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with the new imperial history – whether there is and should be such a thing as ‘the new imperial geography’? 86 One of the points of consensus was that, although the spatial turn in the new imperial history had incorporated and further developed spatial concepts of networks and scale, these notions do not exhaust all the ways of conceiving space, place and imperial relations. Laura Benton’s recent A
The book shows how people have come to approach the writing of imperial histories in the early twenty-first century. It explores the social and political contexts that informed the genesis and development of the Studies in Imperialism series, and the conceptual links it has sought to forge between empire and metropolitan culture. The book provides an insightful account of John MacKenzie's 'Orientalism': the problems of 'power' and 'agency'. The 'MacKenziean moment' needs to be read historically, as a product of the 'delayed arrival of decolonising sensibilities', where contemporary popular phenomena and new types of scholarship integrated Britain and its empire. Sexuality made early appearances in the Series through the publication of 'Empire and Sexuality'. MacKenzie's 'Empire of Nature', 'Imperialism and the Natural World', and 'Museums and Empire' convey the impact of his scholarship in the themes of exploration, environment and empire. The historical geographies of British colonialism have enjoyed a prominent place in the Series, and the book explores the ways in which different 'spatial imaginations' have been made possible. Discussions on colonial policing during the depression years, and on immigrant welfare during and after decolonisation, take their cue from MacKenzie's European Empires and the People. The later nineteenth century witnessed the interaction of many diasporas, which in turn produced new modes of communication. By dealing with the idea of the 'Third British Empire' and the role of the Indian press during and after the British Raj, the book repositions British imperial histories within a broader set of global transformations.
of historical and other familiar spatial concepts in order to explain and express the as yet little understood nature and structure of cyberspace, as they conceive it. Adopting the same method but choosing a quite different model, it was proposed that if there are any appropriate existing topological concepts that might accurately describe the experience of cyberspace, they might be 260 EXSELF.indb 260 The extended self 30/07/2014 13:39:54 found in the Japanese concept of movement space, rather than in the static baroque models favored by Mitchell. More
relation to different definitions of ‘the margins’, a spatial concept which has had much currency but which might increasingly be questioned on theoretical, geographical and political grounds. Among other things, we are interested in the geographical edges of the cluster of islands in which we live, the terrain historically described as the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland’. To use ‘margins’ in this context suggests a spatial and definitional grouping of ‘nations’, organised around a putative English ‘core’ often operating
Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.
expressing new spatial concepts. But his work is no more radical than this.34 There was, in Ginzburg’s opinion, a radical modernist problem which “no one [apart from the author] had yet tried to solve in the country.”35 His focus was no longer on colour-light-spatial (tsvetosvetoprostranstvennye) Golden calf, golden tooth 169 problems. The radically modern architectural turn was the exploration of texture, the problem of “visually tactile perception,” the problem of touch, which “by extension corresponded to conditional reflexes and also visual perception.”36 For
questions in a transatlantic context (Scott-Smith, Leendertz, Chamedes, Jarausch). Others offer alternative ways to relate the transatlantic to a wider setting (Bailyn, Canny, Morgan, Maier), either by using the methodology developed along transatlantic examples for other contexts or by positing transatlantic relations as a stepping-stone to broaden the view. The contributions of this volume also invite us to rethink spatial concepts and their geopolitical and ideological underpinnings which result in the framing of specific areas. (Trans
British poets without on the whole being a literal model. One can see equivalents of Olson’s ‘spatialized concept of language’45 in Fisher, MacSweeney and O’Sullivan. Naturally, any voice influenced by another retains or develops its own particular characteristics. But it is striking how, for those indebted to the theory of projective verse, Olson’s curiosity, habits of research and mixed stock of information spawn something closer to the English lyric tradition. In other words the open field is mediated through forms to which it was originally opposed, and this often
spatial concepts, not equivalent to each other. In other words, to be European within this view does not necessarily mean being an EU Member State, a candidate or an associated country. Within this approach, ‘Europeanness’ plays the role of a certain marker of Belarusian identity, as it emphasises a Belarus-centric self-perception and the perception of their neighbours. This self-perception has a clearly defined cultural and social dimension and thus Belarusian authorities further underline that ‘the peculiarity of the Belarusian culture is in its Europeanness, and
. This painful contrast – according to Maurer – rendered the Icelanders more acutely aware of their former glory and nourished a collective attachment to the past which was stronger there than in other countries. 5 In her studies on the ‘Icelandic world’, the Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup has labelled the peculiar image of the Viking and medieval past as cherished by modern Icelanders uchronia (‘no-time’), which should be understood as the temporal equivalent of the spatial concept of utopia: an idealisation of the national narrative, essentially detached