Cultural Geography in a New Millennium: Translation, Borders, and Resistance

Abstract

In a period in which movements of people, ideas, and technology have come under growing and intensified scrutiny it seems particularly important to reflect on the possibilities and challenges for understanding mobility in cultural geography. Increasingly, a key component of the subdiscipline has been the exploration of the ways in which place and identity are embedded in a range of cultural landscapes, and the ways in which those social and material landscapes have reflected and influenced various experiences and notions of movement. Of course, mobility and travel are intricately interwoven with a range of other identities and relations, such as race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and physical ability. To understand the ways in which these relations mediate and produce space it is necessary to interrogate places and moments that compete, reinforce, and resist dominant notions of place (and who should be able to move). As cultural geographers, this interrogation offers an opportunity to understand the practices and uses of boundary making and how these are interwoven with issues such as cultural diversity and social justice. While this is a very general suggestion for what direction cultural geography may take in the near future, and which to some extent has already yielded provocative and insightful research, I will now briefly turn to some specific journeys that pose further challenges along the way to a (hopefully) more inclusive subdiscipline. 1) SPEAKING: CLAIMING SPACE When we dare to speak in a liberatory voice, we threaten even those who may initially claim to want our words ... our words connect us with anyone, anywhere who lives in silence (hooks 1989, 18). Conversations move. They produce (and are part of) spaces, and they propel and stifle emotive understandings of place. As such, and linking into hooks' statement above, speech and conversation pose significant practices and mediums through which we can negotiate cultural landscapes. Given the growing number of studies exploring the linkages between space and representation I would also suggest that in order to interrogate and depict cultural geographies in more diverse ways it is worthwhile paying attention to the ways in which we integrate and prioritize varied ways of speaking and the different voices that become part of disciplinary dialogues. By this, I mean, how do we--as geographers, oral historians, neighborhood residents, storytellers, photographers, and audiences--select specific places for study, actively look for difference, or re-present landscapes as another kind of exotic locale in which we engage with other voices, but in ways that perhaps make everyday banalities seem exotic for academic eyes? How do we make new cultural geographies, new connections, in a politically progressive manner? Are we creating dialogues when we incorporate new voices into our studies, or are we simply making a statement? These questions require complicated answers and demand the interweaving of research and praxis, i.e., they necessitate the self-reflexive positioning of cultural geography research within specific political contexts. 2) GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSLATION: JOURNEYS THROUGH COLLABORATION Recently, I have been reflecting on the ways in which we teach about difference and cultural geography, particularly in a postcolonial context. …