Cultural geography: After a fashion

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 191-201

  Crang, Philip ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY;

EID: 77951183595     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010363846     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. Peter Jackson, Maps of meaning: introduction to cultural geography (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989).
2. sleep furiously, directed by Gideon Koppel, New Wave Films; cinematic release in May 2008.
3. DVD release in October 2009. Gideon Koppel is a lecturer in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. The film was the principal 'output' from a period of research leave funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which has a commitment to recognizing 'practice-led research' and a diversity of research output forms. For an interview with Koppel in the AHRC's own publication, Podium.
4. see: Philip Pothen, 'Showcase: a very personal journey', Podium 13 (Winter 2009), pp. 16-17; available online at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/About/Publications/Documents/Podium%2013.pdf (accessed 15 October 2009).
5. Numerous reviews of the film were published around its release dates; links to many of these are accessible via the New Wave Films website.
6. See for example John Banville, 'The hills are alive: sleep furiously', Sight and sound (June 2009); available online at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/4958 (accessed 30 August 2009).
7. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary affects (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2007).
8. The exhibition at the RGS-IBG was open to the public from 15 October to 10 December 2009. The online exhibition is on the RGS-IBG website at: http://www.rgs.org/hiddenhistories (accessed 15 October 2009).
9. The companion volume and exhibition catalogue is Felix Driver and Lowri Jones, Hidden histories of exploration. Researching the RGS-IBG collections (Egham, Royal Holloway, University of London in association with the RGS-IBG, 2009). A podcast of an interview with Felix Driver about the exhibition is available at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News/Podcasts/Pages/felixdriver.aspx (accessed 15 October 2009). The research was funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), under its Museums, Galleries, Archives and Libraries Research Grant scheme.
10. Felix Driver and Lowri Jones, Hidden histories of exploration, p. 49.
11. The Fashioning Diaspora Space project was funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of its Diasporas, Migration and Identities strategic research programme. Team members include: myself, Shivani Derrington, Felix Driver and Helen Scalway (at the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London) and Sonia Ashmore, Christopher Breward and Rosemary Crill (at the V&A).
12. The 'Moving Patterns' exhibition was held in the RGS-IBG from 7-21 May 2009. A catalogue is available from the author. The exhibition, and the research it presents, also feature on the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). In early 2010 a set of pages on 'Moving Patterns' will be launched, accessible via the research project webpage: http://www.vam.ac.uk/res_cons/research/diaspora/index.html. At the time of writing, Helen Scalway's blog on the exhibition and her research, including images of the exhibited pieces, is located at: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1750_scalway/blog/.
13. The site of the 'Moving Patterns' exhibition was also, therefore, a deliberate intervention: its location in the Pavilion exhibition space of the RGS-IBG not only placed it at the main public entrance of this metropolitan centre of Geographical knowledge, but also looking east across the iconic thoroughfare of the British imperial archive, South Kensington's Exhibition Road.
14. An influential text is Deanna Petherbridge, The primacy of drawing: an artist's view (London, Exhibition Catalogue, A National Touring Exhibition from the South Bank Centre, 1991).
15. See also her essay 'Nailing the liminal: the difficulties of defining drawing', in Steve Garner, ed., Writing on drawing. Essays on drawing practice and research (Bristol, Intellect Books, 2008), pp. 27-41.
16. A recent intervention is TRACEY, eds, Drawing now. Between the lines of contemporary art (London, IB Tauris, 2007).
17. TRACEY is an online journal concerned with contemporary drawing, and for this book its editors were Simon Downs, Russell Marshall, Phil Sawdon, Andrew Selby and Jane Tormey. Ernst van Alphen provides an overview of different theoretical statements on drawing in his 'Looking at drawing: theoretical distinctions and their usefulness', in Steve Garner, ed., Writing on drawing, pp. 59-70.
18. TRACEY, Drawing now, pp. xii and xiv.
19. Avis Newman refers to drawing as a 'theatre of gesture', an animation of thought that responds to and differently manifests what is seen (and usually unseen). This, to me, seems to accord well with Scalway's practice and its reworking of visible patterns into new visual and material forms.
20. See Avis Newman, 'Conversation: Avis Newman / Catherine de Zegher', in Catherine de Zegher, ed., The stage of drawing: gesture and act, selected from the Tate collection (London, Tate Publishing, in association with the Drawing Centre, 2003), pp. 231-7.
21. Steve Garner, 'Introduction', in Writing on drawing, p. 14.
22. more generally see his chapter 'Towards a critical discourse in drawing research' in the same volume (pp. 15-26).
23. Throughout this review I adopt an ecumenical definition of Cultural Geography, understanding it as an intellectual realm of exchange inhabited by diversely located participants, rather than as a sub-discipline defined by institutional location. At times, this results in my own 'claiming' of work as 'cultural geography' when this term may not be recognized or used by that work's authors (as would be the case with Koppel's film).
24. To clarify, this is a claim made within Maps of meaning and reproduced within subsequent promotions of a wider cultural turn. Its verdict upon longer traditions of Cultural Geography is thoroughly debatable, and of course subject to much debate at the time. For a similarly timed, but very different 'textbook' rendering, I still find Kenneth E. Foote, Peter J. Hugill, Kent Mathewson and Jonathan M. Smith, eds, Re-reading cultural geography (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1994) a vital counterpoint.
25. In re-reading Maps of meaning, Jackson's emphasis on social action, and suspicion of getting caught up in language, is notable. In the contemporary context, others have charted how 'non-representational theory' may, in some of its travels, have been unintentionally reduced to a stylistic affiliation that pronounced 'representation' - and by association Cultural Geography - as intellectually passé.
26. See Catherine Nash, 'Performativity in practice: some recent work in cultural geography', Progress in human geography 24(4) (2000), pp. 653-64.
27. Hayden Lorimer, 'Cultural geography: the busyness of being "more-thanrepresentational"', Progress in human geography 29(1) (2005), pp. 83-94.
28. and the clarification offered in Nigel Thrift, 'Life, but not as we know it', in Non-representational theory: space, politics, affect (London, Routledge, 2008), pp. 1-26.
29. Maps of meaning introduces an approach to ideology, drawn heavily from deployments of Gramsci in cultural studies and cultural history, in its chapter on 'Culture and ideology', pp. 47-75.
30. A sense of the wider field and multiple theoretical interventions upon which Jackson was drawing is present in John B. Thompson, Studies in the theory of ideology (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1984).
31. Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, 'Preface', in Handbook of cultural geography (London, Sage, 2002), p. xviii.
32. See also Sarah Whatmore, 'Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more than human world', cultural geographies 13(4) (2006), pp. 600-9.
33. For Jane Jacobs, Cultural Geography has long been marked by a dual attention to the role of the small, minor and the exceptional and their role in the making of 'big geographies'.
34. see Jane M. Jacobs, 'A geography of big things', cultural geographies 13(1) (2006), pp. 1-27.
35. On cultural materialism see Raymond Williams, Culture and society, 1750-1950 (London, Chatto and Windus, 1958).
36. For a somewhat concentrated sense of how 'cultural politics' had become distilled by the 1990s, see Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, Cultural politics. class, gender, race and the postmodern world (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995).
37. See Nigel Thrift 'Life.' and 'Summoning life', in Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Mark Goodwin, eds, Envisioning human geographies (London, Arnold, 2004), pp. 81-103.
38. This was most publicly kicked around in the pages of the journal Antipode; see Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, 'What's left? Just the future', Antipode 37 (2005), pp. 220-38.
39. and Neil Smith, 'Neo-critical geography; or, the flat pluralist world of business class', Antipode 37 (2005), pp. 887-99.
40. Not least, they are important in countering a tendency to reduce this tension to a gestural solution, in which proclamations of critical, radical, or political import are unburdened by serious theorisation and more indicative of some combination of authorial self-regard and obedience to established mores.
41. Les Back, The art of listening (Oxford, Berg, 2007).
42. on 'structures of feeling' see Raymond Williams, The long revolution (London, Pelican, 1961).
43. Marxism and literature (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977).
44. and Politics and letters: interviews with New left review (London, Verso, 1981), pp. 133-74.
45. See, respectively: Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary affects.
46. Nigel Thrift, 'The material practice of glamour', Journal of cultural economy 1(1) (2008), pp. 9-23.
47. A geography of big things'. It is in this spirit that a range of global biographies of both things and people also strike me as particularly exciting. Miles Ogborn's historical geographies are notable exemplars: Indian ink: script and print in the making of the English East India Company (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2007).
48. Global lives. Britain and the world, 1550-1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008).
49. See also Stephen Daniels and Catherine Nash, 'Lifepaths: geography and biography', Journal of historical geography 30(3) (2004), pp. 449-58.
50. I was lucky enough to be involved in an excellent session (Folk Geographies: Land, Life, Lore) with such a sensibility at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago in 2006, organized by Dydia Delyser and Hayden Lorimer. An exemplar of work on place, landscape and environment within the creative and performing arts that also enacts this kind of reconnection is Mike Pearson, In comes I: performance, memory and landscape (Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2007).
51. Hayden Lorimer, 'Cultural geography: worldly shapes, differently arranged', Progress in human geography 31(1) (2007), p. 97.
52. Clearly, an enormous range of work is indicated in this general statement. Work that interrelates these emphases in particularly interesting ways includes, in my view: Tim Ingold, 'Culture on the ground. The world perceived through the feet', Journal of material culture 9(3) (2004), pp. 315-40.
53. and 'Materials against materiality', Archaeological dialogues 14(1) (2007), pp. 1-16.
54. Hannah Macpherson, 'The intercorporeal emergence of landscape: negotiating sight, blindness, and ideas of landscape in the British countryside', Environment and planning A (2009 online publication).
55. Justin Spinney, 'A place of sense: a kinaesthetic ethnography of cyclists on Mont Ventoux', Environment and planning D: society and space 24 (2006), pp. 709-32.
56. and 'Cycling the city: non-place and the sensory construction of meaning in a mobile practice', in Dave Horton, Paul Rosen and Peter Cox, eds, Cycling and society (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007), pp. 25-46.
57. Nigel Thrift, 'Closer to the machine? Intelligent environments, new forms of possession and the rise of the supertoy', cultural geographies 10 (2003), pp. 389-407.
58. and 'The material practice of glamour'.
59. John Wylie, 'Becoming-icy: Scott and Amundsen's South Polar voyages, 1910- 1913', cultural geographies 9(3) (2002), pp. 249-65.
60. and 'A single day's walking: narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(2) (2005), pp. 234-47.
61. Kathryn Yusoff, 'Antarctic exposure: archives of the feeling body', cultural geographies 14(2) (2007), pp. 211-33.
62. These terms are taken from Miwon Kwon's 'genealogy of site specificity' in her book One place after another. site-specific art and locational identity (Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2002).
63. Denis Cosgrove and Mona Domosh, 'Author and authority. Writing the new cultural geography', in James S. Duncan and David Ley, eds, Place/culture/representation (London, Routledge, 1993), pp. 25-38.
64. Philip Crang, 'The politics of polyphony: reconfigurations in geographical authority', Environment and planning D: society and space 10(5) (1992), pp. 527-49.
65. Caitlin DeSilvey, 'Salvage memory: constellating material histories on a hardscrabble homestead', Cultural geographies 14(3) (2007), pp. 401-24.
66. Hayden Lorimer, 'Herding memories of humans and animals', Environment and planning D: society and space 24 (2006), pp. 497-518.
67. Ogborn, Global lives.
68. Wylie, 'A single day's walking'; and 'Smoothlands: fragments/landscapes/fragments', cultural geographies 13(3) (2006), pp. 458-65.
69. See, for example, Felix Driver, Catherine Nash, Kathy Prendergast and Ingrid Swenson, eds, Landing: eight collaborative projects between artists + geographers (Egham, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2002).
70. Kate Foster and Hayden Lorimer, 'Some reflections on artgeography as collaboration', cultural geographies 14(3) (2007), pp. 425-32.
71. Holly McLaren, ed., Bordering: an art / geography collaboration (London, Queen Mary, University of London, 2007).
72. Hester Parr, 'Collaborative film-making as process, method and text in mental health research', cultural geographies 14(1) (2007), pp. 114-38.
73. Salvage memory'; 'Observed decay: telling stories with mutable things', Journal of material culture 11(3) (2006), pp. 318-338.
74. and 'Art and archive: memory-work on a Montana homestead', Journal of historical geography 33(4) (2007), pp. 878-900.
75. Toby Butler, 'Memoryscape: how audio walks can deepen our sense of place by integrating art, oral history and cultural geography', Geography compass 1(3) (2007), pp. 360-72.
76. Shiloh R. Krupar, 'Shanghaiing the future: a de-tour of the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall', Public culture 20(2) (2008), pp. 307-20.
77. For an excellent review essay see David Pinder, 'Cartographies unbound', cultural geographies 14(3) (2007), pp. 453-62.
78. See also Edward Casey, Earth-mapping: artists re-shaping landscape (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
79. and Denis Cosgrove and Luciana L Martins, 'Millennial geographics', in Claudio Minca, ed., Postmodern geography: theory and praxis (Oxford, Blackwell, 2001), pp. 169-95.
80. More specifically, see: Catherine Nash, 'Mapping emotion', Environment and planning d: society and space 16(1) (1998), pp. 1-9.
81. and for more on Kathy Prendergast and other 'contemporary artists who use maps in their work' see: http://www.artjunction.org/articles/mapartists.html (accessed 15 March 2009).
82. and http://www.kerlin.ie/artists/Kathy-Prendergast.aspx (accessed 15 March 2009).
83. Christian Nold's 'emotional maps' have deployed the look of a TIN polygon in presenting personal accounts and physiological data of place experiences; see, for example, his 'emotion map' of Greenwich, in London at: http://www.emotionmap.net/map.htm (accessed 15 March 2009).
84. Alison Barnes's work was published in this journal: 'Geo/graphic mapping', cultural geographies 14(1) (2007), pp. 139-47.
85. Her earlier work, prior to her 'Moving Patterns' pieces and sited in a South London sari shop, was discussed in 'A patois of pattern: pattern, memory and the cosmopolitan city', cultural geographies 13(3) (2006), pp. 451-9.
86. For a recent example of a cultural geography film, see Bradley J. Garrett 'Urban explorers: quests of myth, mystery and meaning', Geography compass 5 (2009), in press.
87. Cf. Irit Rogoff, Terra infirma. geography's visual culture (Routledge, London, 2000).
88. Ron Martin, 'Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda', Progress in human geography 25(2) (2001), pp. 189-210.
89. As a minor corrective, it should be said that the last two or three decades of Cultural Geography have in fact seen some strong commitments to public policy. Notable examples include the bodies of work produced by and around sub-disciplinary leading lights Jacquie Burgess and David Ley on environmental and immigration policy respectively.
90. The title of an event organized on behalf of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) in July 2009 by Ian Cook and Kathryn Yusoff at the School of Geography, University of Exeter.
91. The Art of the Garden', Tate Britain, London, June-August 2004.
92. for an account see Stephen Daniels, 'The garden in winter', cultural geographies 12(3) 2005, pp. 366-70. 'Swinging London' was held at the V&A Museum, London, June 2006-February 2007.
93. see Christopher Breward, David Gilbert and Jenny Lister, eds, Swinging sixties (London, V&A Publishing, 2006).
94. These were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2008 and 2009.
95. Alex Loftus, 'Intervening in the environment of the everyday', Geoforum 40(3) (2009), pp. 326-34.
96. David Pinder, 'Urban interventions: art, politics and pedagogy', International journal of urban and regional research 32(3) (2009), pp. 730-6.
97. David Pinder, 'Arts of urban exploration', Cultural geographies 12(4) (2005), pp. 383-411.
98. See, for example, Kathryn Yusoff, ed., BiPolar (London, Arts Catalyst, 2008).
99. In the UK, the proposed relating of research funding - at both individual and institutional levels - to demonstrable commitments to wider public 'impacts' is problematic in all kinds of ways, but does provide, potentially, a means for greater recognition of public scholarship.