D. W. Meinig and The Shaping of America

Published over eighteen years, between 1986 and 2004, in four volumes and well over 2000 pages, Donald Meinig's The Shaping of America quartet is one of modern geography's most substantial achievements. It warrants and repays careful attention. This essay seeks first to situate or contextualize The Shaping project by attending to the development of Meinig's ideas and scholarship before 1986. It argues that the approaches and emphases of Meinig's magnum opus were substantially but not entirely adumbrated by his earlier work and that the four volumes reflect something of the intellectual contexts in which Meinig developed his ideas about historical geography and the discipline more generally, as well as of Meinig's own particular interests and circumstances. The second section of this essay turns attention to the four volumes and offers some assessment of their contribution to, and significance for, geography, historical geography, and the study of American and Atlantic history.     

Absurd Avatars,Transcultural Relations: Elia Suleiman,Franco-Palestinian Filmmaking and Beyond

This article illuminates the threads of connection drawing together the work of the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman and French cultural production, while acknowledging the broader international contexts of these connections. The transcultural relations identified in the article title are a means of articulating these concerns. Suleiman's films, funded by French production companies and supported by French film festivals, have a tacit connection to France. Suleiman's mute self-representation within his films also draws upon auteurist and absurdist tropes familiar to European literature and art in the twentieth century. First discussing the broader cultural and geopolitical contexts of Franco-Palestinian filmmaking, the article then engages closely with critical tropes of the Absurd and human gesture in relation both to the critical reception of Suleiman's films, and the films' aesthetics, specifically in his recent feature films Divine Intervention (2002) and Le Temps qu'il reste/The Time that Remains (2009). Offering an alternative articulation of these complex transcultural relationships, the article explores Suleiman's position as a mute filmic figure and auteur director. It re-opens an often ‘unspoken’ dialogue of Franco-Palestinian cinematic relations which has been frequently designated as historical or political, rather than also and in equal measure, cultural, aesthetic, ethical and personal. At the same time, it seeks to open out these dialogues beyond France and Palestine, towards transcultural relations between Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and North America.