Geographical Literature Research Articles

Is national border weakening in technology space? Analysis of inter-urban hierarchy with Chinese patent licensing data

The literature on the diffusion of innovation from the 1970s has found that a domestic inter-urban hierarchy was the most common conduit for the innovation diffusion. Has this hierarchy become obsolete in today’s globalized economy? As less-developed cities within a developing country absorb technological innovation directly from overseas, is the nationality of cities becoming less important? Contemporary economic geography literature tends to answer these questions in the affirmative. This study challenges that resounding yes. Through our analysis of Chinese patent licensing data, we find evidence not only for the survival but also for the reinforcement of the domestic inter-urban hierarchy. While it is true that the number of cities licensing patents to import technology from overseas has been increasing, it is being outmatched by the domestic patent licensing from the top-tier cities within China. This development demonstrates that the role of the nation as a spatial unit of knowledge production and application has remained constant throughout, even as the technological level of its cities has improved under the increasing globalization of the national economy.

Geopoetics of Belozerye in Book ‘Journey to Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery’ by S. P. Shevyrev

The article analyzes S. P. Shevyrev’s book ‘Journey to Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery’ and focuses on the geopoetics of the Belozerye region. The novelty of the study lies in its use of geopoetic paradigm as a tool for analysis and its examination of a relatively understudied work. The relevance of the study is due to the growing interest in literary geography. The article presents an exploration of the spatial and sacred imagery of Belozerye as a local text of Russian North. It argues that Shevyrev’s geopoetic image of Belozerye is characterized by two distinctive features: ‘frontier’ and ‘sacredness’. The former highlights the region as a cultural and territorial ‘frontier’ of Russia, while the latter portrays it as a spiritual center, the ‘heart’ of Russian spiritual and religious culture. The authors of the study emphasize that this antinomic pair constitutes a characteristic feature of Belozerye as a local text of Russian culture. The article also examines the poetics of geographical (landscape) and sacred (monastery, church) objects in Shevyrev’s book, emphasizing how the discovery of the value-laden content of geocultural imagery contributes to the formation of artistic generalization.

Introduction to the Forum: Revisiting Torsten Hägerstrand's Diorama, Path and Project

AbstractIn this TESG Forum, we revisit Torsten Hägerstrand's 1982 Diorama, Path and Project, a paper that significantly expanded Hägerstrand's time‐geographical conceptual vocabulary in the international geographical literature. The paper was the crystallization of a process where Hägerstrand tried to bridge regional science ideas with humanistic ones. The ‘diorama’ was introduced to discuss how imaginations emerge from the togetherness of objects and memories in localized space and initially formulated to help geography overcome the disciplinary fragmentation and paradigmatic rows that had splintered geography in the 1970s. ‘Path’ is Hägerstrand's well‐known concept describing people's spatial pattern of activities. Finally, the concept of ‘project’ tried to capture a broader conception of agency that was able to accommodate people's paths as the result of goal‐intended and value‐inspired actions. In this introductory essay, we contextualize the paper in the development of Hägerstrand's work and introduce the separate contributions to the Forum.

Interdisciplinary research in hazards and disaster risk

This Progress Report reviews the geographical literature concerning environmental hazards and risk focussing particularly on areas that require and enhance interdisciplinary working between human and physical geographers. Although there are still substantial gaps between disciplinary siloes, there is a growing recognition that critical interdisciplinary work is vital. Key areas include early warning, urban planning, hazard and risk mapping, scientific advisory processes, risk communication and institutional geographies. We review some of this work, examine emerging theory and consider the opportunities for greater knowledge exchange between disciplines using critical physical geography and cognate approaches.

The Cuerpo-Territorio of Displacement: A Decolonial Feminist Geopolitics of Re-Existencia

ABSTRACT In this article we examine the root causes and consequences of forced displacement in Guerrero, Mexico. Drawing upon Latin American and Caribbean decolonial feminist thought, we use ‘cuerpo-territorio’ (body-territory) as a lens for understanding multiscalar violence in the region. This centres the experiences of women and children, key figures both in the (re)production of embodied, communal, and territorial ties and in the phenomenon of forced displacement. Their testimonials complicate understandings of internal migration in Mexico and asylum-seeking in the US, disrupting typical re/victimising narratives while acknowledging the interconnected, intimate-global violences these women and youth often face. In connection with ‘cuerpo-territorio’, we incorporate the decolonial concept of ‘re-existencia’ (re-existence) to show how those suffering displacement actively transform possibilities for being-in-the-world. In conversation with feminist geographic work on oppositional resistance, resilience, and re-working, we explain ‘re-existencia’ as solidarity practices that move beyond mere survival. Instead, these practices draw on longstanding indigenous ways of being to infuse new life into territories dispossessed through violence. This article aims to deepen dialogue with feminist geographic literatures outside of the Anglo-centric canon, and calls for greater attention to Latin American and Caribbean decolonial epistemologies in analyses of displacement in the Americas.

Unpacking the competitive relations among Chinese business actors in Africa

ABSTRACT Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in Africa has attracted much discussion on the competitive relations between Chinese companies and their foreign or local counterparts. There is however limited research examining the increasingly competitive relationships among Chinese business actors themselves and the complex implications of their activities for African economic development. Existing studies often either treat Chinese actors as a homogeneous entity pursuing a collective, state-directed agenda or emphasize the collaborative networks among Chinese business groups during their transnational entrepreneurial expansion. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the nature and consequences of intra-Chinese competition in Africa. It draws upon a critical reading of multidisciplinary literature in international businesses, management studies and economic geography, an extensive review of empirical cases across Africa, as well as field research in Ethiopia and Nigeria. Findings shed light on the competitive interests, logics, and strategies of Chinese overseas actors in construction, telecommunications, manufacturing, and retail sectors, and identify the challenges associated with managing intra-Chinese competition and fostering positive economic impacts in Africa.

ПРИРОДНИЙ ТА КУЛЬТУРНИЙ ЛАНДШАФТИ В КРИМСЬКОМУ ДОРОБКУ МИКОЛИ ЧЕРНЯВСЬКОГО

The article deals with the studying spatiality and the system of national spaces in Ukrainian literature. It focuses on the work of Mykola Chernyavsky, a representative of Ukrainian literary modernism, a victim of Stalinist totalitarianism. The main attention is paid to the understanding of the writer’s work, which was the result of his trip to the Crimea in the summer of 1927 for the sanatorium treatment. This trip is interpreted as an example of a modernistic pilgrimage, with its attraction to the discovery of a new space, which becomes a lever of self-discovery, and a means of self-identification. The non-fiction text of Mykola Chernyavsky, which was preserved in his diary entries, is analyzed for the first time. It is proven that the writer’s notebook became the protext of the author’s further artistic searches in poetry and prose. The Crimean routes of the author recorded in his documentary records, are traced. The main artistic toposes can be devided into three groups topos: natural (sea, mountains, vegetation), social (populations, sanatoriums), ethno-cultural. Despite the dominant imperial discourse in Crimea, which was preserved in the post-revolutionary period, the author discovers the world of the Crimean Tatars, finds areas of popularity of Ukrainian culture, reflects on its achievements and prospects on the Crimean Peninsula. The poetic cycle “Crimea” (1927-1928) by Mykola Chernyavsky testifies to the originality of the author’s artistic visions, his intensive use of toponyms, with the help of which he expresses the uniqueness of the Crimean space. In the novel “Under the Black Flag” (1928), the writer introduces the inner text – short story “Iphigenia in Taurida”, which becomes an artistic version of the writer’s diary, resorting to gender inversion: the female protagonist acts as an observer in it. The conclusions emphasize the cartographic originality of the writer’s Crimean work, the sacralization of the region's landscape, its utopian aura, which can cause catharsis in pilgrims. Arguments are given that Mykola Chernyavsky’s work is a worthy contribution to the literary geography of the modernist era, in particular, the richness of the author's marinist images is emphasized.

The impact of institutional interactions on cluster response to innovation: The case of Montreal and neural machine translation

AbstractDespite the importance of institutions in the cluster literature, scholarship has struggled with its conceptualization of institutions, resulting in an incomplete portrait of diverse phenomena. In response, we crystallize a hybrid stream of institutionalism that has emerged in the economic geography literature and propose the construct of institutional interactions to provide structural and relational insight into cluster‐wide resistance to innovation. By pairing network analysis with a genealogical study of the Montreal translation cluster, we isolate the impact of institutional interactions and find preliminary support for the redundancies created by institutional brokers and institutional network characteristics. We demonstrate how to use the construct of institutional interactions to diagnose constraints to innovation in an institutional environment.

Media tourism through atmospheric practice

• Media tourism is extended into the realm of atmospheric practice. • Media tourism encompasses literary geography's spatial hinge theory. • Media tourism can occur unexpectedly, in places unrelated to texts. • Texts are intersubjective, they possess atmospheric presence and agency. • Atmospheric practice involves walking with a relaxed, attuned consciousness.

Displacement beyond dislocation: Aversive racism in gentrification studies

In this article, we argue for a critical gentrification studies that includes a more expansive and nuanced understanding of how displacement works, beyond the mapping and counting of dislocated bodies. As part of our argument, we introduce the concept of aversive racism to the geographical literature on displacement, pointing to this insidious mode of spatial practice that we argue is widely constitutive of place-making and place-taking processes in gentrifying areas. We do this by first providing a review and analysis of how displacement has been conceptualized and measured in existing geographical scholarship on gentrification, followed by a critical examination of the gentrification literature's engagement with race and racism, and a final argument for an affective approach within a Black geographies framing that encourages more analyses based on experiential encounters with more-than-physical displacement-by-gentrification.

Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography After the Rubber Boom by Amanda M. Smith

Reviewed by: Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography After the Rubber Boom by Amanda M. Smith Charlotte Rogers KEYWORDS Amazonia, Cartography, Maps, Environmental Humanities, Literature, Literary Criticism, Latin America amanda m. smith. Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography After the Rubber Boom. Liverpool UP, 2021, 248 pp. The drama of getting lost in the jungle has long been a driving force of fiction about the South American wilderness. While "losing oneself" is often glossed as a psychological and even existential crisis in literary studies, Amanda M. Smith's Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography After the Rubber Boom approaches the phenomenon from a more prosaically literal yet equally enriching perspective. Mapping the Amazon examines five canonical novels set in the tropical forests of South America by José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, and Márcio Souza. Smith proposes that each author creates a literary geography that signals the insufficiency of traditional cartography to represent Amazonia while simultaneously presenting an imagined landscape that has real consequences for the region's ecologies, peoples, and cultures. This important contribution to Amazonian literary studies deftly builds a theoretical bridge between geocriticism and the environmental humanities. Smith incisively identifies a tension central to her corpus of texts, namely the gulf between what Gallegos called the "geografía muerta" of cartography and the [End Page 115] "geografía viva" of the forest (68). One episode from Rivera's La vorágine perfectly crystallizes this dichotomy: the coyly named character Clemente Silva gets lost attempting to navigate the forest according to existing maps of Amazonia, only to later save himself through an attentiveness to the Canaguche palm, whose orientation indicates the direction of the sun. Smith neatly traces the cartographic impulse to the extractive industries that have cyclically ravaged the region, while conversely illustrating how Silva's successful multispecies wayfinding draws on Indigenous lore. This contrast informs the entire volume, as Smith guides her reader through the ways in which each author grapples with the histories of extractivism and its effects on Indigenous cultures, at times denouncing industrial depredations and at others unexpectedly reinforcing them. Smith's lively syntheses of geocriticism and discourses of extractivism in the introduction will be highly useful to budding scholars—in fact, I have already passed Mapping the Amazon along to several of my PhD students at the University of Virginia. The book sidesteps the broader history of mapping the Amazon in previous centuries to make room for a deep dive into the rubber boom and its afterlives, including impressive archival research and fieldwork undertaken in Colombia and Peru. Smith's definition of extractivism begins with a tight focus on rubber and other physical materials in Gallegos and Rivera, and it expands over the course of the volume to include literary and spiritual extractivism in the works of Vargas Llosa, Calvo, and Souza. Chapter 1, "Reading Maps with La vorágine," interprets the demise of Rivera's famous protagonist Arturo Cova as a cautionary tale of the perils of "cartographic delusion," which Smith defines as "the blind overreliance on maps that are necessarily incomplete," in contrast to Clemente Silva's ability to survive by respecting Indigenous and more-than-human perspectives (44). The twin highlights of chapter 2 are Smith's insights on how debates about education in Venezuela inform Gallegos's Canaima and her pathbreaking reading of the much-analyzed "Tormenta" scene as an interspecies shamanic experience for the main character, Marcos Vargas. Smith's discussion of the Canaima National Park in Venezuela puts her in a fruitful dialogue with the work of Victoria Saramago while also featuring the unjust repercussions of "writing over Carib meanings" in the literary canon and South American societies today. Chapter 3 accuses Mario Vargas Llosa of "openly flaunt[ing] his instrumentalization of Amazonian cultural geography to write and sell books" (102). In line with many leftist diatribes against the Peruvian Nobel laureate, Smith excoriates Vargas Llosa for his involvement with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and his selective mapping of Amazonia in La casa verde, La historia de secreta de una novela, and other works. Chapter 4 is perhaps the most radical in the book for its study of the ayahuasca boom...

Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom by Amanda M. Smith (review)

Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom by Amanda M. Smith (review)

Vidalian traces: Genre de vie, culture and democracy

Modern geographers have tended to reimagine their discipline with very little acknowledgement of a disciplinary past. The relative absence of reference to the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache in the current geographical literature illustrates this disciplinary amnesia. In Anglophone literature, Vidal is recognized for his impact in other disciplines. In geography, his work has moved from that of a classic that is reread by succeeding generations to being part of the acknowledged but largely unread geographical canon. In part this is a consequence of the narrow interpretation that links Vidal’s legacy to the changing fortunes of Anglo-American regional geography. The recent reconsideration of Vidal’s last publication, La France de L’Est (Lorraine-Alsace), has suggested a more multidimensional Vidal. These rereadings have concentrated on political geography. However, he also engaged themes related to those found in the writings of his contemporaries, Durkheim and Dewey. Durkheim and Dewey have been common reference points in current scholarship in ways that have thus far eluded Vidal.

The marginality trap. Deconstructing the administrative framework for a reform of local governance: The case of Calabria between top‐down and bottom‐up dynamics

AbstractThe region of Calabria, already at the Union of Italy in 1861, and even more so at the institution of the Republic (1948), was among the poorest and most marginal regions not only of Italy but also of the European Union. Despite the numerous funding policies active to de‐marginalize the area at both the national and European scale [currently, mainly European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and European Social Fund (ESF); up until 1992 mostly the Extraordinary Intervention for the Mezzogiorno], there has not been a significant improvement or change in this tendency. In this paper, through a processual approach based on historical and geographical literature, I examine the position of the administrative framework of the region as a possible codetermining factor of such a condition of peripheralization, trying to assess whether and how a careful reform of it could improve the potential of current de‐marginalization policies. Ultimately, starting with the reconstruction of the numerous factors leading to Calabria's marginality, this study highlights the dynamic and relevant role of the framework in a perspective of the development and valorization of the area.

“This killing New York life”: Geographies of Illness in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep (1927)

Abstract This article examines the literary geography of Edith Wharton’s Jazz Age New York in Twilight Sleep. It considers the impact of the urban narrative upon the characters, and how this work can be understood as a spatial event. Sheila Hones describes literary geography as the interdisciplinary nexus between literary studies and geography. Building upon this definition, the author extends the interdisciplinarity of narrative spatiality toward the medical humanities. Edith Wharton’s New York is embodied, possessing its own animus like an automaton, being simultaneously alive and dead, dazzling yet breathless, killing but beautiful. There is a sickness to the city which impacts most of the major characters, either physically or mentally. Using the epigraph as a framework, this article offers an innovative consideration of the relationship between fictional place and mental state, highlighting Edith Wharton’s use of space and place in Twilight Sleep to warn of the danger New York represented to female mental health.

Définir l’Afrique par la littérature – le littéraire comme vecteur de l’africanité dans le discours des Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs (Paris, 1956 et Rome, 1959)

In our paper we show how Black writers (those of Africa and those of the Black diaspora in Europe and America) have contributed to the intellectual work centered on the idea of Africanity. We explain to what extent literature, as one of the domains of culture, reflects different visions of Africa, as formulated in the discourse of the World Congresses of Black Writers and Artists (Paris, 1956 and Rome, 1959). With reference to the official texts presented or elaborated during these events, we expose in which way literature is involved in the decolonial remapping of the geocultural place of Africa and in the remodeling of the postcolonial literary geography while pointing out the precursory or heralding character of certain postulates whose echoes will be heard during the festivals of negro and pan-African art of the 1960s and whose relevance is also confirmed nowadays.

Bottom-up cluster branding through boundary spanners: The case of the Jingdezhen ceramics cluster in China

It is increasingly recognised that for clusters to evolve and initiate new developmental paths, they need to bring in various external resources, especially external human capital. However, external talent often has imperfect knowledge regarding distant places; hence, a key challenge for clusters is to overcome this lack of knowledge and unfamiliarity to ensure that external talent becomes aware of the cluster’s local assets and the possibilities for (re)locating there. It is thus important for clusters to engage in cluster branding: that is, to promote its assets ‘outwards’ and to build-up a positive, renowned brand-name. While place branding is already an established theme in urban geography, cluster branding has hitherto been under-examined in the extant cluster literature in economic geography. Moreover, both the well-researched place-branding literature and the limited cluster-branding literature tend to be primarily concerned with official, top-down branding, initiated by government agencies. This article, instead, shows that branding can also involve organic, bottom-up processes driven by the agency of diverse individual actors, working in tandem with governmental actors. Through a case study of an arts and creative cluster, the Jingdezhen ceramics cluster in China, it unpacks how resourceful individual actors – conceptualised as boundary spanners – have become powerful agents in increasing the cluster’s legitimacy and visibility in the relevant industries through their personal networks and mobility, thereby contributing to attracting external talent into the cluster. More specifically, the study identifies three bottom-up cluster branding mechanisms, namely: convening temporary clusters locally; participating in external temporary clusters; and representing through digital media.

Using Semantic Web to Create and Explore an Index of Toponyms Cited in Medieval Geographical Works

Western thought in European history was mainly affected by the image of the world created during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The most popular reason to travel during the Middle Ages was taking a pilgrimage. Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela were the most popular destinations. It is not surprising that a lot of works written by travellers as guides for pilgrims exist. By the beginning of the Renaissance, a more precise image of the world was defined, thanks to the discovery of ancient geographical models, especially the work of Ptolemy. The Italian National Research Project (PRIN) IMAGO --- Index Medii Aevi Geographiae Operum --- (2020-2023) aims to provide a systematic overview of the medieval and renaissance Latin geographical literature using the Semantic Web technologies and the LOD paradigm. Indeed, until now, this literature has not been studied using digital methods. In particular, this article presents how we formally represented the knowledge about the toponyms, or place names, in the IMAGO ontology. To maximise the interoperability, we developed the IMAGO ontology as an extension of two reference vocabularies: the CIDOC CRM and its extension FRBRoo, including its in-progress reformulation, LRMoo. Furthermore, we used Wikidata as reference knowledge base. As case study, we chose to represent the knowledge related to the toponyms cited by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri in his Latin works. We carried out a first experiment for visualising the knowledge about these toponyms on a map and in the form of tables and CSV files.

Belonging and Unbelonging in Literary Geography: a Comparative Approach to Johann Koppelstätter’s and Arturo Manzini’s Place-based Detective Fiction

The concept of a sense of belonging to a place has long been the subject of attention in geographical studies. Scholars have consistently highlighted the ability of literary works to convey a spatial sense of belonging on the part of protagonists and authors, as well as to foreground landscape elements that may reveal the characters’ personalities. Within this framework of research, the paper calls attention to the specular concept of estrangement, or unbelonging: a literary geographical quality that characterizes certain novels. A comparative analysis is presented between two different cycles of detective novels set in the Italian alpine areas. Specific elements of the landscape, the social milieu, and the authors’ psychology that might convey such a sense of belonging are identified and categorized. The analysis shows how the relationship between the protagonists and the space in a novel can be based on a sense of estrangement that plays a role in signifying the characters’ psychology and personality. In conclusion, it is proposed to consider the absence of the sense of belonging to place as a literary quality and element of agency within an intra-textual analysis of literary geography.

The construction and enforcement of East Asia’s air defence identification zones: Grey volumes in the sky?

The declaration of China’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) over portions of the East China Sea in 2013 has often been interpreted by international relations scholars as an aggressive “land grab” in the sky. However, classical geopolitical perspectives of territory and control, despite their popularity when analyzing the politics of East Asia, fail to present a full understanding of ADIZ creation, adjustment, maintenance, and contestation. Rather than a problem created by the rise of China, conflicts over airspace are a regional phenomenon. By engaging with the critical geography literature on airspace, verticality, and space production, this paper theorizes ADIZs as the partial extension of state sovereignty via assemblages in response to the emergence of new vertical threats and opportunities. It then shows how the Cold War consensus on the function and performance of these volumes has broken down in East Asia, which has paradoxically encouraged both the expansion of ADIZs as well as their systematic violation. These “grey volumes,” which are characterized by debates over the legality, function, and performance of airspace, are explored in a case study of the ADIZs of Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan. Ultimately, these patchworks of ambiguous and overlapping airspaces are difficult to reconcile with classical geopolitics’ one-dimensional assumptions of sovereignty and territory.