Ned Kelly Died for our Sins

From time to time scholars have posed the question: why have Australian Aborigines not developed cargo cults with the same intensity and flamboyance as their Melanesian neighbours? This discussion evades the implications that Aborigines may have been negligent in their cultural production of responses to colonisation, and seeks to engage with some of the responses some Aboriginal people actually have made to colonisation. Focussing on stories of Ned Kelly, and contrasting them with stories of Captain Cook, the suggestion here is that Aboriginal people's search for a moral European communicates the challenging and provocative possibility that coloniser and colonised can share a moral history and thus can fashion a just society.     

Book reviews

Nationalisms and Sexualities. A. Parker, M. Russo, D. Sommer & P. Yaeger (Eds), 1992. New York, Routledge. 384 pp., £40.00 hardback, £12.99 paperback. ISBN 0–415–90432–3 hardback, 0–415–90433–1 paperback.

Sexuality and Space. B. Colomina (Ed.), 1992. New York, Princeton Papers on Architecture, Princeton University School of Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press. 389 pp., $14.95 paperback. ISBN 1–878271–08–3.

Racialized Boundaries: race, nation, gender, colour and class and the anti‐racist struggle. F. Anthias & N. Yuval‐Davis, 1992. London, Routledge. 226 pp., £40.00 hardback. ISBN 0–415–01813–7.

Refusing Holy Orders: women and fundamentalism in Britain. G. Sahgal & N. Yuval‐Davis (Eds), 1992. London, Virago. 244 pp., £8.99 paperback. ISBN 1–85381–219–6.

Different Places, Different Voices: gender and development in Africa, Asia and Latin America. J. H. Momsen & V. Kinnaird (Eds), 1993. London, Routledge. 322 pp., £40.00 hardback, £12.99 paperback. ISBN 0–415–07538–6 hardback, 0–415–07563–7 paperback.

Gender, Development and Identity: an Ethiopian study. H. Pankhurst, 1992. London, Zed Books. 216 pp., £29.95/549.95 hardback, £12.95/$19.95 paperback. ISBN 1–85649–157–9 hardback, 1–85649–158–7 paperback.

‘Viva’: women and popular protest in Latin America. S.R. Radcliffe & S. Westwood (Eds), 1993. London, Routledge. 270 pp., £40.00 hardback, £12.99 paperback. ISBN 0–415–07312‐X hardback, 0–415–07313–8 paperback.

Seeking Common Ground: multidisciplinary studies of immigrant women in the United States. D. Gabaccia (Ed.), 1992. Westport, CT, Praeger. 272 pp., $55 hardback, $17.95 paperback. ISBN 0–313–27483–5 hardback, 0–275–94387–9 paperback.

The Women Outside: meanings and myths of homelessness. S. Golden, 1992. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press. 319 pp., $25.00 hardback. ISBN 0–520–07158–1.

The Transformation of Intimacy: sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. A. Giddens, 1992. Cambridge, Polity Press. 212 pp., £19.50 hardback. ISBN 0–7456–1012–9.

Situating the Self: gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics. S. Benhabib, 1992. Cambridge, Polity Press. 266 pp., £45.00 hardback, £11.98 paperback. ISBN 0–7456–0998–8 hardback, 0–7456–1059–5 paperback.

Made from this Earth: American women and nature. Vera Norwood, 1993. Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press. 368 pp., $37.50 hardback, $17.95 paperback. ISBN 0–8070–2062–8 hardback.     

Can a preservationist ideology halt the process of creative destruction? Evidence from Salt Spring Island,British Columbia

For more than 50 years, rural municipalities across the developed world have struggled to redefine themselves in the face of declining primary sector employment. In some places, this struggle has led to the creation of landscapes that provide heritage‐seekers with tangible commodities and intangible experiences reflecting a by‐gone past. Recent research suggests that these post‐productivist heritage‐scapes may evolve into leisure‐scapes of mass consumption, if profit or economic growth are the key motives underlying development ( Mitchell and Vanderwerf 2010 ). This article questions whether a dominant ideology of preservation can prevent this scenario. We studied Salt Spring Island, British Columbia: (i) to determine if the island displays the characteristics of a heritage‐scape, (ii) to discover if a preservationist ideology has contributed to its current state, and (iii) to ponder if this state can be maintained, in light of recent regional and provincial discourse. Our analysis reveals that the creation, and maintenance, of this heritage‐scape has been guided largely by public discourse underlain by a preservationist ideology. This prolonged state, however, may be drawing to an end. Recent provincial directives to double tourist revenues suggest that local (and regional) discourse soon may be overshadowed by the province's mandate to promote economic growth. The response of local stakeholders will ultimately dictate the Island's ability to maintain its present state as a post‐productivist heritage‐scape.     

Leonor of England,Plantagenet queen of King Alfonso VIII of Castile,and her foundation of the Cistercian abbey of Las Huelgas. In imitation of Fontevraud?

In 1187 Alfonso VIII of Castile and his queen, Leonor of England, founded a Cistercian nunnery, Santa Maria Regalis de Las Huelgas, on the outskirts of Burgos. Despite the clear allegiance of the foundation to the Cistercians from the outset, the idea that the abbey was inspired by and even modelled on the nunnery of Fontevraud in Anjou is an encroaching commonplace in accounts of medieval Spanish history and art history around 1200. This study re-evaluates the arguments for that perception and puts forward a different reading of the early years of Las Huelgas, not as a foreign importation but as a peculiarly Iberian, even Castilian, institution.     

Living through,living with and living on from breast cancer in the UK: creative cathartic methodologies,cancerous spaces and a politics of compassion

This paper contributes to a growing literature exploring the embodied emotions involved in death studies. It does so through a creative cathartic autobiographical account of living through and on from breast cancer. In presenting this ‘storifying experience’, this UK-based paper has three key aims: first, it attempts to counter the disjuncture between the fleshy and emotional cancer journey I have travelled through and the sometimes abstract, disembodied accounts of cancer circulating in some geographical texts; second, it reveals some geographical insights that are uncovered through the use of creative cathartic methodologies which unsettle commonly held discourses about dying and surviving; and third, it poses some troubling questions for geographers working in this field with respect to the methodologies, politics and emotions of such research. In the paper, I argue that employing a creative cathartic methodology gestures towards ‘an opening into learning’ that provokes emotional enquiries about what it means to be taught by the experience of (traumatised) others. In particular, I advocate for a politicised compassion that both cares for those who are living through, with or living on from life-threatening illnesses and also cares about the complex conditions that shape their experiences, both within and beyond the academy.     

Multiplying Labour,Multiplying Resistance: Class Composition in Buenos Aires’ Clandestine Textile Workshops

Buenos Aires’ talleres clandestinos (clandestine textile workshops) are powerful sites of accumulation and resistance; a complex and communitarian migrant economy. The economy’s complexity is, however, masked by its spatiality, clandestinity, and the promotion of culturalist analyses that ignore intra-collective class differentials. This paper considers the “autonomy of migration” approach through the lens of “class composition” to explore the talleres’ contours. Witnessed in the talleres is a clear “multiplication of labour”, yet approaching this multiplication compositionally highlights the multiple examples of resistance and refusal immanent to the workshop economy. But this dialectic of control and resistance transcends the workplace, with the talleres one node in a wider, socially reproductive borderscape. By developing a framework that neither condemns nor celebrates economic structures like the talleres, but instead unpacks their antagonistic nature, the paper highlights the benefits of (a) analysing the autonomy of migration approach compositionally, and (b) further geographical engagement with autonomist thinking.