A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Based on a decade of research in the UK, US and Singapore, the book examines the transnational relations through which theatre emerges, ‘tracking’ both practitioners and creative process in their physical and imaginative border crossings to explore how meanings and identities are constructed, negotiated, and reconfigured across different spaces of production, performance and reception.
Oxford Street is based on more than a decade of research in the field, during which Quayson studied the histories of colonial and postcolonial town planning and the marks of transnationalism. These include sights, sounds, and spatial interactions in Accra’s urban street life. As the reader is taken on a compelling journey through tro-tro slogans, billboard advertisements, salsa scenes, and gym culture, s/he is invited to go beyond the superficial spatial cues of this seemingly typical African urban street.
Reeves’ fascinating and persuasively written ethnography explores the borders of the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, today part of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The borders of the Ferghana Valley have regularly been depicted by academic and policy-oriented literature as too complicated in terms of their spatial patterns, too arbitrary with respect to the population groups they unite or separate, and not sufficiently delimited with regard to ambiguities arising from shared spaces.
Spatial History, the title of Mikhail Yampolsky’s new book, evokes a vertical, rather than horizontal (or chronological), approach to history. The idea that historical process (and the writing of history) contains some focal points which allow one to take the gist of the events and deploy the logic of history in depth rather than in breadth is not new in principle.
"Anti-Crisis" is a partial historiography of the idea and the role it plays in the formulation of critique, as well as a thorough exploration of the epistemological premises and assumptions behind crisis narratives. Throughout, Roitman’s aim is to unpack the self-evident nature of the crisis and to denaturalize the claims, narratives, judgments and actions generated by its invocation with particular attention to those actions and judgments the crisis label categorically forecloses.
Hélène Blais’ "Mirages de la Carte" explores the geographical invention of Algeria during the French empire. The book mainly interrogates the role of maps and surveys in the construction of a national image which was subsequently largely recovered by independent Algeria in the 1960s.
"Geographical Diversions" is a well written ethnographic contribution to the study of mobilities, fixities, and trade, with a focus on trade routes in Nepal, Tibet (or Tibetan Autonomous Region, i.e. TAR), India, and China. In her first monograph, anthropologist and geographer Tina Harris traces the “properties, spatial origins, and trajectories of commodities” that serve to fix some geographies while rendering others mobile and free.
The transformation of GIS into GIScience was a de-reifying move in a succession of moves that have gradually brought geospatial tools and technologies into realms of scholarly reputability. It is now no longer a knee-jerk reaction to assume that the use of GIS as part of scientific, cultural, political, or economic inquiry must be part of a positivistic conspiracy to colonise (and ultimately degrade or destroy) geographic inquiry once and for all.
The violent events of the summer of 2014 in Jerusalem were a tangible reminder of the explosive tension that characterizes inter-group relations in the contested city. Those events brought to life the lines between Israeli and Palestinian urban spaces, especially in the northern parts of the city, and highlighted them as rigid internal boundaries between the two communities.
With the inevitable differences between authors’ readings of psychoanalytic texts, the book does not detract from the importance of its larger project to demonstrate the “breadth, depth and vitality” of psychoanalytic geographies. Nor does it shy away from controversial issues, or try to suggest coherent meta-theories for apprehending the world.