Geographical knowledge, Empire, and the Indigenous Other: Engaging a decolonising introspection into Early French colonial geography

Abstract

This paper contributes to the process of decolonising geographical knowledge on Indigenous people. More specifically, it seeks to critically engage with knowledge production on the Indigenous Other in early French colonial geography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This particular moment coincided with the institutionalisation of French geography and the subsequent ambition to convert this discipline into a “science.” As a result, early colonial geographers began objectifying Indigenous people. Rather than discuss how early French colonial geographers defined the Indigenous Other as a new “object of science,” this paper examines how this desire to objectify other humanities resulted in the dehumanisation of Indigenous peoples. After clarifying the meaning of “colonial geography” in France, this paper focuses on early French colonial geographers’ invention of the Indigenous Other based on different modalities whose common principle appears to be the concept of “race.” This paper concludes that racialised determinants were key to othering, distancing, and even animalising Indigenous Others. Disparaging non-European people through the use of biased “science” enabled early colonial geographers to inferiorise and dispossess them under the guise of “progress.”

Abstract

This paper contributes to the process of decolonising geographical knowledge on Indigenous people. More specifically, it seeks to critically engage with knowledge production on the Indigenous Other in early French colonial geography in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.