Cultural Geography: By Whom, For Whom?

Abstract

THE RISE (AND RISE?) OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY The turn, coupled by spatial turn in recent years has drawn significant attention to cultural geography from those in subdisciplines and disciplines. One might forgive those who sometimes mistake particular research as cultural geography which is in fact conducted by non-geographers or geographers who would not ordinarily identify themselves as cultural geographers. A pointed moment that illustrated this to me was when a sociology colleague insisted that he had read cultural geography, and when asked, indicated that he had read Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin. One interpretation of this is, as Shurmer-Smith (1996) offered through her title of a collection of postgraduate papers, that cultural geography is over place. Another more positive interpretation is that important questions and perspectives of cultural geography have become appropriately influential across geography and disciplines. My reading of multiple cultural geographies that have mushroomed over last decade prompts me to sort out specific priorities that I believe deserve fuller attention and identify particular discomforts over developments. By no means are all these priorities and concerns unique. However, emphasis I place on these particular issues does reflect my positionality, a Chinese Singaporean educated in Singapore and Britain, teaching now in a Singapore university that aspires to compete in first league, and appointed to role of an academic administrator overseeing educational matters in my university. DECENTERING ANGLO-AMERICAN CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES So much of contemporary cultural geography is written from and about Anglo-America, and to a smaller extent, Australia and Canada. While Sauerian tradition emphasized fieldwork in antiquarian and rural settings, and took cultural geographers to places such as Latin and Middle America, this tradition has shifted over years such that a certain Anglo-American dominance is now evident. Whereas much of cultural geography tended to be atheoretical, much of current theorizing occurs as a consequence of Anglo-American empirical observations. These western ideas are subsequently imported into contexts, with empirical studies often constituting another case study illustrating theoretical logics established in western settings. Reflecting on this, I would urge three priorities, all of which may be traced to my own positionality. The first priority is to encourage a more diverse geography, including an interrogation of cultural geographies of Asia which would yield helpful and potentially divergent theoretical insights from those developed in west while acknowledging that space called Asia is far from monolithic. The decentering that cultural geographers have argued for through recognition of other (in race, gender, class) deserves to take place in practice of our own discipline so that we decenter Anglo-American theoretical ideas. My second priority is an acknowledgment of value of in-betweeness in raising political and epistemological questions. My own location Anglo-American social and cultural geographies (given my own education in Britain) and the region (given my current location and given that I have spent much of my life in Singapore) has informed my perspectives, and I strongly encourage that we allow our in-between positionality to inform our work. Third, while writing cultural geographies of Asia or elsewhere outside Anglo-American world, and while acknowledging in-betweeness of locations (hence perspectives), I am concerned that we are, more often than not, writing back to (Anglo-American) center. My third priority would be to extend our subdisciplinary debates to new audiences, using vernacular languages for publication, thus engaging academic/linguistic communities and opening up opportunities for potential voices to enter dialogues (see Bunnell, Kong and Law, forthcoming). …