Postmodern Geography

1. POSTMODERN GEOGRAPHY
-Benjamin L. Saitluanga

According to Oxford Dictionary of Geography, Postmodernism is ‘a philosophical stance
which claims that it is impossible to take grand statements - meta narratives –about the
structures of society or about historic causation because everything we perceive, express,
and interpret is influenced by our gender, class and culture and no one interpretation is
superior’,

Postmodernism is a recent movement in philosophy, the arts and social sciences. It
emerged as a reaction towards the modernism which arose as a result of the so called
Enlightenment project in Europe during the 18
th
century. Modernism emphasized order in
social, economic, and political systems. Modernist thinkers sought theories and
generalizations to explain the complexities of human life. Postmodernism, on the other
hand, has been described as being post-paradigm and refuting the necessity for theory
building.

Postmodernism first emerged in the fields of architecture and literary theory and then
incorporated into social sciences afterwards.

The main characteristics of postmodernism are-
1. Postmodernism does not believe in the rationality of human actions and hence,
locations and spatial patterns, as was the case during the positivist era.
2. Postmodernism respects heterogeneity and diversity in all spheres. According to
Lyotard, who is considered to have pioneered the word postmodernism, ‘we can
no longer talk about a totalizing idea of reason for there are no reason, but only
reasons.
3. Postmodernists argue that every discourse interprets the world from a particular
vantage point, that every view is a view from somewhere, and that what one sees
depends on where one stands.
4. Therefore, postmodernists maintain that for every topic, there are inevitably many
competing discourses, none of which is inherently more correct than the others.
Thus, there are no a priori grounds for deciding what is true or not.
5. Postmodernism shuns the postulation of theories and laws or meta-narratives like
Marxism. Instead, it insists on particularity and plurality of knowledge
6. Postmodernism champions the cause of the poor, the weak, the peripheral and the
downtrodden.

According to Derek Gregory (1989) the unmaking of modern human geography or the
movement toward post-modernism in geography started in the 1970s with the
introduction of the political economy perspective in human geography.

Postmodernism has been defined in diverse and sometimes confusing ways since it first
became common in the lexicon of human geographers during the mid-to late 1980s. This
confusion arose because postmodernism has two closely related definitions: one as object
and the other as attitude. First, postmodernism can be understood as an object or an era.
This era is defined by things such as literature, art, and architecture and by processes such
as differing forms of capitalist production that result in the context of postmodern
thought. Second, postmodernism can be understood as an attitude or a way of

2. understanding the world. This attitude can be understood as an intellectual movement that
provides a coherent set of ideas for understanding the world in a particularly postmodern
way. In an attempt to capture some of the complexity of the interrelationships between
postmodernism as object and postmodernism as attitude, Michael Dear have suggested
that postmodernism can be further distinguish as postmodernism as epoch,
postmodernism as style, and postmodernism as method.

Postmodern geographers are a diverse group. Marxists, such as Ed Soja and David
Harvey, argue that postmodernism is the latest cultural expression of advanced capitalism
and that so-called postmodern landscapes reflect the emergence of a globalized,
hypermobile, post-Keynesian, post-Fordist regime of production. In this view,
postmodernism essentially is a response to the enormous wave of time–space
compression unleashed by contemporary capitalism. Others employ the postmodern
celebration of difference to reassert the significance of localities and local uniqueness,
arguing that when and where social events happen is fundamental to how they happen, a
move that elevates geography to the level of epistemology.

Postmodern geography is characterized by –

1. Postmodernism corrects the bias towards historicism by putting space in the
centre of explanations; spatial dialectics alongside the historical dialectic. Inspired
by postmodernism, David Harvey argued that historical materialism has to be
upgraded to historical-geographical materialism.
2. Postmodernism puts a previously marginalized geography at the centre of social
science by restoring spatiality alongside historical in critical social theory
3. Postmodern geography lays emphasis on geo-social changes, population growth,
hunger, disaster etc
4. Postmodern geography shifts from macro to micro and also from general to
specific.
5. Postmodern geography has thus moved away from spatial analysis to social
theory.
6. Ed Soja argued that postmodernism stresses the importance of geography and
spatiality by championing differences.

Criticisms:
In spite of the attractiveness of postmodern approach-its reassertion of space in the
academics by correcting time’s annihilation of space and materiality of space, there are
oppositions too. Some criticisms are

1. Critics of postmodernism accuse it of degenerating into intellectual nihilism and
endless relativism in which all positions come to have equal weight.
2. Some Marxists argue that the postmodern focus on culture and discourse has
submerged class as a meaningful social category.
3. Ron Martin, a Cambridge economic geographer argued that post-modern textual,
discursive and cultural turns have pervasive impact across the subject because it
results in further retreat from policy research and modes of enquiry
4. Rawling also argued that the core of geography might get lost if geographers
follow postmodern approach.