Cultural geographies in practice: Monumental geographies: Re-situating the state

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 148-155

  Sidaway, James D ^a   Mayell, Peter ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL HERITAGE; ICONOGRAPHY; MEMORY; MONUMENT; SYMBOLISM;

EID: 33846471208     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474007072824     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. O. Burkeman, 'Ground Zero rethink after cost soars to $1bn', Guardian (6 May 2006), p. 19.
2. For accounts from Italy, South Africa and Scotland, see: D. Atkinson and D. Cosgrove, 'Urban rhetoric and embodied identities: city, nation and empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome, 1870-1945', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (1998), pp. 28-49;
3. A. Crampton, 'The Voortrekker monument, the birth of apartheid, and beyond', Political geography 20 (2001), pp. 221-46;
4. C. Withers, 'Place, memory, monument: memorialising the past in contemporary highland Scotland', Ecumene 3 (1996), pp. 325-44.
5. There are dozens of other case studies. In a related vein, others have investigated how broader architectural projects/plans are frequently pervaded by national-political expressions: see D. McNeill and M. Tewdwar-Jones, 'Architecture, banal nationalism and re-territorialization', International journal of urban and regional research 27 (2003), pp. 738-43.
6. N. Johnston, 'Cast in stone: monuments, geography, and nationalism', Environment and planning D: society and space 13 (1995), pp. 51-65.
7. For an example of such contest, see H. Muzaini and B. S. A. Yeoh, 'War landscapes as "battlefields" of collective memories: reading the Reflections at Bukit Chandu, Singapore', Cultural geographies 12 (2005), pp. 345-65.
8. D. Simpson, 9/11: the culture of commemoration (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 17.
9. K. E. Foote, Shadowed ground: America's landscapes of violence and tragedy (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1997).
10. The photographs in Figures 1-4 were taken by the authors, James D. Sidaway and Peter Mayell. In a key case study that also contains a broader review of relevant literatures than can be made here, Simpson and Corbridge study 'the period between the [key] event and its public memorialization - between what might be called the signifier and the signified. During this time memorial practices grew out of numerous private and small-scale projects...' See Simpson, E. and Corbrige, S. The geography of things that may become memories: the 2001 earthquake in Kachchh-Gujarat and the politics of rehabilitation in the prememorial era, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (2006), p. 566.
11. T. Cresswell, in place/out of place: geography, ideology and transgression (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
12. D. Hook, 'Monumental space and the uncanny', Geoforum 36 (2005), pp. 688-704, is a suggestive account of the relationships between monuments and the production of subjectivity.
13. e.g. http://911digitalarchive.org/ and http://www.sep11photo.org/
14. R. S. Nelson and M. Olin, eds, Monuments and memory, made and unmade (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), pp. 322-3.
15. Outside China (where the site is blocked), images of this may be viewed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddess_of_Democracy.
16. Examples may be viewed at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/murals.
17. J. Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989), pp. 1-2. Habermas goes on to problematize and historicize categories such as public, private, intimate, family, individual, civil society, and the state. A similar gesture characterizes Althusser's exploration of 'ideological state apparatus'.
18. M. Foucault, Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, ed. C. Gordon (New York, Pantheon, 1980).
19. The notion of 'affect' as a critical shorthand for the emotive-psychological level of being and politics has recently and productively been explored in the geopolitical arena by G. O'Tuathail, 'Just out looking for a fight: American affect and the invasion of Iraq', Antipode 35 (2003), pp. 856-70,
20. and S. Carter and D. P. McCormack, 'Film, geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention', Political geography 25 (2006), pp. 228-45.
21. Nigel Thrift had earlier called for critical work on geopolitics to move beyond a focus on 'the big picture' to consider more mundane and apparently trivial moments within geopolitical discourse and action: 'It's the little things', in D. Atkinson and K. Dodds, eds, Geopolitical traditions: a century of geopolitical thought (London, Routledge, 2000), pp. 380-87.
22. Suggestive work on performance and psychogeography might also be brought to bear here. For two paths of departure, see D. Pinder, 'Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city', Ecumene 8 (2001), pp. 1-19,
23. and B. Reid, "'A profound edge": performative negotiations of Belfast', Cultural geographies 12 (2005), pp. 485-506.
24. See too Robert Macfarlane's critical review of Iain Sinclair's London psychogeographical excursions, Times Literary Supplement (7 Oct. 2005), pp. 3-4.