Commentary: Post-Colonial Encounters of the Methodological Kind

In his book the Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon (1968) argued that the colonial world was divided into a system of compartments which if closely examined would reveal the lines of force it implied. He argued that this approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout, would allow us to demarcate the lines on which a decolonized society would be reorganized. Although Fanon was not specifically addressing the issue of research methodology, I find his observations useful in thinking about how power is spatially organized and how that spatial organization influences how as researchers we come to understand and produce knowledges about different spaces. In commenting on Kingsbury and Klak's (2005) article, I draw upon Fanon's observations because his examination of the material and psychological dimensions of the unequal geographies produced by the colonial encounter is still relevant to understanding the terrain of the Jamaican cultural landscape that all researchers are likely to encounter. I shall also draw upon the work of feminist geographers who have written widely on the politics of the field and the politics of developing research methodologies that seek to challenge the unequal relations of power in the production of knowledge. This literature is particularly helpful in taking us beyond the simple mapping of the topography of the Jamaican landscape to answering the question that Kingsbury and Klak (2005) pose when they ask 'what is the purpose that geographical research in the Caribbean should serve.' It is therefore with these literatures in mind that I shall respond to Kingsbury and Klak's invitation to engage in a 'critical discussion of the problems that can result from contextually and spatially insensitive research agendas.'

Using Fanon to Map the Uneven Geographies of Jamaica's Research Terrain

For Fanon (1967), the colonial project was one that racialized the unequal economic and political relationship between the colonizer and the colonized through the creation of rules, norms, regulations and rituals that did not jeopardize the accumulation of wealth by colonizers. Any encounter between whites and non-whites or foreigners and locals in this context could only be understood within the binary of the 'colonizer/colonized, powerful/powerless, white/black, rich/poor.' These binaries, Fanon argued, were particularly powerful because they simultaneously constituted the economic substructure and superstructure of the colonies. Thus he argued that the case often became the consequence, "you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich" (Fanon 1967, 40), that ultimately structured the course of all encounters between those constructed as powerful (white/rich/colonizer) and those constructed as powerless (non-white/poor/ colonized). Fanon's (1967, 16) belief that "race becomes the lens through which all social relations and theories of time are judged" suggests that all encounters between whites and non-whites are mediated through the tension created by the poor material status and political status of the ruled relative to the rulers.

In the forty years that have passed since Fanon wrote the Wretched of the Earth, much has changed. The majority of the colonized world was decolonized, the Cold War ended and significant changes in the pace and nature of flows of capital, people and ideas across territorial boundaries continue to reveal the complicated and unsettled nature of the binaries that defined much of Fanon's scholarship. Yet, he displayed remarkable prescience in his observations of how colonialism shaped the material and psychological spaces within which encounters across racial, economic, cultural and gender borders are conducted. The stark and widening global economic inequalities between the Third World and the First, and the institutionalization of neo-liberal ideologies within Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), World Trade Organization trade rules and debt repayment programs like the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Debt Initiative all point to new systems of international governance organized by agencies like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, whose approaches Joseph Stiglitz (2002, 40) describes as "having the feel of the colonizer." Indeed, the neocolonial character of contemporary regimes of capital accumulation remains sufficiently strong for Harvey (2003, 144) to coin the term "accumulation by dispossession" to describe...