Impure and Worldly Geography

Pierre Gourou and Tropicality

Gavin Bowd, Daniel Clayton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781409439493
• eBook ISBN: 9781317118084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Tropicality is a centuries-old Western discourse that treats otherness and the exotic in binary – 'us' and 'them' – terms. It has long been implicated in empire and its anxieties over difference. However, little attention has been paid to its twentieth-century genealogy.

This book explores this neglected history through the work of Pierre Gourou, one of the century's foremost purveyors of what anti-colonial writer Aimé Césaire dubbed tropicalité. It explores how Gourou's interpretations of 'the nature' of the tropical world, and its innate difference from the temperate world, were built on the shifting sands of twentieth-century history – empire and freedom, modernity and disenchantment, war and revolution, culture and civilisation, and race and development. The book addresses key questions about the location and power of knowledge by focusing on Gourou's cultivation of the tropics as a romanticised, networked and affective domain. The book probes what Césaire described as Gourou's 'impure and worldly geography' as a way of opening up interdisciplinary questions of geography, ontology, epistemology, experience and materiality.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students within historical geography, history, postcolonial studies, cultural studies and international relations.

1 The tropics and the colonising gaze

‘What impure and worldly geography!’

From Gourou, his book Les Pays Tropicaux, in which, amid certain correct observations, there is expressed the fundamental thesis, biased and unacceptable, that there has never been a great tropical civilisation, that great civilisations have existed only in temperate climates, that in every tropical country the germ of civilisation comes, and can only come, from some other place outside the tropics, and that if tropical countries are not under the biological curse of the racists, there at least hangs over them, with the same consequences, a no less effective geographical curse… . What impure and worldly geography!¹

So charged the Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) in his searing 1950 Discours sur le colonialisme, which is one of the most incisive and influential anti-colonial texts of the post-war era.² He was censuring the French geographer Pierre Gourou (1900–1999), a Professor at the Collège de France in Paris and Université Libre de Bruxelles (he had a joint appointment). Les pays tropicaux had been published in 1947, ran to five editions to 1966, and became a touchstone of Western post-war understanding of the tropics. Césaire was concerned with how colonialism operated through language, imagery and texts like this (that is, as a ‘discourse’) as well as by economic, political and military means.³ He did not dispute the notion that the world is divided into different regions, but objected to the way Gourou concluded that there was a hierarchical division between a fortunate temperate world and a perennially cursed tropical world. The way Gourou divided temperate from tropical lands had ‘consequences.’ Let us start this book, which is about the idea of ‘impure and worldly geography’ as it relates to Gourou and the tropics by delving further into this mise-en-scène.

Césaire contended that the “subjective good faith” of liberal Western academics like Gourou was “entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism.”⁴ Their high-minded and well-intentioned knowledge was implicated in how the colonising West “gets into the habit of seeing the other man [sic] as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.” Colonisation “dehumanizes even the most civilised man,”⁵ Césaire continued, and its brutal effects had rebounded on Europe in the form of Nazism and two devastating wars.⁶ The way colonial regions and populations had been represented, in a profoundly Eurocentric manner, as ‘other’ – in a twofold sense: as primitive, backward, unruly and inscrutable; and as knowable and amenable to the civilising mission of the West – had also been integral to this dehumanisation.

The expression les pays tropicaux (tropical lands/world) had long been used in France, and with increasing colonial purpose from the 1870s, to refer to a part of the world that was different to temperate regions (les pays tempéré) in environmental and racial terms.⁷ Empire created a space in which Westerners encountered and contemplated both environmental and cultural patterns, distributions and variations, chiefly on the presumption that environment and culture were somehow interconnected, and with the proviso that the nature of such links had a pivotal influence on the level of development of different regions. The ‘subjective good’ faith of erstwhile explorers and latter-day academic experts did not simply promote a more wise and careful (scientific and technical) understanding and management of the world. As Janet Browne reflects, it also shaped and was shaped by a “language of expansionist power” and an “expansionist geography.”⁸

Gourou characterised the tropical world as “the belt of hot, wet lands” with a mean monthly temperature of over 65˚F and sufficient rain for agriculture to succeed without irrigation, and as a zone which stopped at the desert (see Figure 6.1).⁹ Delimited thus, the tropics encompassed over 14 million square miles and more than one-third of “the useful portions of the earth’s surface,” he continued, but was sparsely populated overall because tropical nature fettered human existence and enterprise.¹⁰ “Compared to temperate countries, tropical regions are afflicted by a certain number of inferiorities,” he proclaimed.¹¹ “It is generally not possible to master an elusive and difficult tropical nature, and build in hot, wet lands societies with a superior civilisation.”¹² “We who live in temperate lands find it difficult to realise how baneful nature can be to humanity or to grasp that in many tropical places and regions water may swarm with dangerous germs, numerous blood-sucking insects may inject deadly microbes into the body, and the very soil may be harmful to the touch.”¹³ Tropical soils were “less favourable to human existence than temperate ones,” he continued, and this “basic problem of salubrity” was aggravated by “pathogenetic complexes” unique to the tropics, and “deficient” agricultural practices which “in the last analysis provide an insufficient economic basis for a bright civilisation and are not conducive to great political and intellectual achievements.”¹⁴ He saw some of the rice-growing areas and cultures of the Far East as an exception to this rule, yet maintained that even there the attainment of civilisation was “without a doubt connected to cultural influences brought from outside the tropics.”¹⁵ It was to the modern West that the tropical world still needed to look for help if it was to lift itself out of its “endemic bind” of poverty, disease and backwardness.¹⁶

Césaire said nothing (and perhaps knew little) about the disciplinary context out of which Gourou wrote, but he did not need to in order to castigate Gourou’s outlook as a pernicious environmental Eurocentrism. The geographer’s observations and generalisations were not only highly speculative, Césaire charged, but also fuelled by a double standard: for Europe would never entertain the thought of African or tropical influences on its own civilisation. Césaire pointed to the fate of Cheikh Anta Diop’s Nations nègre et culture to hammer home his point. Diop documented the black African (Egyptian) origins of European civilisation in a book published by the radical press Présence Africaine in 1955 – the year in which it also re-issued Césaire’s tract. Diop’s book stemmed from a thesis he submitted for a Doctor of Letters at the Sorbonne, but he could not find a jury willing to examine his work. His treatment confirmed to Césaire that what counted as valid knowledge about Francophone Africa or Europe was the preserve of white intellectuals.¹⁷ After World War II, and particularly in France, academic specialists operating overseas through increasingly professionalised and international networks of research and policy-making started to supplant colonial administrators and amateur collectors as the custodians of African and tropical knowledge. Their authority rested on what governments and international agencies regarded as their superior scientific know-how and objectivity, and Césaire thought it a scam.

So it was, as Césaire saw matters, that Gourou’s book, which was ostensibly rational and objective (steeped in fieldwork and immense learning, and shorn of bombast), cast a “geographical curse” (malédiction géographique) over the tropics.¹⁸ If, as Gourou maintained, geographers were concerned with civilisations and progress, then as Césaire continued the thought:

it is not from the effort of these populations, from their liberating struggle, from their concrete fight for life, freedom, and culture that he expects the salvation of tropical countries to come but from the good coloniser – since the law categorically states that “it is cultural elements prepared in non-tropical regions which ensure the progress of the tropical regions towards a larger population and a higher civilisation.”¹⁹

As Anne Gulick notes, Césaire’s “true adversary” was not Gourou but “the variety of law that makes categorical statements – the law with the power to curse – and the law that is no more or less than the performance of a language of pure authority.”²⁰ Césaire saw Gourou’s primer as a malevolent quest “to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions.”²¹ While Gourou eschewed the idea of ‘race,’ he avoided a reckoning with colonialism and Césaire saw this as a prime symptom of the duplicitous authority with which he pronounced on the problems of the tropical world.

Gourou fits the mould of what Donna Haraway, writing fifty years after Césaire, has configured as “the modest witness”: the male observer who is

the legitimate and authorized ventriloquist for the object world, adding nothing from his mere opinions, from his biasing embodiment… . [A witness] endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts. He bears witness: he is objective; he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects. His subjectivity is his objectivity. His narratives have a magical power – they lose all trace of their history as stories, as products of partisan projects, as contestable representations, or as constructed documents in their potent capacity to define the facts. The narratives become clear mirrors, fully magical mirrors, without once appealing to the transcendental or the magical.²²

Césaire’s critique of Gourou anticipates elements of Haraway’s treatment of “expert knowledge” and its separation “from mere opinion” as a “founding gesture of what we call modernity” – a knowledge that works “without appeal to transcendent authority” but works to give the illusion of just that.²³ Haraway also writes of the need to question “the god trick” of thinking that one can aspire to see “everything from nowhere,” and to work for “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims.”²⁴ Gourou objectified the world he sought to represent, and invested both the differences between temperate and tropical worlds, and the relationship between culture and space in the tropics, with a sense of permanence that was tied to his status as an expert.

Césaire regarded Les pays tropicaux as just one of a much larger number of examples “purposely taken from very different disciplines” which, to his mind, “proved” that it was “not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges” who needed to be named as “supporters of a plundering colonialism” and “enemies” of those struggling for freedom, but

likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academicians, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists.²⁵

Gourou was one of his “lovers of exoticism” and “goitrous academicians,” and Césaire drew upon his text, along with those of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, journalists and missionaries to declare that the denigration of non-Western peoples had been propelled by Wes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Interview schedule
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The tropics and the colonising gaze
• 2 Tropicalising Indochina
• 3 Romancing the tropics
• 4 Networking the tropics
• 5 Gourou en guerre
• 6 Affecting the tropics
• 7 Gourou’s ‘colonial situations’
• 8 Fin de la tropicalité (as we knew it)?
• Index