet in practice postcolonial analysis of imaginative geographies has privileged
the production ofspace and been drawn to the multiplication of enclosures and
partitions that demarcate the colonizing from the colonized. These are
immensely important considerations. But these geometries were not featureless
planes: they were topographies rather than topologies - 'geographies' in the
fullest of senses - and, as I want to show, it is important to explore how
colonial productions of space were hinged to colonial productions ofnature (as
can be seen in the passage from Levi-Strauss).1
In considering these connections,
it will be necessary to move beyond poststructuralism by investing not only
nominally 'cultural' practices with the capacity to make a difference but also by
allowing that nominally 'natural' organisms and physical systems also have the
capacity to make a difference. This possibility assumes a special force in colonial
discourse in which other natures are frequently endowed the gigantesque or
monstrous powers that threaten to overwhelm colonial cultures and to exceed
the space available for their presentations.
Culture, Nature, and Colonial Modernity
From the sixteenth century the triumph of European modernity came to be
represented as in some substantial sense the triumph of 'culture' over 'nature.'
The scare-quotes remind us that this was an imaginative achievement: that both
'culture' and 'nature' here, whatever else they may be, are conceptual constructions,
the product of imaginative cuts in the fabric of the world (see Demeritt,
this volume). There were voices that dissented from the discourse ofdomination,
to be sure, but in general 'culture' and 'nature' were prised apart within the
modern European imaginary and the advance of European culture was usually
measured by the distance it was supposed to have traveled from its own nature.
88 DEREK GREGORY
'pre-modern' domination
'CULTURE' 'NATURE'
'modern' domination
_____/
Figure 5.2: 'Culture,' 'nature,' and modernity
It was widely assumed that European nature has been forced to yield its
secrets to the intimate probings of a new experimental European science especially
physical science and natural history - and to release its energies
through the inventions of a new mechanical European technology. Other
sciences and other technologies were by no means as inferior as these assumptions
made out, but the achievements of the 'Scientific Revolution' and the
'Industrial Revolution' helped to create and calibrate an imaginative distance
between a self-consciously modern Europe and the rest of the world (Adas,
1989). Modern cultures were supposed to have dissected nature so deeply and
to have imposed themselves upon nature so forcefully that they were no longer
at its mercy, whereas premodern cultures were regarded as creatures of their
containing natures whose institutions, practices, and possibilities were conditioned
and limited by the caprice of their local ecologies (figure 5.2).
This imaginary produced, and was in part produced through, a culture of
nature in which 'nature' was constructed as an external and eternal domain
lying outside the historical trajectories of 'culture.' Smith (1984) calls this an
"ideology of nature" because it obscures the ways in which the restless dynamics
of capitalism enter fully into the historical production of nature. In concealing
these connections, Smith argues this culture of nature is so indelibly marked by
class that it can be described as a bourgeois imaginary. Modern colonialism has
often been described as a bourgeois project by its radical critics, so such a
conjunction is scarcely surprising. But this culture of nature is marked in other
ways that also bear directly on European colonialism. F~r 'nature' was not only
dominated: it was also domesticated. This had two other dimensions of acute
significance that further served to situate discourses about social nature produced
under the sign of colonialism.
In the first place, these modern productions of nature were feminized: They
were codified in an imaginary that was intricately gendered and sexualized. If
appeals to 'Mother Nature' were a commonplace of European thought,
however, they were by no means constants. Merchant (1980) suggests that in
the course of the seventeenth century established "constraints against penetration"
- taboos that derived from the Renaissance image of nature as a
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 89
beneficent, nurturing 'earth-mother' who busily provided for the needs of
humankind in an ordered universe - were transformed, in large measure
through the active elaborations of empirical, experimental science and technology,
into what she calls "sanctions for denudation." These switched signals
were not mute metaphors; rather, they helped to fashion a fluid and evolving
'rape-script' in which Natura was no longer able to complain "that her garments
of modesty were being torn by the wrongful thrusts of man" (Merchant, 1980:
189). While Merchant's argument unfolds in a Europe riven by the scientific
revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were close connections
between the maps of nature made by that 'New Science' and the colonial
mappings of the 'New World' (Albanese, 1996), and later and in a different
register between the cultural authority of natural science and (post)colonial
projects in South Asia, Africa, and elsewhere (Adas, 1989; Prakash, 1999).
In the second place, modern productions of nature were codified in an
imaginary that defined European nature as temperate nature: a nature that was
moderate, constant, and continent, without extremes of excesses. It was
acknowledged that there were interruptions to its harmonies and cycles, like
the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that devastated much of the city or the volcanic
spasms of Vesuvius that excited so many Victorian tourists, but a nature whose
instabilities were chronic and generalized was located elsewhere (cf. Johns,
1999). The capricious eruptions, violent extremes, and monstrous deformations
of nature at large were supposed to be removed from modern Europe either by
the passage of time (the catastrophic floods and ice ages of the remote past) or
by physical distance: Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment adventurers and
explorers may no longer have feared remote regions and many-headed monsters,
but their scientific journals and travel writings conveyed to an enthralled public
a vivid sense of the excesses of other natures - wild, luxuriant, and tangled;
harsh, empty, and barren - and hence produced those other natures as other.
Through the emerging partitions and divisions of global space European nature
was constructed as 'normal' nature, while other, nontemperate natures were
diagnosed as abnormal, pathological, and even 'unnatural' natures.
This double discourse of domination and normalization presented modern
colonialism with a dilemma. On the one side, it was possible to attribute the
advance of European culture not only to the distance it had traveled from
nature but also, paradoxically, to its embeddedness in its own, temperate
nature. In his lectures on the philosophy of world history first delivered m
1822-3, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel had this to say:
Man uses nature for his own ends; but where nature is too powerful it does
not allow itself to be used as a means ... The torrid and frigid zones, as
such, are not the theatre on which world history is enacted ... All in all, it
is therefore the temperate zone which must furnish the theatre of history.
And more specifically the northern part of the temperate zone.
90 DEREK GREGORY
These were not exceptional views in northern and western Europe. On the
other side, however, it was possible to feminize non-European nature not as a
nurturing mother but as a wild, seductive, and unruly siren, which implied not
only that these other natures lacked the order that could only be brought to
them from the outside by a masclinized Reason that forced them to submit to
its will, but also that their excesses posed a real threat to the virile powers and
integrities of European culture as it penetrated those other natures.
I want to bring this dilemma into sharper focus by considering the discourses
of domination and normalization in turn. This analytical separation is for the
purposes of exposition alone: both the powers and the predicaments that
attended them derived in very large measure from the ways in which they were
entangled with one another, and it will be impossible to keep them wholly
separate.
Colonizing Cultures and the Domination of Nature
Colonialism was involved in a distinctive cultural politics of nature, but this
does not mean that the precolonial past was a 'golden age' of ecological
equilibrium. "By making the arrival of the Europeans the center of our
analysis," Cronan (1986: 164) warns, "we run the risk of attributing all
[ecological] change to their agency" and rendering native inhabitants "as passive
and 'natural' as the landscape." Famine, deforestation, and environmental
degradation were not the exclusive products of colonial moderniry. Neither did
modern colonialism inevitably issue in ecological apocalypse: colonial ecologies
were not always and everywhere exploitative and destructive and, at least before
the 1870s, there was a space for what Grove (1995) calls a "green imperialism."
We can gain some sense of what was distinctive about a colonial politics of
nature by turning to the novelist Joseph Conrad. The protagonists of his short
story 'An Outpost of Progress,' first published in 1897, are two agents of a
European trading company in Mrica:
They lived like blind men in a large room, aware only of what came in
contact with them (and of that only imperfectly), but unable to see the
general aspect of things. The river, the forest, all the great land throbbing
with life, were like a great emptiness. Even the brilliant sunshine disclosed
nothing intelligible. Things appeared and disappeared before their eyes in an
unconnected and aimless kind of way. The river seemed to come from
nowhere and to flow nowhere. It flowed through a void.
"Blind," "unable to see the general aspect of things," this nature appeared to
both men as "a great emptiness," "a void." It was a nature without limits or
boundaries, an unmappable and hence unmasterable space, where a river could
come from nowhere and flow to nowhere.
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 91
Later the hapless pair chance upon a faded European newspaper containing
an article on 'our colonial expansion':
It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilisation, of the sacredness of the
civilising work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing
light, and faith, and commerce to the dark places of the earth. Carlier and
Kayerts read, wondered and began to think better of themselves. Carlier said
one evening, waving his hand about, "In a hundred years, there will perhaps
be a town here. Quays, and warehouses, and barracks, and - and - billiard
rooms. Civilization ..." (Conrad, 1991: 42-3)
Here at last was the prospect of dominating nature through the production of
a different, differentiable space, of bringing this unruly nature within the
disciplined, regulated, and ordered perimeter of culture.
The same themes reappear in Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. In this
scene Marlow has just arrived at a trading station in the Congo:
When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance
of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a
high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear
necktie, and varnished boots. No hat, hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a
green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a
penholder behind his ear.
I shook hands with this miracle, and I learned he was the Company's
chief accountant ...
This extraordinary European figure presented a stark contrast to what Marlow
saw as "the great demoralization of the land" and the encroachments of its
savage nature on the space of the trading station itself:
Everything else in the station was in a muddle - heads, things, buildings.
Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of
manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads and brass-wire sent into the
depths of darkness, and in return came a precious trickle of ivory.
I had to wait in the station for ten days - an eternity. I lived in a hut in
the yard, but to be out of the chaos I would sometimes get into the
accountant's office ... [where], bent over his books, [the chief accoutant]
was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions. (Conrad, 1985:
45-7)
Marlow's overwhelming sense is one of disorder - and yet, in the middle of all
this, he glimpses (and seeks refuge in) a space of rationality, of calculability, the
space of capital accounting.
Here was the central predicament of colonial modernity: how could nature
'out there' - savage and undomesticated - be brought 'in here'? How could
92 DEREK GREGORY
such a 'nature' be made to submit to 'culture'? The immediate answer does not
lie in the clearing of forests and the fencing of fields, the laying of roads and
railways, and the building of barracks and barrages. These were concrete
achievements - some of them spectacular signs intended to be taken for
wonders - but to understand how they were possible, conceptually and
imaginatively, it is necessary to understand the process of enframing through
which the discourse of domination was articulated.
Enframing nature
'Enframing' means both to set the world up as a picture and to treat the world
as a picture. This looks deceptively simple, but its implications are so farreaching
that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger once declared that
"the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as
picture." This is a large claim, so let me try to unpack what is involved. As a
first aproximation, we can say that the modern domination of nature depends
upon the successful production of a space of constructed visibility within which
three objectives have to be fulfilled: 'nature' has to be held at a distance, set up
as an object, and structured as a more or less systematic totality. If we look
more closely at what this involves, we can see that there is something theatrical
about it. It's a sort of performance that involves a 'staging' - an artful
'organization of the view' - by means of which an audience is persuaded that
the representations made available to it provide a privileged (or 'truthful') access
to the real. The connections between power, space, and visuality here are
complex, but Mitchell (2000) summarizes their diverse histories as so many
stagings of 'the world-as-exhibition' or 'the world-as-picture,' each of which
turns on a distinction between 'representation' and 'reality.'
You probably think there is nothing exceptional about this, but its obviousness
is precisely the point that Mitchell seeks to sharpen: how is such an
'obvious' distinction brought about? Within this imaginative theater, he suggests,
both actors and audience conduct themselves as though the world is
divided in two. On one side, reality is taken to be 'an object that exists prior to
any representation, as something given, material, fixed in its unique time and
space'; on the other side, representation promises its practitioners endless, serial,
replicable entries into the presence of the real which .is thereby made available
(or 're-presented') for them within a unified and fully legible space. Colonial
modernity, Mitchell argues, "involves creating an effect we recognize as reality,
by organizing the world endlessly to represent it." Hence, the real - in our
case, 'nature' - is endlessly made available to us through multiple practices and
performances, each of which is made to 'stand for' the objective, original, and
enduring structure of the natural world (Mitchell, 2000: 16-24).
It is now possible to see why Heidegger, Mitchell, and others firmly believe
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 93
that 'the world-as-exhibition' is structurally (not accidentally) implicated in the
general operations of colonizing power: in 'the conquest of the world as picture.'
For the dualism put in place through the process of enframing endows the
modern viewing subject, constructed as a disembodied and distanced observer,
with the exclusive privilege and the extraordinary power to dis-cover the 'real'
order of what will appear to other, nonmodern actors and audiences as an
otherwise errant universe. Seen like this the modern enframing of nature is
inherently colonizing no matter where it takes place: coercive, invasive, appropriative
in all its sites, it makes nature available for inspection, codification,
calculation, and regulation. And, as I've said, it is a central concern of Marxist
materialism to identifY the instrumentalities by means of which this ever more
effective domination of nature under a restlessly globalizing capitalism sustained
the ever more effective domination of one class by another.
Making colonial natures visible
But in its specific operations colonial discourse trades on the dualism between
'representation' and 'reality' in such a way as to produce (and reproduce) a
second dualism - between 'colonizer' and 'colonized'- that turns on more than
class filiations and which thus prompts different questions. If colonial 'nature'
is held at a distance, set up as an object, and structured as a totality, how does
this enframing accommodate the double positions of colonizer and colonized?
In what ways does the colonial domination of nature sustain the power of the
colonizer over the colonized? And to what extent is the colonial will-to-power
compromised, interrupted, even reversed?
To fashion a preliminary answer to these questions I want to examine two
strategies by means of which colonial discourse attempted to enframe nonEuropean
natures as particular landscapes. The concept of landscape was focal
to modern colonialism and imperialism (Mitchell, 1994), but I can discuss only
symptomatic examples here, and it is extremely important not to homogenize
colonial ways of seeing. Different travelers with different purposes had different
perspectives and different priorities. More than this, enframing was not simply
a matter of packing one's cultural baggage at home, unpacking it elsewhere and
returning with its contents unchanged and intact. As Martins (2000: 21)
remarks, representations, practices, and performances were always contingent
affairs, in process as well as in transit, and freighted with the traces of their
passage. Although my examples are drawn from nominally 'artistic' and
'scientific' registers, these should not be construed as opposites; each informs
and even depends on the other. Still more important, their terminus is much
the same. By these means nature is made to appear within a space of order and
organization and, m the end, made available for calculation and
commodification.
94 DEREK GREGORY
In her cnuque of the 'imperial eyes' deployed by European cultures of
exploration and travel in the nineteenth century, Pratt (1992) has drawn
attention to what she calls 'the monarch-of-all-I-survey-scene.' Here, in an
exemplary passage originally published in 1860, is the British explorer Richard
Burton describing his first view of Lake Tanganyika:
Nothing, in sooth, could be more picturesque than this first view of the
Tanganyika Lake, as it lay in the lap of the mountains, basking in the
gorgeous tropical sushine. Below and beyond a short foreground of rugged
and precipitous hill-fold, down which the foot-path zigzags painfully, a
narrow strip of emerald green, never sere and marvellously fertile, shelves
towards a ribbon of glistening yellow sand, here bordered by sedgy rushes,
there cleanly and clearly cut by the breaking wavelets. Further in front stretch
the waters, an expanse of the lightest and softest blue, in breadth varying
from thirty to thirty-five miles, and sprinkled by the crisp east-wind with
tiny crescents of snowy foam. The background in front is a high and broken
wall of steel-coloured mountain, here flecked and capped with pearly mist,
there standing sharply pencilled against the azure air ... [The landscape],
like all the fairest prospects in these regions, wants but a little of the neatness
and finish of art - mosques and kiosks, palaces and villas, gardens and
orchards - contrasting with the profuse lavishness and magnificence of
nature ...
Nature is here visibly made over into a picture, and in this passage pictorial
imagery achieves several things.
First, Burton's ability to deploy the picturesque was a triumphant affirmation
of what Ryan (1996: 60) calls "the portability of [European] visual taste.'' Just
think: an aesthetic popularized by an English country parson was seemingly
able to contain the vastness of the Mrican landscape and to render it in familiar
terms.
Secondly, once the landscape is framed as a painting, constructed as a sketch,
and filled in with a palette of watercolors (the 'steel-coloured mountain sharply
pencilled against the azure air'), the scene of visual mastery becomes almost
palpable. "If the scene is a painting," Pratt (1992: 205) remarks, "then Burton
is both the viewer there to judge and to appreciate it, and the verbal painter
who produces it for others."
Thirdly, Burton not only organizes the view, he also orders the landscape as
a composition of elevations, planes, and colors: an order which turns out to be
necessary if the landscape is to be seen at all. During his travels through central
Mrica, the French novelist Andre Gide (1929) was once driven to despair at
"the impossibility of differentiation." Looking out over a wide stretch of
country, "everything is uniform," he wrote, so that "there can be no possible
predilection for any particular site ... From one end of the horizon to the
other, there is not a single point to which I wish to go." Without 'points' there
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 95
was nothing to see: no particular 'sights' and so no particular 'sites.' But those
'points' had to be produced. The land had to be summoned to presence, made
to submit itself as a series of 'points' to the observing gaze in order for it to
appear as a landscape.
Fourthly, this order is not static. The scene is a 'prospect' partly because the
view unfolds before Burton's uninterrupted gaze but partly too because it allows
him to present an unobstructed vision of its future: a vista of palaces and villas,
gardens and orchards, whose cultivation will at once contrast with and
complement the abundance of an undomesticated nature. The picturesque not
only invited this sort of correction; it positively required it. If the landscape did
not conform to the protocols of the picturesque, the artist was given license to
'improve' the prospect. But the explicitly colonial picturesque vested the power
to do so in the totalizing dispositions of the colonizer alone. If local people left
only "scratches on the face of the country," feint "traces on the landscape,"
these were superficial signs to be taken for vacant possession, tacit invitations
to colonial possession and appropriation (Pratt, 1992: 60).
Science made many of the same discursive moves, and often enrolled art in
order to do so. In the course of the eighteenth century the maps, sketches, and
illustrations that were folded into the projects of natural history, topographical
survey, and cartography made visible a colonial 'order of things' by means of a
thoroughgoing spatialization of knowledge that brought various non-European
natures within the sovereign grid of European scientific culture. Those 'natures'
were dis-placed in order to be re-placed within a taxonomy: "One by one,"
Pratt (1992: 31) remarks, "the planet's life forms were drawn out of the tangled
threads of their life surroundings and rewoven into European-based patterns of
global unity and order." Plates in books and journals, specimens in botanical
gardens and zoos, displays in museums and exhibitions: "nature and its
geographies were enframed in these ways for a variety of audiences" (Withers,
1995: 148). In their turn these orderings made possible a second dis-placement
and re-placement that confirmed the power of colonial productions of nature.
A spectator at the zoological gardens in Regent's Park, for example, was able to
occupy a dual position: at once physically in London, where 'the natural world
lay at John Bull's feet,' and also figuratively elsewhere, each exhibit standing for
the place from which it originated. "The Zoo works metaphorically here as a
moment of transportation," Jones (1997: 8) explains, "while simultaneously
acting metonymically to condense the globe into the space of the gardens." It
is this double passage - from 'there' to 'here' and back again at will - that
marks the operations of colonizing power.
But these condensations and displacements revolve around individuals plants
or animals - whereas science, like art, also worked to produce other,
aggregative kinds of 'natural objects.' Consider geology. In the eighteenth
century European explorers had noticed the morphological particularities of the
coast of the Pacific North West, but these were represented as individual
96 DEREK GREGORY
profiles or idiosyncratic sites. It was the achievement of nineteenth-century
geology to read them instead as signs standing for a larger structural order:
In the span of less than 100 years a dramatic shift had occurred, from
collecting specimens and viewing the physical outlines of landscapes, to
'seeing geologically.' What was visible in nature had changed irrevocably: one
no longer attended to scattered mineral samples or other curiosities, but to
the 'inner architecture' of the earth. (Braun, 2000: 22).
This process of scientific enframing was generalizing in another sense too.
Braun (1997: 16) argues that it was only after the land was staged as a "theater
of nature" in this way that it could be made available to political and economic
calculation. As soon as it became possible to convey the fixities and particularities
of solid geology in a general calculus of private property and speculative
valuation, this 'nature' was able to enter a world where 'all that is solid melts
into air': the circuits of global capital where it could be endlessly transformed.
"From London, New York or Montreal, it was now possible to view the 'true
structure' of Canada's nature without having to be there in person; the
circulation of one inscription, the geological map, permitted the circulation of
another, money" (Braun, 2000: 25). This process of commodification was
underwritten by the colonial state which structured systems of property, lease,
and concession, and systems of regulation, surveillance, and enforcement, so
that individuals would be compelled to follow the script of rational accounting.
But to stage colonial governmentaliry through such a theatrical production
of the state's 'vertical territory' required some of the principal actors to withdraw
to the wings. When George Dawson, a surveyor for the Geological Survey of
Canada, made his way through the Pacific Northwest in the 1870s and 1880s,
he routinely relied on the assistance of the Haida people. Although his journals
describe their cultural practices in great detail, these ethnographic inscriptions
are separated from his parallel inventory of the physical landscape. In effect,
Dawson's texts detach indigenous 'culture' from 'nature,' and thereby stage
"the unveiling of nature's 'plan,' a plan which both preceded and lay external to
a native presence" and which for this reason could be fulfilled through "the
judicious mixing of European (Canadian) capital and labor" alone (Braun,
1997: 14).
There were other ways in which scientific discourse allowed the colonial
domination of nature to extend the power of the colonizer over the colonized.
When the British annexed the Punjab they chose to work with local populations
and local rulers, respecting their knowledges and working to enhance existing
systems of irrigation. Although the results were deemed successful, however,
neither the East India Company nor the Presidencies quite knew how to
measure their effect or estimate the results of future irrigation schemes
(Headrick, 1988: 181). For this, water had to be 'disenchanted' so that "all
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 97
mystery disappears from its depths, all gods depart, all contemplation of its
flow ceases" (Worster, in Gilmartin, 1995: 211). This involved not only
filtering cultural residues from 'water' but also replacing them with others. Thus,
in the second half of the nineteenth century a new discourse of hydrology and
hydraulic engineering emerged which translated 'nature' into mathematical
formulae. In these there would be no place for 'local' knowledge and the
hydraulics of irrigation channels and the mechanics of dam construction could
be made the same the world over.
Crucially, the production of nature through the production of ever more
abstract spaces raised other possibilities for the consolidation of colonial power.
If movements of water and sediment could be made visible and literally brought
to account through cascades of equations, was it possible to bring 'culture'
within the same calculus? Was it possible to enframe both culture and naturea
colonized 'culture-nature' - within a system of simultaneous equations? One
answer sought to reduce culture to nature by treating local actors as so many
(other) objects to be controlled with the same dispassionate efficiency that
calibrated flow models and turned valves. Accordingly, rules of conduct were
published setting out penalties and punishments for infractions of the irrigation
code. As Gilmartin (1994: 1139) observes, this was "an attempt to impose
individual 'discipline' within an irrigating 'machine."' But the colonial order
was vested in collectivities rather than individuals, and the state's powers of
surveillance and sanction were hopelessly inadequate to the task. An alternative
solution was to naturalize 'culture' within the calculus ofequilibrium economics
by modeling local people as self-interested actors whose transactions were
governed by the abstract and instrumental rationality of the market. This too
erased the collective, communal world of local cultivators, but it proved to be
problematic for the colonial state on quite other grounds:
1f the model of market rationality promised theoretically to integrate irrigators
on a micro-level into a system of colonial environmental control, it also
threatened to undercut the theoretical separation of the British, both from
the environment and from Indian society, that was so central to their
position as a ruling community. Indeed, the alliance between large-scale
government control of the environment and profit-maximizing individuals
held the potential to define political foundations for a community linking
the state and society, a community forged through a common relationship to
the environment. But this was not a vision of community for which colonial
rule provided a structural foundation. For the British, the scientific definition
of the environment served to legitimize the state's separation not only from
the natural world that it sought to control, but also from the customary,
community-based structure of Indian society. (Gilmartin, 1995: 226)
It should now be clear how the process of enframing enabled the conversion
of other 'natures' into more or less domesticated 'landscapes.' By the turn of
98 DEREK GREGORY
the twentieth century the concrete forms made possible through these transformations
often amounted to spectacular stagings of the power of colonialism to
dominate other natures - mines and plantations; canals and railways; barrages
and dams- and, through these practices and performances, other cultures. But
colonial enframings were not always as secure or stable as they seemed. Not
only could colonial stagings of a supposedly domesticated nature be interrupted
by unforeseen side-effects and by extreme physical events like flash-floods, but
they could be subverted through everyday acts of resistance and collective
protests (Guha, 1989). These grandiose projects could also be co-opted by
political movements that reactivated indigenous knowledges, in concert with
modern Western traditions, to redirect colonial technoculture to avowedly
anticolonial, nationalist ends (Prakash, 1999). More recently still, postcolonial
states have been obliged to confront demands from marginalized populations
over their complicities in technocultural dominations of nature that have
licensed multiple forms of resource-based repression (Moore, 1997; Watts,
1997). Postcolonial theory has had much less to say about any of these counterpossibilities
than political ecology or subaltern studies but, as I now want to
show, colonial discourse - still the main object of postcolonial critique - could
itself confound the process of enframing through its own contradictions and
ruptures.
Colonizing Natures and the Normalization of Nature
In her analysis of "tropical nature as a way of writing," Stepan (1991) reminds
us that "nature is not 'natural' but is created as natural." But the converse is
equally true. In rendering temperate nature as 'normal' nature, colonial discourse
simultaneously constructed nontemperate nature as radically other and
thereby established an essential distance between 'normal' nature and its
excesses. This distance was essential because it was a gap that was necessary for
the formation of metropolitan-colonial identity and for the privileges colonialism
accrued to itself. 'Nature' was enrolled as another register within which
colonial discourse could map the space between colonizer and colonized as a
surface of difference. Writing tropical nature as 'other' thus conveyed "its
discursive differentiation from home and the familiar," and in doing so helped
to establish the 'superiority' of the domestic over the exotic (Stepan, 1991:
496-7). That distance was always precarious, however, for if those 'unnatural
natures' remained undomesticated there was then the ever-present possibility of
transgression: the hideous threat that these monstrosities would break out from
the 'place' that colonial discourse had assigned to them.
In response to these ideas I want to consider two questions. How did
colonial discourse represent these other natures as 'other,' as in some sense
pathological natures? And if these distinctions simultaneously shored up find
(POST)COLONIAUSM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 99
undermined the foundational divide between the space of the colonizer and the
space of the colonized, how were these instabilities inscribed in the practices
and performances of colonizing powers?
The central representational predicament was to find a way of conveying the
otherness of other natures (and other cultures), of bringing them within a
European project of a universal 'earth-writing' that would make them intelligible
to metropolitan audiences without at the same time destroying the very
signs that marked them as other. Europeans embarked on the early modern
voyages of discovery found the (multiple) terms for this dilemma in the
problematic of 'wonder,' a sort of radical passion that careened between
ravishment and repulsion and which effected what Greenblatt (1991: 135) sees
as "the crucial break" with an-other world that could only be described "in the
language of sameness." There were several ways to traverse this paradoxical
space of rupture and connection. One was to search for affinities and parallels
that would recognize and validate the presence of each in the other. There were
thus European representations of North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries that portrayed it as "an Old World in the rough," producing
an uncanny sense of "strange familiarity" through an imaginative ordering of
the land as an almost-but-not-quite European landscape (Dickenson, 1998:
127). Another strategy was to refine and heighten the sense of radical difference,
to develop the reflex of estrangements, so that the distance from the other
would be accentuated in ways that could license its colonial appropriation and
transformation on quite other terms. But this distance did not remain an
uncharted abyss: it was artfully and imaginatively mapped so that, over time,
the discursive production of other natures established its own protocols and
conventions. Explorers and travelers underwrote their observations through a
whirlwind spiral of citation and cross-reference that installed and naturalized
imaginative geographies whose canonical forms were reproduced and elaborated
in successive accounts. By these means, through a colonial discourse that
gradually widened its horizons of meaning and thickened its contours, the
strangeness of other natures eventually became familiar in its very strangeness.
Pathologizing nature
By the middle of the nineteenth century European natural historians and
travelers could draw on a deeply sedimented imaginative geography of 'the
tropics,' for example, and those who failed to satisfY the expectations of their
audience usually met with little popular success. The dominant discourse of
'tropicaliry' was structured by two major thematics (Arnold, 1996: 141-68).
The first represented the tropics as an Acadia, a sort of Garden of Eden before
the Fall. This rhetorical space was most closely associated with the islands of
the Caribbean and the South Pacific. In the eighteenth and on into the
100 DEREK GREGORY
nineteenth centuries the production and reproduction of such an emphatically
exuberant nature was sustained by an intimate cross-fertilization between
luxuriance and sexuality. Although there was nothing new in engendering
'nature' as feminine, the production of a distinctively tropical nature as sultry
and seductive had a genealogy of its own. This cultural formation derived in
part from what Livingstone (1991) calls a 'moral climatology' that asserted a
causal connection between the heat and humidity of the 'torrid zones' and the
supposed moral lassitude and intemperance of their indigenous populations.
But it also derived from a botanical discourse whose taxonomies fastened on
the reproductive anatomy of plants, and from the subterranean diversion of
those classifications into a vernacular discourse of elite eroticism (Bewell, 1996;
Browne, 1996). And it owed much to philosophical and aesthetic discourses of
primitivism that were preoccupied with 'nature' as much as 'culture' and which
were eventually modulated in complex ways by a fin-de-siecle modernism that
continued to remark the object-lessons to be learned from contemplating both
'noble savages' and the lush garden of delights that they enjoyed (Barkan and
Bush, 1995). It was through all of these routes, through the constitution of
what I prefer to think of as a more general 'moral economy of nature,' that
somewhere like Tahiti became such a complex mythical symbol that intermingled
"pastoral innocence and threatening libertinism" in powerfully unsettling
ways (Bewell, 1996: 184).
In the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these imaginative
geographies were overwritten by a second thematic, inscribed most vividly
in South Asia and Africa, that constructed the tropics as pestilential rather than
paradisaical. Here abundance became excess and, at the limit, excrescence:
tropical nature was produced as a brooding, duplicitous, and enervating
monster. Moral climatology played a central role in this "pathologization of
space" too, but its rhetorical atlas was dramatized by a biomedical discourse
that constructed the tropics as "the pathological site par excellence" (Naraindas,
1996). By the early nineteenth century it had become common for European
writers to identifY the tropics with putrefaction, decay, and decomposition, and
with fevers produced by 'bad air' ('malaria') that supposedly spread in a
particularly acute form as a 'miasma.' The baseline for mapping South Asia as
part of this tropical zone was laid down by the British East India Company in
Bengal, where the tripartite regime of heat, humidity, and overabundant nature
was assumed to be symptomatic of the subcontinent as a whole, and to flag it
as a distinctive and dangerous space. These diagnostics were projected onto
local populations whose bodies were folded into this pathologized tropical
nature by the racialized and sexualized discourses of environmental determinism.
In the early nineteenth century, India was thus constructed as "the kind
of place, subject at once to indolence and passion, where disease and sexuality
alike flourished," and its indigenous inhabitants were elaborately feminized by
a masculinism that identified the people of the humid and marshy plains with
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 101
"physical and moral weakness" (Metcalf, 1995: 171-3; Arnold, 1998: 7). Even
when environmental theories of disease yielded to bacteriological theories in the
late nineteenth century, the connective imperative between tropical nature and
tropical culture was retained; "One now sought to avoid not 'miasmatic fluxes'
but Indian bodies, the filthy carries of contagious disease" (Metcalf, 1995: 177).
By the end of the nineteenth century these two versions of tropicality had
become entangled with one another. Consider the two views of the city of
Chandrapore with which E. M. Forster opens A Passage to India:
Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles
along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely
... The very wood [of the houses] seems made of mud, the inhabitants of
mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye,
that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the
excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left
rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking
there, like some low but indestructible form of life. {Forster, 1971: 9)
Inland, however, "the prospect alters." Viewed from the rise beyond the railway,
where the European civil station is laid out,
Chandrapore appears to be a totally different place. It is a city of gardens. It
is no city, but a forest sparsely scattered with huts. It is a tropical pleasaunce
washed by a noble river. The toddy palms and neem trees and mangoes
and pepul that were hidden behind the bazaars now become visible and
in their turn hide the bazaars. They rise from the gardens where ancient
tanks nourish them, they burst out of stifling purlieus and unconsidered
temples. Seeking light and air, and endowed with more strength than man
or his works, they soar above the lower deposit to greet one another with
branches and beckoning leaves, and to build a city for the birds. {Forster,
1971: 10)
These two views are common motifs of the later colonial imaginary; they
construct three sights/sites. In the first place, they set up two exhibitions of
nature. One presents tropical nature as fallen, wretched, and rotting - a nature
of excrescence - while the other presents tropical nature as a heterotopia, a
prospect of delight and desire - a nature of abundance. In the second place,
these views enable Forster to assimilate colonized culture to tropical nature.
Seen from within, accordingly, the city of Chandrapore is part of a hideous,
disfigured nature of excrescence. Seen from without, where the distance between
the native city and the civil station is scrupulously established, the city can be
recomposed as part of a nature of abundance. But Forster (1971: 10) makes it
clear that this is a powerful yet precarious fantasy: "Newcomers cannot believe
it to be as meagre as it is described, and have to be driven down to acquire
102 DEREK GREGORY
disillusionment." In the third place, therefore, moving from one view to the
other establishes an opposition between the culture of the colonizers and that
of the colonized. The fantasy of a tropical heterotopia is possible only when the
point of view is removed from the landscape, only when it is recognized that
the civil station, with its regular geometry and its red-brick club on the brow,
"shares nothing with the city": which is all another way of saying that the civil
station is apartfrom rather than a part oftropical nature.
The limits of colonial imaginaries: nature as menace
In these ways tropical nature was enrolled to sustain a colonial geography: "a
world cut in two," "a world divided into compartments" (Fanon, 1967: 29),
not only by built forms and other architectures of colonial power, as Fanon
emphasized, but also by colonial productions of nature. If 'seeing the tropics'
required them to be made visible in the 'right' way, and if these imaginative
geographies circulated through metropolitan audiences and were re-exported to
travelers in the field in an endless spiral, then it is easy enough to understand
Gide's (1929: 25) relief as he ventured deeper into the Congo to find that "the
scenery is beginning to be more what I expected; it is becoming like." And yet:
in becoming 'like,' tropical nature was simultaneously required to become
unlike. Gide marked this transition when, "homeward bound," he wrote that
"the landscape is less vast and less vague; it is growing more temperate and
more organized" (p. 207). That sense of other natures as disorganized was a
goad to the ordering projects of natural history and natural science, but it also
marked the perimeter of their powers, which explains the undertow of menace
running through my characterizations of tropicality.
To fix this more precisely, consider this passage in which Alexander von
Humboldt recalls his arrival in South America in 1799:
When a traveller recently arrived from Europe steps into South American
jungle for the first time he sees nature in a completely unexpected guise ...
With each step he feels not at the frontiers of the torrid zone but in its
midst; not on one of the West Indian Islands but in a vast continent where
everything is gigantic; mountains, rivers, and the masses of plants. If he is
able to feel the beauty of landscape, he will find it hard to analyse his many
impressions. He does not know what shocks him more: whether the calm
silence of the solitude, or the beauty of the diverse, contrasting objects, or
that fullness and freshness of plant life in the Tropics. It could be said that
the earth, overloaded with plants, does not have sufficient space to develop
... The same lianas that trail along the ground climb up to the tree-tops,
swinging from one tree to another 100 feet up in the air. As these parasitical
plants form a real tangle, a botanist often confuses flowers, fruit and leaves
belonging to different species. (Humboldt, 1995: 83-4)
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 103
This is not the colonial picturesque but the tropical sublime, forcibly reminding
its European viewers of their inability to distinguish, differentiate, and identifY.
The superfluity of the tropics threatened to overwhelm the space of its
representation, and to mock, even challenge the sovereignty of the 'monarchof-all-1-survey.'
Tropical nature seemed to demand a different mode of traveling:
episodic, tactical, improvisational; a different way of seeing: sensual,
corporeal, 'haptic'; even a different form of writing: overwrought, palpitating,
ambivalent. Colonial discourse thus produced a sort of 'tropical Gothic' which,
even as it sought to confirm that necessary distance between the tropical and
the temperate, simultaneously threatened to collapse metropolitan-colonial culture
into tropical nature.
Deserts, too, confounded Europeans abroad. When Florence Nightingale
traveled through Egypt in 1849-50 she saw the western desert fringing the
Nile as "a great dragon, putting out his fiery tongue, and licking up the green,
fertile plain, biting into it, and threatening to encroach still more" (Nightingale,
1987: 63). The desert not only exceeded its proper place but it appeared to this
young Englishwoman as nature in extremis, exhausted and hollowed out, a
space of inversion that mocked the harmonies of a temperate nature: "A lifeless
desert would be far less frightful than this dead desert, the idea perpetually
recurring of an awful evil at work, making this kingdom his own, overwhelming
everything by some monstrous convulsion" (Nightingale, 1987: 49). The desert
was not only an unfamiliar nature but, as she said herself, an "unnatural nature"
that lay outside the space of Reason itself.
These textual gestures were more than the field responses of an amateur;
they were part of a much more pervasive normalization of nature that affected
the culture of science too. When the American physical geographer W. M.
Davis proposed his 'ideal' cycle of erosion at the very end of the nineteenth
century, he described it as the 'normal' cycle and modeled it on temperate
regimes. Moving towards the poles or the tropics, he noted "significant
departures from normal geographical development" and these prompted him
to propose "special" cycles of erosion to accommodate them (Davis, 1899,
1904). Likewise, in The Physics ofBlown Sand and Desert Dunes, Ralph Bagnold
(1941: xix) attempted "to explain on a basis of experimental physics some of
the many strange phenomena produced by the natural movement of sand over
the dry land of the Earth." In deserts, he continued,
Instead of finding chaos and disorder, the observer never fails to be amazed
at a simplicity of form, an exactitude of repetition and a geometric order
unknown in nature on a scale larger than that of crystalline structure. In
places vast accumulations of sand weighing millions of tons move inexorably,
in regular formation, over the surface of the country, growing, retaining their
shape, even breeding, in a manner which, by its grotesque imitation of life,
is vaguely disturbing to an imaginative mind. (Bagnold, 1941: xxi)
104 DEREK GREGORY
Bagnold's mind was doubly imaginative. He sought to bring its formations
within the calibrated spaces of Reason by disclosing a "geometric order" to
their strange topographies. But, as his image of the dunes "breeding" in a
"grotesque imagination of life" suggests, Bagnold was also fascinated by the
topologies of the monstrous and the uncanny.
In fact, in his travel writings Bagnold had transformed the regular geometries
of Egypt's seemingly lifeless Western Desert into a trickster landscape imbued
with stealth, cunning, and even agency. At first, he wrote, the dunes "had
seemed quite friendly, without evil intent, too big to bother about such a tiny
invasion of their empire. They had let us crawl over them without much
hindrance once we had got to know them." But as Bagnold and his companions
traveled south into the Great Sand Sea, the dunes became "hostile, resenting
our presence" (Bagnold, 1935: 155-6). Undeterred, Bagnold and his party
pressed on, driving between two sand ridges which became steadily higher until
- the horror! - they began to close in. The next morning all three cars sank to
their axles in the sand, and the party was trapped. "The dunes had selected this
of all places for their second attack." Bagnold recalled, "the exact centre of a
lifeless circle of country 360 miles across." The group retraced its tracks for 12
miles and finally broke through, cresting the ridge "as fast as the going would
allow, intent on nothing but escape from the fiery dunes" which at last began
to break up "amongst groups of friendly solid hills." "But for many miles
farther," Bagnold continued, "we could see them still pursuing us in long
persistent tongues of gold, dodging between the purple hills, keeping abreast of
us like a pack of wolves." Bagnold did not feel safe until he had reached "real
rocks that breathed a restful permanence" with no sign of "the monstrous
elusive organism of the dunes" (Bagnold, 1935: 160-4).
If colonial discourse required the land to submit to the demand that its
language offer what Carter (1987: 63) calls "a more coherent rhetorical
eqivalent, a more logical arrangement of what was to be seen" than any local
language, then in moments like these the project of "replacing local difference
with universal intelligibility" seems to have been underwritten by something
approaching panic. For example, deserts could be seen as landscapes of
redemption or as landscapes of retribution, but common to these discordant
thematics was a chronic loss of words, a failure of language itself. Florence
Nightingale (1987: 89) had fretted that it was "useless to try to describe these
things, for European language has no words for them." "How should it," she
demanded, "when there is no such thing in Europe? All other nature raises
one's thoughts to heaven: this sends them to hell." Other travelers resorted to
Arabic transliterations: barchan, seif, wadi. Yet to most of their audience these
strange sound-shapes must have been utterly unintelligible, marking the desert
as at once exotic and obdurately unyielding to European language. If the limits
of our language mark the limits of our world, then recourse to these alien
words confirmed that such forms were beyond the limits of any European
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 105
language - that they were literally 'un-worldly' - and, if Nightingale is any
indication, their recuperation often involved a language of fantasy, monstrosity,
and inversion (see Greogry, 2001).
Finally, the tropical rainforest could effect its own paralysis of colonialism's
imaginative geographies. The British and French derived the word 'jungle' from
the Hindi jangla to produce "a metaphorical contrast between the orderliness
of temperate woodlands and the tangled, menacing, malarial vegetation that
constituted tropical nature" (Arnold, 1998: 8). But this very contrast was so
unstable that it could undo itself: as the distance between 'there' and 'here' was
torqued, so the metaphor slipped and meaning itself became dis-placed. The
anthropologist Michael Taussig captures what I have in mind when he
described the efforts of the German film-maker Werner Herzog to represent
the Amazon rainforest as "a nature conceived as pitting extremes of meaning, a
deconstructing tropicality that implodes oppositions in the profusion of their
rank decay and proliferating disordered growth" (Taussig, 1987: 79; my
emphasis). For Herzog, for the colonizing powers that he represents in Aguirre
and Fitzcarraldo, the jungle appears as "a text that frustrates all hermeneutic
efforts from the outside," all attempts at translation and interpretation, and its
seemingly "chaotic diversity" exposes with extraordinary force what Koepnick
(1993) calls "the systematic inappropriateness of Western routines of cognition
and ordering."
The jungle rejects any attempt to be read, mastered or even represented. As
it reduces human beings to insignificant receptacles of what will always
escape their grasp. Herzog's rainforest delineates a unique training ground
for sentiments of sublime terror. (Koepnick, 1993: 136)
Gandy (1996) complains that Herzog's imaginary eviscerates 'culture' and
hypostatizes the agency of 'nature'; yet, for colonial discourse, that was all too
often precisely the point. As I've repeatedly emphasized, colonial cultures, with
their fears of miscegenation and creolization, were riven by fears of a different
sort of hybridization too. The colonial project required European culture to
penetrate another nature, but there was also the unspeakable possibility of
inversion, of another nature penetrating what Duncan (2000) calls the 'moral
masculinity' of colonial culture.
In the Amazon rainforest, the usual signals were indeed reversed; the green
of the rainforest stood for danger:
It is out of this green that hostile Indians, wild animals, insects and diseases
emerge. It is this green which prevents the eye from finding easy riches to
plunder. It is this green which fills the sites reserved for the sugar-cane
plantations. It is this green which hides and protects a population whose fate
it is to serve. Relief comes in the form of a red signal: fire in the forests, to
106 DEREK GREGORY
open up the horizon as far as the eye can see, and when it gets there, fire
again. (Sevcenko, in Martins, 2000: 20)
There were certainly sites where the horizon was opened up, where 'nature' was
beaten back by the colonial economy and its political and military apparatus:
the construction of roads and railways, mines and plantations, barracks and
towns. By the end of the nineteenth century, Manaus had become the nervecenter
of the Amazonian rubber economy, shipping 20,000 tons downriver
each year. It was also the shock city of the province of Amazonas, a site where
the excesses of unrestrained capitalism and its production of a social nature - a
'normal nature' - were revealed with unusual clarity. A vast new harbor was
completed, and there was a regular steamship service across the Atlantic to
Liverpool. A gridiron of cobbled streets had been blazed across the rainforest,
paved in Portuguese stone. Boulevards were bordered with serried ranks of
exotic fig trees, jacarandas, and eucalyptus, punctuated by electric lamp
standards and festooned with a canopy of telephone wires. Trolley-buses
clattered through the streets, and high over the city rose the ornate dome of
the Opera House (Collier, 1988). Here, surely, colonialism's 'culture' had
visibly triumphed over 'nature.'
Upriver, however, these polarities were reversed. Agents of the Peruvian
Amazon Rubber Company, backed by British capital and a board of directors
in London, worked out of trading-posts and encampments in the high Amazon
to collect wild rubber through the enforced employment of indigenous people.
In this 'Devil's Paradise' what Taussig (1987: 40) calls "a massive staging of
punishment in a theatre of cruelty" took place, "a spectacle in the proscenium
of the open space cleared in the forest." Thousands ofHuitotos- men, women,
and children - were systematically tortured, violated, and killed. A subsequent
British committee of inquiry put the burden of these atrocities on the back of
political economy: on the capitalist logic of extracting low-grade rubber using
scarce labor. There is no doubt that the wild rubber industry involved high
transactions costs and risks; no doubt too that indigenous people were trapped
in a system of debt-peonage whose bonds of credit and debt wound round
their bodies "like the vines of the forest around the great rubber trees" (Taussig,
1987: 68). And yet: can any of this explain the ferocity, the sadism - the
savagery - of the company's agents? Taussig suggests that this "theatre of
cruelty" was intimately related to colonialism's staging of a 'wild,' tropical
nature. He argues that the rubber traders and their Barbadian militiamen feared
a 'brute' and 'animal' nature which they saw surrounding them, advancing,
threatening to engulf them; and that they identified this 'unnatural nature'
with the indigenous people who inhabited the rainforest (Taussig, 1987: 97).
Colonial discourse constructed a space of terror, therefore, in which 'wild
Indians' were figured as deviant creatures of a deviant Nature: "hostile elongations
of the disorganized natural environment" (Koepnick, 1993: 141 ). As these
(POST)COLONIALISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE 107
traders and militiamen constructed a landscape of wildness and savagery, so
they themselves became wild and savage: the violence of their actions mirrored
the violence of their fears. "The only way they could live in such a terrifYing
environment," Taussig (1987: 122) concludes, was "to inspire terror
themselves."
I doubt that this really was "the only way." Other responses were possible,
at least thinkable, because agency is always conditional and contingent. In
postwar Malaysia, for example, the 'jungle' was assigned its own agency, its
own code of violence ('the law of the jungle'), and constructed by the state and
its military apparatus as "an uncontrollable space providing refuge to an
uncontrollable population." But the response there was large-scale deforestation,
not genocide (Sioh, 1998). Still, the salience of Taussig's argument does not lie
in the particular circumstances that he describes - which were surely exceptional
- but precisely in the way in which such an extreme case establishes much
more general limits.
For if his explanation is difficult to comprehend, Taussig believes that this is
because we insist on clinging to the distinction between 'reality' and 'representation.'
On his contrary reading, and conforming to the arguments I have been
developing throughout this essay, the dilemmas of representation - revealed
here through the monstrous deformations brought about by the discourse of
normalization - are never 'merely' philosophical: they also constitute a powerfully
charged means of domination. In trying to make sense of the insensible,
the extraordinary brutality of the agents of the Peruvian Amazon Company,
Taussig claims that "the terrors and tortures they devised mirrored the horror
of the savagery they both feared and fictionalized" (Taussig, 1987: 121, 133).
My added emphasis underscores what I said at the very start: imaginative
geographies are never 'merely' representations because they have practical,
performative force. More than this, Taussig's reading also shows that the
discourses of domination and normalization are duals of one another. In their
connectivity - in their contradictory combination - it becomes clear that
separations between 'culture' and 'nature' are fabrications too, and that they
come undone precisely because they have always been conjoined.
Acknowledgments
I owe a particular debt to Cindi Katz for insisting so patiently and with such critical
intelligence that I take the politics of nature seriously. Many thanks also to Bruce Braun
and Noel Castree for their exemplary patience.
108 DEREK GREGORY
Notes
It should be clear by now that I do not use the term 'the production of nature' in
the economistic sense of several Marxist theorists (see Castree's chapter 10, this
volume). Rather, I want to focus attention on the 'productivities' of discourse and
culture in, quite literally, making 'nature' visible and available for transformation
within colonizing societies.
Further Reading
Arnold's (1996) The Problem ofNature is an excellent introduction to productions of
nature under colonialism. A special issue of the Singapore journal of Tropical Geography
(vol. 21, March 2000) is devoted to 'Constructing the Tropics' and contains a number
of useful (and brief) essays. Sawyer and Agrawal (2000) address many of the themes
discussed in this chapter and illustrate their importance for a contemporary cultural
politics of nature. Blaut (1999) shows how assumptions about European nature
continue to inform present-day polemics about modernity. For useful case studies see
Gilmartin (1994) and Braun (1997).
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