Popular geopolitics and political memoir: Geopolitical expertise and force majeure as foreign policy justifications in Tony Blair's A Journey

Political memoirs are not only popular with a general readership, they can also be useful historical source material. The place, form and function of geopolitics within them have been seldom explored, especially in the context of critical geopolitics. This article redresses this balance by arguing that geopolitics is a crucial salient in representations of foreign policy in that it is both a marker of expertise, power and authority, and an effective force majeure, allowing memoirists to depict constraints on action. These conclusions are reached through a theorisation of the form of memoirs in the light of recent innovations in popular geopolitics, in which I propose that they be studied via socio-discursive and fictive categories, in order to discern modes of representation and interactions with audience in justifying and explaining controversial foreign policies. The case study which demonstrates this concerns former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s, 2010 memoir, A Journey, a paradigmatic text in terms of how geopolitics functions in the above modes, particularly in his representations of globalisation, the War on Terror and the UK's relationships with the USA and Europe. By bringing together approaches from popular geopolitics and discursive theories of memoirs, I am able to make an original contribution that highlights the importance of political space within one particular and popular literary form and how this is used to justify past foreign policies.     

Geopolitics as palimpsest: Contextual inscriptions of the global war on terror

This article aims to develop the agenda of a grounded, contextual critical geopolitics, with particular emphasis on the interaction between local and hegemonic geopolitics. This is achieved by examining the local reception of the geopolitics of the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) in the context of the establishment of US bases on Romanian territory following the 2004 US Global Posture Review. A close reading of this context reveals a complex and ambiguous relationship, simultaneously assertive and subversive, between the GWOT's sui generis, territorially non-specific geopolitics of transit, and Romania's exceptionalist geopolitics of place, significance, and convergence. Not only did the GWOT geopolitics fail to erase local geopolitics, but it also became muddied, contaminated, and inadvertently destroyed by the ‘old’ local geopolitical knowledge. This suggests an understanding of geopolitics as a palimpsest, the product of serial, imperfect, synchronic and diachronic erasures and writings-over that produce geopolitical knowledge of, and in different contexts. In broader conceptual terms, this study highlights the heteroglossia of geopolitical knowledge, the resilience of local geopolitics, and the importance of contextual sensitivity in the pursuit of the normative mission of critical geopolitics.     

Identity and geopolitics in Hergé's Adventures of Tintin

This is a study of identity and geopolitics in Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, a series of adventure comics created from 1929 to 1976. The Tintin comics became increasingly popular throughout the mid-twentieth century, and their creator, Hergé, is still a subject of intrigue in the press and popular publications. Recent work in popular geopolitics has pioneered the use of comics as a new type of source material in critical geography. Hergé's approach to the comics format combines an iconic protagonist with detailed and textured environments that draw upon some of the geopolitical discourses of the twentieth century. Three forms of geopolitical meaning are identified within the Tintin comics: discourses of colonialism, European pre-eminence and anti-Americanism. These overlapping trends amount to different facets of one single discourse, which places European ideologies at the centre of its world-view. This is highlighted by focusing on three geographical spaces of the Tintin series, and by contextualising the life and selected works of Hergé.     

Popular geopolitics of Chinese Nanjing massacre films: a feminist approach

This article attempts to deconstruct the masculinised contract among the war narrative, popular culture, and Chinese nationalism by exploring the roles of women in Nanjing Massacre films with war narratives and Chinese audiences' emotional ‘readings’ of these women. Based on the analysis of City of Life and Death (2009) and The Flowers of War (2011) and audiences' comments on these two films from Douban Movie, this article has mapped a popular geopolitics of these two films through a feminist approach. The main argument of this research points out that, through the production and consumption of these two films, the women of the Nanjing Massacre can be territorialised as Nanjing/China and used to represent China's attitudes towards both the historical and current Sino–Japanese relationship. In this way, the women of these films can be considered an articulation of popular culture and politics, and they are empowered to establish Chinese nationalism and construct anti-Japanese identities in Chinese society. To a wider extent, this article can be read as a contribution to the literature on gender, nationalism and popular geopolitics.     

NOTES ON CAMPS,OR, COUNTERFACTUAL FÜHRERS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE JOKE

In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account of normalization, particularly his claim that aesthetic normalization can undermine our moral judgments regarding the Holocaust. Drawing on Sigmund Freud on jokes, and Susan Sontag on Camp aesthetics, I argue that every effort to normalize the Holocaust, especially ones that work through humor and jokes (a major topic of Rosenfeld's book), actually maintain the Holocaust's status as a series of historical events resistant to “normalization.” If “normalization” is a process through which extraordinary, or morally charged, historical events lose their moral charge, then aesthetic efforts to normalize the Holocaust actually reinscribe the special moral status that Rosenfeld believes they erase.     

Between dependency and engagement: Centring subaltern geopolitics in multiperspectival border studies. Lessons from the Western Sahara

Contributing to the growing interest in multiperspectival border studies, this article advocates for a re-centring of subaltern geopolitics in the debate. Focusing empirically on Morocco's diplomatic dispute with the EU over the application of trade agreements to the Western Sahara (2015–2019), the analysis considers the geopolitical bordering of the controversy through the concepts of dependency and engagement to explain how the disputed territory both structured Morocco's disadvantageous relationship to the EU, while also giving rise to material and symbolic possibilities for the state leadership to subvert these geopolitical asymmetries in the late 2010s. The events are theorised through the combined lenses of critical border studies, subaltern geopolitics, and the politics of space to bring two complementary insights to the fore: (i) to insist that multiperspectival approaches account for the uneven landscape of borders, and the entities that act upon, animate, and transform geopolitical affairs from outside the dominant nodes of power and knowledge; conversely (ii) to destabilize prevailing binaries of geopolitical marginality and centrality through a reading of borders in an irreducibly multiple sense. Together, the analysis demonstrates the value of centring subaltern geopolitics in emerging debates on border multiplicity in the field today, while also avoiding the tendency to reinforce the spectacle of the border itself.     

‘Cleverly Drawn’: Oscar Wilde,Charles Ricketts,and the Art of the Woman's World

This paper offers a new examination of the influential women's magazine, theWoman's World (1887–90), and Oscar Wilde's editorship thereof. Previous studies have focused on the magazine's importance as a venue for promoting proto-feminist writing and for enabling Wilde to boost his professional cachet through editorial work, but the aesthetic aims and execution of theWoman's World merit further analysis. The Woman's World reveals how male artists negotiated aesthetics and Aestheticism between themselves within its pages, as well as how they presented it to the publication's assumed audience of women. This paper particularly centres on the magazine's role in establishing the professional relationship between Wilde and Charles Ricketts, later the designer and illustrator of some of Wilde's most important texts, while simultaneously considering how Ricketts's work furthered the artistic and intellectual instruction Wilde hoped to offer the magazine's readers. Case studies of several of Ricketts's illustrations demonstrate the types of visual reading that the Woman's World seemed to espouse, and which worked in tandem with the textual contents to encourage women to develop critical reading skills.     

Police and Politics in Aesthetics-Based Urban Governance: Redevelopment and Grassroots Struggles in Enninglu,Guangzhou, China

Rancière's theorisation of police, politics, and aesthetics offers an illustrative framework to understand urban (re)developments. While extant works have examined separately the art of governing through aesthetics and the political subjectivities of those having no part in the frame of visibility and intelligibility, this study argues that hegemonic aesthetic regime and bottom-up aesthetic practices can be mutually constitutive and reside in relationships of co-existence and mutual negotiation. Drawing on over a decade's investigation in Enninglu, a neighbourhood district in Guangzhou that underwent several rounds of political struggles related to redevelopment and conservation, we reveal how local residents negotiated aesthetic norms enacted by the state. Particular attention is paid to the interactions between the aesthetic regime imposed by the state and grassroots people reclaiming their own aesthetic sensibilities, culminating in a contingent, inconclusive, and “impure” space of politics. Both political subjectivities and aesthetic norms are redefined ongoingly in this process.     

Celebrity humanitarianism and the popular geopolitics of hope along the Thai-Burma border

In June of 2014 Angelina Jolie, actress and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador, visited camps—home to 130,000 Burmese exiles—along the Thai-Burma border to draw international attention to one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. Her fourth trip to the border since 2002, Jolie's day-long visit was widely commended in popular media. I draw on ethnographic research among Burmese exiles in northern Thailand to argue that the popular geopolitics of hope she engendered is constituted through contradictory impulses of, on one hand, her signification of global capital and the concurrent widespread geoeconomic hope around Burma's deepening integration into global capitalism, and on the other, the far-reaching geopolitics of fear that has materialized around the threat of repatriation resulting from rapid political-economic change in Burma. Thus, this paper builds on recent work in popular geopolitics and geographies of emotion and affect to offer a grounded illustration of the micro-macro linkages between popular culture and everyday geopolitical experience, as well as the often politically nuanced role of celebrities in humanitarian interventions. This paper contributes to ongoing conversations around the relationship between celebrity humanitarians from the global North and the political-economic implications of the affective enrollment of their intended benefactors from the global South.     

B/ordering nature and biophysical geopolitics: A response to Hirsch

This response to Hirsch's examination of Mekong geopolitics raises challenges to the geo-economics’ capture of common property resources and fragmentation of the Mekong commons by stressing flows, migrations and socio-ecological relations that should be central biophysical elements within deliberative geopolitics in the region.     

Nativist-populism,the internet and the geopolitics of indigenous diaspora

The increasing influence of nativist-populism across Europe has provoked public and scholarly debate in recent years, to which political geographers are well placed to contribute. This article synthesises recent work on popular geopolitics and the geopolitics of diaspora to analyse the ways that the MAK-Anavad (the Kabyle government-in-exile) positions itself politically through both reactionary nativism and progressive indigenism. The politics of diaspora, indigeneity and nativism share some common discursive traits relating to territory and belonging, though their starting points and political effects are different. This article outlines and explains the ways the MAK-Anavad's discourse articulates with the nativist-populism of the French Right, arguing that this is possible because of its diasporic situation, colonial history, and a common discourse of anti-Islamism. Online social media, an important new field for the study of popular geopolitics, is argued to offer a key political opportunity structure for the MAK-Anavad and to privilege a populist communication style.     

Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.     

Hume,Bishop Butler,and the Revival of Ritual in Anglophone Protestantism

A sweeping reassessment of the role of ritual, ceremony, and aesthetics took place in anglophone Protestantism between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. While the nineteenth‐century developments themselves have been extensively studied, little scholarly attention has been paid to the importance of the earlier emergence of philosophical language capable of explaining and justifying, in a Protestant context, the ritual and aesthetic dimensions of religious practice. I argue that this language, paradoxically, grew out of a symbiosis of sceptical modernity, traditional religious apologetics, and the religious “enthusiasm” of the early eighteenth century. I approach the topic through the interconnected oeuvres (and careers) of David Hume and Joseph Butler, presenting the first synoptic account of their ideas about the psychological underpinnings of religious worship, and the use made of their ideas by later generations of anglophone Protestants. As mainstream Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians confronted the challenges presented by Methodism and Evangelicalism, they found support in a synthesis of Butler's and Hume's ideas. Eventually, the beneficial role of ritual and aesthetics in religious worship came to be widely accepted throughout the anglophone Protestant world.     

On reading the scriptures as literature

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's thought has been seen by many scholars to be derivative of German Idealism, especially Kantian critical philosophy. The present article challenges that claim by offering an analysis of Coleridge's interpretation of Francis Bacon's founding of the empirical method. Through the course of this discussion, Coleridge's understanding of the distinction between the intellective faculties of reason and understanding will be established, and will be shown to run counter to Kantian epistemology. Coleridge's dialectical approach to the role of reason in the operations of the understanding will be applied to their uses in scientific discovery, aesthetics, and religious thought. The various uses of symbolic representation in the context of these different endeavors will be given critical expression, revealing the unity of the human mind and nature, of subject and object. Ultimately, it is by appeal to the existence of God that the intelligibility of these various fields of symbolic representation are established. Coleridge's interpretation of Bacon offers a way of reconciling Baconian empiricism with Platonic Forms, in a genealogical recovery of the concealed methodology established in his Novum Organum. The overall argument proceeds critically, through a discussion of the subjective operations of the symbol-making powers of human thought, in the sciences and mathematics, in aesthetic, and in theological speculation and religious representation, revealing the Romantic origins of modernity.     

Social Werktreue and the musical work's independent afterlife

New musicology's rejection of formalist precepts eclipses how the subjectivization of aesthetics institutes the schema of music's opposition to reality. Social Werktreue—fidelity to the work and to the faithful reproduction of an original intent—replaces ideals of aesthetic transcendence with analyses of a work's socially constructed meaning. Hence, absolute music's social demystification positions music criticism within a system of oppositions ratified by bourgeois culture. The power individual works exercise in contesting reality deconstructs formalist dogma and social Werktreue. The temporality evinced when works address us in new situations attests to the work's independent afterlife. By confronting formalist criticism and social critique with the schema Kant initiated when he legitimated aesthetic judgment's transcendental function, this independent afterlife argues against transposing the principle of interpretive fidelity onto the social plane. Works reveal dimensions of experience in the midst of existing social and historical conditions, thereby opening new horizons for music criticism.     

Settler geology: Earth's deep history and the governance of in situ oil spills in Alberta

Alberta's bitumen industry is frequently identified as a key site of environmental politics in the Anthropocene owing to the scale of its fossil fuel extraction operations. While popular images of surface mining activities often focus these discussions, approximately 80% of the bitumen reserves in the Canadian province lie too deep for surface mining and are extracted through in situ technologies, including processes that inject high-temperature, high-pressure steam to mobilize geologic formations of the tar-like fossil fuel. This article examines how in situ extraction was governed in response to four flow-to-surface (FTS) events in which bitumen unexpectedly migrated to Earth's surface as the result of in situ operations. The governance response to these events is of particular interest because it counters the assertion that existing governance institutions operate on time scales that are incommensurate with those relevant to the Anthropocene. The Alberta case shows the opposite owing to how Earth's deep history was used to provide temporal syntax for a geotechnical debate that ensued over what caused the FTS events. By detailing the controversy over what caused the FTS events, and the search for “enabling conditions” that would link causal explanations to the spatial distribution of the four bitumen seeps, Earth's deep history was also made commensurate with the political geography of settler colonialism in Alberta. The article introduces and develops the notion of ‘settler geology’ in order to capture the naturalization of geologic forms of reasoning about Earth's deep history, the geologic force of anthropogenic in situ operations, and the temporal framework of settler colonial governance in Alberta.     

The regard of the first man: on Joseph Addison’s aesthetic categories

This study examines the sources that could inspire Joseph Addison’s influential ‘aesthetic’ triad of ‘great’, ‘uncommon’, and ‘beautiful’, as elaborated in his essay-series The Pleasures of the Imagination in 1712. After identifying a philological problem in the interpretative tradition which gives rise to Addison’s triad from a section of Ps Longinus’ Peri Hypsous, further three seventeenth-century texts – Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra, Dominique Bouhours’ Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, and Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón – are presented in order to reconstruct a ‘reading glass’ through which Addison could peruse and understand the Longinian section, and then could create his ‘aesthetic’ triad. As a result of this reconstruction, the possible connection between Gracián’s allegorical novel and Addison’s essay can cast more light on the complex and insufficiently discussed relationship between theology or devotional literature and the emerging modern aesthetic discourse. From this angle, Addison’s ‘man of polite imagination’, that is, the homo aestheticus in the modern sense of the adjective, seems to be the heir of Gracián’s ‘first man’ who has the privilege of regarding the created world in a new light, and, as Addison’s aesthete, of discovering its greatness, novelty and beauty in ‘innocent pleasures’.     

Review articles

Colette is not generally included in recent narratives of twentieth-century French neoclassicism. However, her contemporaries of various political and aesthetic persuasions considered Colette to be a classique of the first order. This article explores classification as classique by critics sympathetic to Charles Maurras and the aesthetics of the Action française as well as left-leaning critics associated with André Gide and the group surrounding the Nouvelle Revue française. The article shows that it is Colette's strong association with a particular type of femininity that allows her to be thought of as classique by critics of such different political and aesthetic commitments. The article also examines examples of resistance to Colette's categorisation as classique, and attempts to assert the modernity of her work, coining the term classique moderne as a way of bringing together diverse attempts to explain the harmony between classicism and modernity in Colette's work. The article suggests that Colette's incorporation in the canon of the classique is part of a larger solidifying of the role of femininity in French identity at that moment.     

Young islanders,the meteorological imagination,and the art of geopolitical engagement

There is scant literature analysing how young islanders regard climate change, particularly in terms of resilience, agency and a geopolitical aesthetic. To address that gap, this paper offers a theoretical framework and empirical example responding to such issues. The work's theoretical foci are upon the role of the artist as interlocutor; the importance of arts practices in encouraging children to participate in climate change debates and actions; and the potential of what anthropologist Tim Ingold has called the meteorological imagination. These three matters inform a two-year praxis project – A Map of a Dream of the Future – involving methods from the geohumanities and engagement with young islanders, academics, artists and writers, community cultural development workers, and educators. Together, we worked on various activities to draw out our individual and collective ideas about islands, arts, climate change, and geopolitics. In the process were created an education kit, children's workshops and exhibitions, and a professional art installation at a major national arts festival. At the same time, new insights have been gained about how the meteorological imagination may be a significant resource by which to work with children as they come to terms with a future whose climate has changed.     

What More Is There to Say? Revisiting Agamben's Depiction of Homo Sacer

This article argues that Agamben's “paradigmatic method” leads to particular choices in his depiction of the figure of the homo sacer. Reviewing this project also suggests that there's more to history—the example given is the story of homo sacer—than Agamben's method would ever leave us to say. In other words, there are still resources in the tradition for something new, and thus there is much more left to say about its legacies.