Colonial Geography and Masculinity in Eric Dutton's Kenya Mountain

Eric Dutton's Kenya Mountain, (1929) tells the story of an unsuccessful attempt to climb Mount Kenya in the 1920s. In this article, the author concentrates on a close, contextualized reading of the book as a contribution to critical feminist geographical understanding of colonial discourse at a later point in the colonial timeline than has been commonly analyzed in studies of British colonial geographies and travel literature. Dutton's discursive tactics in the text reveal the inextricable relations between a gendered and enframed sense of landscape and colonial rule. The book also is a window onto the ambivalences and contradictions within British colonial ideology in Africa in the interwar years. In particular, Dutton's struggle with hegemonic masculinity and his complex relationships with the African men on the climb are interrogated as manifestations of broader ambiguities in Britain's African empire. These points of emphasis in this reading of the book emerge from recent feminist and progressive analyses of gender, colonial geography and adventure writing.     

A Feminist Literary Cartography of the Canadian North: Women,writing and place in Aritha van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere

This article examines the idea of North in Aritha van Herk's (1990) Places Far From Ellesmere, a feminist rereading of Anna Karenin that is also an exploration of place—Ellesmere Island—and of gender, identity and belonging. I situate my reading of Ellesmere firstly within feminist literary theory, focusing on the concept of intertextuality and on the implications of the concept, from the perspective of feminist theorists, for the acts of writing and reading. I further contextualise van Herk's work by outlining the growing sensitivity to the complexities of writing Canadian space in Canadian literary criticism. The focus then shifts to Ellesmere, beginning with an investigation of van Herk's representational practices and philosophies, which are organised around a critique of the relationship between writing, gender and power. I argue that van Herk's insistence upon the power of feminist textual rereadings, an insistence that results from her aversion to authority, critically shapes her geographical imaginary, and her understanding of North. By extending the text and thereby the practice of reading to geography, van Herk makes possible a feminist representation or rereading of the North that simultaneously contests the conventions of literature, of place and of gender. Ultimately, I argue that it is van Herk's commitment to investigate the processes of representation in which she is engaged that makes her representation of the North such a valuable text for feminist and literary geographers.     

The character of English geographyc. 1660–1800: a textual approach

This article re-evaluates the character of geography in England in the 150 years after the Restoration. Most historians have focused either on exceptional geography books or on texts of geographical knowledge, rather than on geography booksper se. Drawing on cultural–historical approaches to the book, this article looks at the character of geography as a textual tradition. This requires an analysis of geography books from three points of view: the texts themselves and the definition of their function and audience; the readership and their sites of reading; and authorship and the milieu of book production. This analysis shows that geography was consistently related to two social and intellectual traditions: a commercial and practical tradition, and a humanistic and scholarly tradition. Such a position allies geography as a textual tradition with recent characterizations of the English Enlightenment.     

Authorizing landscape: «authority», naming and the Ordnance Survey's mapping of the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth century

A range of work in human and historical geography has discussed naming and mapping as reflections of social power. In historical contexts in particular, attention has been drawn to the ways in which native knowledges, even the natives themselves, were either «written out» by being excluded, or marginalized in the processes of «translation» and cartographic representation. This article examines the work of the Ordnance Survey in the nineteenth-century Scottish Highlands and the means this English-speaking body employed in providing authoritative names to what was, in placenames and in the language of the inhabitants, a Gaelic landscape. An examination of the Ordnance Survey's Original Object Name Books is used to explore how the landscape was «authorized», to discuss who was judged an authoritative source and, from this, to emphasize naming as a social process.     

Reading,tourism, and geography consumption in literary places

Literature and geography are closely related in the worlds of consumption and mobility, and literature is often used as a resource for the tourism industry. The reading and consumption of literature, therefore, are related to visitation of a real place, and the roles of readers and tourists merge. The case of one literary tourism site, the San Mao Teahouse in the ancient town of Zhouzhuang in China, is selected to explain the complexity of reading and geography consumption in literary tourism. Observations and in-depth interviews were used to collect the data, and then the thematic analysis method was used. The study finds that tourists can also actively participate in the construction of literary places at destinations where relevant texts do not exist. In this kind of literary place, consumption occurs in multiple spaces as a result of tourists’ reading combined with geographical consumption. This study proposes a conceptual framework to analyze the geography consumption of literature in tourist destinations. The results show that the main geography consumption is reflected in three aspects, namely text, reality, and imagination. Based on their previous reading experiences, readers explore both the literary text and the reality. In this process, their imaginations always have an effect. Two distinguishing features have been found: first, through actively reading and decoding literary geography, the readers recreate a new fictionalized reality based on their imaginations. Second, the readers pursue the imaginative process from the real Zhouzhuang back to an imagined place that San Mao wrote about. The study contributes to the current literary geography research field, especially from the perspective of consumption. The study also provides a new perspective on literature in the modern world and practical implications for the design of literary tourist products and literary heritage conservation.     

Geography by Rail®: a new twist on a romantic concept

Based on William Morris Davis’ great Transcontinental Excursion of 1912, this article assesses and reviews the Geography by Rail® program (GbR) – a unique, short-term, field-based study abroad experience that takes an uncommon-in-the-US approach to international exploration and fieldwork, incorporating on-the-ground, regional geography-based learning experiences. Though it could be used as such, this is not intended as a “how-to” article, but instead, an examination of how the program’s alternative approach to short-term, field-based learning increases student engagement, enlivens the discipline of geography by championing the regional geography approach, and bridges the physical-human divide in geography. Examples are given of assessment techniques, relevant skills gained by student participants, student feedback received, and potential limitations of such a program. Our main goal rests in demonstrating that by being in the landscape, practicing in it, students often gain a perspective not achievable in the traditional classroom setting. In the regional and romantic geography sense, favoring breadth of learning over depth, we further argue that GbR represents a novel way to accomplish this important-yet-not-often-fostered and, oddly and unfortunately, difficult-to-find-in-geography concept.     

Blue governmentality: Elemental activism with conservation technologies on plundered seas

For the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the atmosphere and ocean are channels for movement that are to be used and overcome in direct actions to protect marine environments. To accomplish these missions, they deploy a fleet of ships, helicopters, and drones that intervene to stop violations of conservation laws. In this way, oceanic elements—waves, winds, icebergs, and storms—mediate conservation and conservation technologies. The elements and the technologies that Sea Shepherd exploit both inhibit and make conservation possible.This paper argues that the drone is an exteriorization of the human body whose liberatory potentials are mediated by the atmosphere and ocean. Through ethnographic, textual, and videographic analysis, this article explores blue governmentality—how the azure sky and cyan ocean and the technologies that flow through these elements at once afford and constrain the control of biopower. Understanding blue governmentality means appreciating how the elements mediate movement, communication, and life itself. It requires comprehending how technologies emerge from the body, extend political intentionality, work across the elements, and network with other technologies. This article challenges conservation geography to see governmentality not as a totalizing force but one that is tempered by elemental mediations, technological affordances, and human fallibility.     

Thomas Carlyle's Calvinist dialogue with the nineteenth-century periodical press

This article signals at a dearth of critical engagement with Thomas Carlyle's Presbyterian heritage resulting from the received whiggish narrative of his Calvinism as unenlightened, anachronistic, and backward-looking. It proceeds to challenge this view by examining closely Carlyle's creative use of key Calvinist concepts in his cosmopolitan and enlightened dialogue with the contemporary periodical press over British and European cultures. Carlyle is shown to be an adept purveyor both of the Edinburgh Magazine's enlightened idiom and of Blackwood's morally conservative and artistically cosmopolitan agendas, while also making creative capital of the Anti-Jacobin's powerful Gothic imagery and of the critical verve of the Westminster Review. The main addressees of Carlyle's reading of the signs of the times, I argue, are contemporary Whigs. Carlyle's depiction of Macaulay as a ‘spiritual hippopotamus’ spells Carlyle's broader critique of the modern lack of imagination of the spiritual which sponsors deterministic religious and secular readings of reality. Carlyle displays his enlightened Calvinist perspective in discussing the French Revolution through such key Scottish Enlightenment concepts as free will, conscience, civilisational and moral progress, and divine providence. Insightful and creative use of his inherited Scottish Calvinist heritage characterises Carlyle's open, cosmopolitan reading of the signs of the times.     

PRODUCING GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE THROUGH VISUAL METHODS

The tradition of using qualitative interviews in the study of everyday life, place and identity in geography, housing studies and related disciplines is a long and sound one. Recently there has been increasing interest in using visual methods as part of qualitative methodological approaches. Through our own empirical work, this article explores one position in visual methodology, which suggests visual methods as a way of in a sense getting closer to the lived life. Drawing inspiration from qualitative methodology and performative perspectives in geography, this article argues that this position overlooks the ways in which the visual – here photography – can also be seen as performed. Based on the authors' experiences with visual methods in fieldwork in housing areas in greater Copenhagen, and using both informants' and researchers' photographic work, the article shows how a performative perspective on photography can be used in qualitative research in geography.     

Decolonizing geographies of travel: Reading James/Jan Morris

Travel writing can produce critical 'in-between' spaces, which contribute to broader cultural politics of postcolonialism, by transgressing and in a preliminary sense deconstructing imperial binaries. These imperial binaries structure subjectivities, on the one hand, and material geographies, on the other. This paper examines such a project, through a reading of travel writing by James/Jan Morris, which shows how processes of decolonizing subjectivities and material geographies may be recursively related. Morris is known for newspaper coverage of the 1953 Everest expedition, for a trilogy on the British Empire, for the autobiographical account of a sex change, and for many travel books and articles; all of which foreground themes of gender and imperialism. The paper argues that Morris's decolonizations have charted and created in-between spaces of subjectivity and material geography, ambivalent spaces with critical potential. The ambivalence of these spaces can constitute a critical limitation, but also an opportunity; in response, the conclusion redirects some critical attention away from writers and textual spaces to readers and interpretations, and thus points towards a postcolonial (and wider) politics of reading.     

Obituary: 1899

Work by historians, geographers and others has examined the role of memory and of commemoration in understanding social meaning and identity. Memory has been shown to be an active constituent of the ways in which meaning is invested in space and place. This paper examines the appeal to memory in Donald MacLeod's Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland, a text written to understand social and geographical change in the nineteenth‐century Scottish Highlands and, in revised form, to counter the alternative views expressed in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Sunny Memories. In discussing MacLeod's use of memory in Highland history and with reference to examples of memory's use in texts and other representations, the paper contributes to debates on how memory ‘works’ in geography and in history.     

‘Why can't I get married?’—Denmark and the ‘Twenty-four year law’

Jackson (2000) proposes a 'rematerialization' of social and cultural geography. He argues for the grounding of geographical analysis in the concrete world of actual physical objects. Examining the work of Jackson (2000) and Miller (1987, 1998) this paper interrogates this return to the physical. In particular, this paper argues that current articulations of physicality rely on a universal metaphysics of matter--positing matter as a universally undifferentiated conditionality. This reliance is problematic in that it signifies an essentialist dichotomy between the objective (the material) and the subjective (the textual). Also this dichotomy necessitates a linear dialectics of matter subjugating the material to the determinative action of form. In subjecting Jackson's notion of rematerialization to a critical philosophical reading, the aim is to disturb the unquestioned metaphysical implications of this return. Indeed it is to suggest that a rematerialization of social and cultural geography must account for the wayward expressiveness of matter--its representative and active capacities outside its relation with the subject.     

How Christianity Won the World

ABSTRACT

This article traces the ideology that allowed Christian civilization to conquer the world. It opens with a view of biblical “national” foundation myths, the Exodus and the Babylonian Exile, and shows how this ideology also allowed for ethnic cleansing, if not genocide, and how those played a dominant role in the mind of western Christians who simply adopted the biblical attitude to foreign nations as their own. A changing perspective including a not so historically dominated reading of the Bible may put an end to the western idea of a God given right to oppress all the nations of the world.     

Geographers Performing Nationalism and Hetero-masculinity

Our article builds upon the insights of recent critical geographic inquiry that has examined the involvement of geography in a multitude of power relations, and in particular the processes of European imperialism and colonisation. The focus of this article, however, is the involvement of the discipline of geography in the constitution and maintenance of a hetero-masculine nationalist discourse. We focus our analysis on articles published in the New Zealand Geographer, but suggest that such hetero-masculine nationalist discourse exists also in the works of geographers writing about other nation-spaces. Our purpose is to draw geographers' attention to the constitutive effects of banal practices in geographic scholarship. We draw upon Michael Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’ to argue that the articulation of nationalist narratives is an endemic feature of the contemporary nation/state, and one that forms a particular discursive order that situates author, text and reader in an assumed national and hetero-masculine landscape.     

Scottish national identities among inter-war migrants in North America and Australasia

Interpretations of Scottish identities have for too long been immersed in an inward-looking or domestic perspective. Where constructions of migrant identities exist they too have been influenced by developments about identity within Scotland, specifically a focus on Highlandism, by a disproportionate concentration on the Scots in Canada, and by exclusion of the twentieth-century migrant experience. This article examines the personal testimonies of Scots in several destinations and argues that they manifested a striking range of external and internal manifestations of their national identities. Unlike Irish migrants, however, whose cultural institutions served a dual purpose, allowing their identities to be proclaimed and engaging in active pursuit of political objectives, the major construction of Scottishness was internalised. Furthermore, visible expressions of Scottish identities did not generate disapproval from the public at large that the assertion of Irish identities occasionally excited. Despite its relative invisibility this sense of being Scottish was powerful and dynamic and shows a Scottish world coexisting within a British one.     

The ‘She-Land,’ social consequences of the sexualized construction of landscape in North Patagonia

This article voices a perspective founded in gender geography and regional history, through the study of the symbolic constitution of core and peripheral areas inside Chile and Argentina. This analysis focuses upon the Patagonian territory and aims to reveal the use of female stereotyped metaphors as the basis for territorial subalternity. At this point, revision of Patagonian history shows that this construction of landscape is related to territorial integration, and could have been seen as gender ideology because of the metaphors involved in the State's arguments. This idea is illustrated with an ongoing nationalist discourse established in Patagonia since the 1930s, which operates as a permanent patriarchal reference and allows the projection of gender metaphors in land. It also takes the particular experience of Patagonian women to question the recognition of the problem behind the construction of landscape and the geographical and historical patriarchal order. As a result of this process, the possibility to argue against the subordination of the region emerges from highlighting feminine metaphors of land and feminine praxis, which nowadays confront both the landscape's official interpretation and an unequal access to resources.     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

Readers-in-conversations: a politics of reading in literary geographies

While the role of readers in literary geographies has been theoretically acknowledged, the methodological practice of engaging with multiple readers is little and far between. This gap between theory and practice has perpetuated understandings of texts as static representations and of readers as passive and homogeneous. Such problematic notions urgently need to be contested and this paper is one such attempt. Using a case study of Singapore poetry and its resistance to state-driven landscape change, I engage with twenty-one Singaporean readers through an online, asynchronous forum to demonstrate the challenging but rich process of studying reader reception. In doing so, I show how the dynamic co-enactment of responses by multiple readers-in-conversations leads to both complementarities and clashes. This not only reveals a more nuanced understanding of the author–text–reader(s) interactions, but also points to an inevitable politics of reading present in the study of all textual representations.     

When things were ‘closing-in’ and ‘rolling up’: the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s Anglo-Irish war novel The Last September

This paper examines the imaginative geography of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel The Last September. Drawing on Said’s analysis of imaginative geographies as registers of territorial identity, I consider the ways in which Bowen’s text maps Anglo-Irish territorial identity in early twentieth-century Ireland. Reading the text as an authoritative, albeit subjective, record of Anglo-Irish experience in Ireland, I identify four interconnected spaces which constitute the imaginative geography of the novel: the open, empty and isolated country; a wider landscape of resistance and control; a distant but necessary England; and an historical landscape of colonial decline. In conclusion, I outline how the concept of imaginative geographies provides a useful lens through which the often fragmented and conflicted nature of territorial identities, both during and after the colonial period, can be explored.     

How are non-geography majors motivated in a large introductory world geography course?

University students who do not declare geography as their major are at risk of poor motivation to learn in an introductory geography class. However, research exploring the role of non-majors' motivation is lacking. This study examines motivational factors impacting non-geography students' engagement and performance. The findings suggest that non-geography majors demonstrate deep engagement when they focus on mastering the content and value geography. Also, when students feel confident of learning geography, they are more likely to demonstrate a high level of achievement. The paper concludes with practical suggestions for enhancing non-geography students' motivation and engagement in an introductory geography class.