Walking the stories of colonial ghosts: A method of/against the geographically mundane

Abstract

The worlds we inhabit tell stories, stitched into the material and symbolic representations of the past that comes to define the features of our places. These stories are never neutral, anchored as they are in the intentional (re)presentation of a racialized white, masculine, and settler story as “our” story. Indeed, space, as an ostensibly neutral platform for storytelling, is called into service of settler-state anxieties to write itself into every (spatial) corner of our lives. This paper takes up this issue by theorizing how the street naming practices of settler communities write into everyday life a settler collective memory that, as a consequence, both shapes space into (settler) place and powerfully intervenes in individual (student) geographic consciousness. By way of vignettes woven throughout theoretical considerations as examples of everyday encounters, I unpack what it means to think of the language of invaded place with greater critical intention as an example of how walking through space can become a pedagogical method, with a focus on detailing what it might mean to support learner engagement with the names that make their communities coherent and media of normalized colonial memory.

Keywords:

• Place
• toponymy
• decolonising pedagogy

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 A common language to describe settler-colonisation is invasion in Australia. In accordance with this, I use the language “invader” to connote those who were/are invaders and/or are inheritors of its logics, privileges, and ways of knowing.

2 The use of collective pronouns is not meant to be a means of generalising the experience of all people who move through place and to deny the different experiences with features of place. Different forms of identity, and their intersections, make for inevitable differences in how people understand the world(s) that they move through. In that light, the collective pronouns used here have as their referents those of “us” (including myself) who are racialized white male invaders, those of us who are overwhelmingly reflected back in the memorial practices of the community and whose history is used to legitimate invasion by virtue of consuming the imaginative space of the past.

3 The term “placial” is used here intentionally. As Cho and Yuan (2019) put it, “by directly modifying the ending of ‘place’ to express the functional and influential characteristics of place,” we can more easily differentiate considerations of place from those of space (p. 548). Given that the interrogation of the world around us is more involved than the structural and empirical arrangements of a location (i.e., very spatial), the use of placial here is designed to draw attention to the cultural and historical work of place required.

4 This picture, while helpful in visualising the organisation of odonyms, is an incomplete picture. Scale, for instance, is a key feature of the politics of naming (Alderman, 2003; Hagen, 2011) as is relative location to significant places (e.g., close to historically or politically significant locations). However, for the purposes of demonstration, this representation helps to illustrate the textual work and lack of narrative structure that requires a reconceptualisation of how space is read as a text.