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Settling the Self: Colonial Space, Colonial Identity and the South African Landscape

Why do certain geographies arrest us and appear to present the past as tangible, despite our understandings of laboured landscapes and of spatial change? How might we understand such ‘appearance’ as not just an ideological effect, but as the immanence of much older forms of embodied perception? And how might our openness to these conditions of possibility for colonial representation change the way in which we rethink the colonial past and its postcolonial presence? These are the challenging questions that Jessica Dubow begins with in a beautifully written book that uses a history of colonial encounters in the environs of today’s Eastern Cape Province in South Africa to demonstrate what we might call ‘the uses and abuses of phenomenology for life’. Dubow’s commitments are multiple: on the one hand, to engagement with the turgid, violent and present history of colonialism, segregation and apartheid in South Africa and the problems of commemoration it evokes; and, on the other hand, to taking to its limits the insights of existential phenomenology to think beyond the somewhat jaded verities of constructivist or interpretive social science. Indeed, this text might buck the trend to think about what we do not see through what Dubow quite rightly calls the ‘dominant constructivist (or discursive) tendency of treating the pictorial image as a readable allegory or an encoded text . . . [that is] as a visual image of something else’ (5), a beyond in which interpretive or discursive method has little purchase. Yet, in contrast to work on affect that thinks in sharply dichotomous terms of the representational and non-representational – in particular, but not just, in geography – Dubow refuses such consolations. Settling the Self is precisely concerned with the embodied, sensual and often uncertain pre-representational realm that preceded the making of a set of contemplative ideals of colonial self and landscape. In one of several illuminating passages in the introduction, Dubow asks whether we have not learnt from Raymond Williams’s (1973) exploration of the emergence of detached contemplation of the English landscape as coterminous with the rise of industrial-capitalist modernity and its separation of production and consumption (8). Nor have we learnt how to extend this historicization to the foundational western metaphysical dualism of observer and observed, which Dubow seeks to undermine through a historical existential phenomenology. Such a problematic might lead us out of post-colonial studies tradition, which Dubow characterizes as stuck in the realm of representation, portraying colonial visuality ‘from an imperial centre, and through a discourse darkly’ (10). Against what Merlau-Ponty would call the ‘intellectualism’ of such a position (11), Dubow turns to what she sees as missing in postcolonial critique: actual embodied engagements with affective possibilities that shaped European presence in such places as the semi-arid Karoo with which she begins the book. Social History Vol. 37 No. 1 February 2012