Colonialism, History and the Construction of Place
Abstract
One of the reasons that the concept of landscape is beginning to prove so useful is that it is a concept in between. At a time when simple determinisms are breaking down, and the boundaries between disciplines are continually being breached, it is useful to have a concept that is free from fixed positions, whose meaning is elusive, yet whose potential range is all-encompassing. Landscape is a frame for discourse that encourages the development of metaphors, which enables the exploration of old topics in new ways, and which may provide the framework for the construction of new theories. Of course, landscape does not exist in a theoretical vacuum: it takes up the flavours or the sophistication of the age. Today’s ‘landscape’ is inevitably processual and transforming, integral to processes of objectification and the sedimentation of history, subjected to poetic and hermeneutic interpretation and a place where value and emotion coincide.