Journal
of Cultural Geography
Book
Review Page
Welcome to the
book
review page for the Journal of Cultural Geography.
Displayed
below are the covers, bibliographical information, and a short synopsis
for books currently available for review.
Book reviews play a vital
role
in the exchange of ideas and advancement of knowledge within
academia.
They call attention to recently published scholarly work, identify its
significance and importance, and warn against possible
deficiencies.
Cultural geographers wishing to review one of the following books are
encouraged
to contact the book review editor identified below.
A complimentary copy of
the
book is sent to the reviewer with a contract, instructions, and
style
sheet. Reviewers are typically allotted 500 to 600 words with an
expected turn-around time of approximately three to four months.
Books
Available
For
Review:
Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity,
American Depression.
(date posted: 28 July 2008)
By Jani Scandura
Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. xix + 322 pp., US$24.95
(paperback), ISBN:
978-0-8223-3666-2
Mucking around in the messy
terrain of American trash, Jani Scandura
tells the story of the United States during the Great Depression
through evocative and photo-rich portraits of four locales: Reno, Key
West, Harlem, and Hollywood. In investigating these Depression-era
“dumps,” places that she claims contained and reclaimed the cultural,
ideological, and material refuse of modern America, Scandura introduces
the concept of “depressive modernity,” an enduring affective component
of American culture that exposes itself at those moments when the
foundational myths of America and progressive modernity—capitalism,
democracy, individualism, secularism, utopian aspiration—are thrown
into question. Depressive modernity is modernity at a standstill.
Such a modernity is not stagnant or fixed, nor immobile, but is
constituted by an instantaneous unstaging of desire, territory,
language, and memory that reveals itself in the shimmering of place.
An
interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s
detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined
photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets,
pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts
its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples
from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial
bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status as the
island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the
American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean;
post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering,
grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and
Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West’s “dump of dreams,” in which the
introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to
transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself.
A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present,
exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America.
The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough
Landscape.
(date posted: 28 July 2008)
By Harm De Blij
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xiv+280 pp., US$27.95
(hardback), ISBN:
978-0-19-536770-6
In recent years a spate of books
and articles have argued that the
world today is so mobile, so interconnected and so integrated that it
is, in one prominent assessment, flat. But as Harm de Blij contends in The Power
of Place
, geography continues to hold billions of people in an unrelenting
grip. We are all born into natural and cultural environments that shape
what we become, individually and collectively. From our "mother tongue"
to our father's faith, from medical risks to natural hazards, where we start our journey has much to
do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming the
obstacles in our way.
Incorporating a series of
revealing maps, de Blij focuses on the rough
terrain of the world's human and environmental geography. The world's
continuing partition into core and periphery, and apartheid
-like obstructions to migration from the former to the latter, help
explain why, in this age of globalization, less than 3 percent of
"mobals" live in countries other than where they were born. Maps of
language distribution suggest why English, the Latin of the latter day,
may become as hybridized as its forerunner. The fateful map of religion
casts a shadow of what he calls "endarkenment" over the future of the
planet in a time of increasingly destructive weaponry.
De Blij also looks at the
ways we are redefining place so as to make
its power even more potent than it has been, with troubling
implications for the future. Optimistic demographic projections based
on declining national populations in the global core are tempered by
the prospect that the vast majority of the 3 billion additions to the
world's population will burden the periphery. Megacities such as Lagos
and Jakarta with their corridors and nodes of globalization foreshadow
a future of potentially explosive social contrasts. Subnational
entities from southern Sudan to northern Sri Lanka seek independence at
a time when the planet's limited living space is already fragmented
into 200 states.
Looking down from the
business-class
compartment of a transcontinental airliner, the world looks a lot
flatter than it does from the doorway of a dwelling in a local village.
Harm de Blij brings us back to earth to reveal the all-too-rugged
contours of place.
A Theory of Enclaves.
(date posted: 28 July 2008)
By Evgeny Vinokurov
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007. ix+317
pp., US$80.00 (hardback), ISBN:
0-7391-2403-X
Evgeny Vinokurov is head of
the Economic Analysis Unit at the Eurasian Development Bank.
Providing a fully fledged theory of enclaves and exclaves, A Theory of
Enclaves covers a wide scope of regions and territories throughout the
world, focusing on three facets of enclaves' existence: political,
economic, and social. Rich with maps and illustrations, this book
covers 282 enclaves with a combined population of approximately 3
million, and shows the importance of enclaves because of their specific
status and the issues they raise for both the mainland and surrounding
states.
The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested
Space.
(date posted: 16 April 2008)
By William David Estrada
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. xiv+357 pp., US$24.95
(paperback), ISBN:
978-0-292-71755-8
City plazas worldwide are
centers of cultural expression and
artistic display. They are settings for everyday urban life where daily
interactions, economic exchanges, and informal conversations occur,
thereby creating a socially meaningful place at the core of a city. At
the heart of historic Los Angeles, the Plaza represents a
quintessential public space where real and imagined narratives overlap
and provide as many questions as answers about the development of the
city and what it means to be an Angeleno. The author, a social and
cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Los Angeles, is well suited to explore the complex
history and modern-day relevance of the Los Angeles Plaza. From its
indigenous and colonial origins to the present day, Estrada explores
the subject from an interdisciplinary and multiethnic perspective,
delving into the pages of local newspapers, diaries and letters, and
the personal memories of former and present Plaza residents, in order
to examine the spatial and social dimensions of the Plaza over an
extended period of time. The author contributes to the
growing
historiography of Los Angeles by providing a groundbreaking analysis of
the original core of the city that covers a long span of time, space,
and social relations. He examines the impact of change on the lives of
ordinary people in a specific place, and how this change reflects the
larger story of the city.
Women and Change at the U.S. - Mexico Border: Mobility, Labor, and
Activism. (date
posted 16 April 2008)
Edited by: Doreen J. Mattingly and Ellen R. Hansen
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008. 231 pp., US$24.95
(paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8165-2746-5
There’s no denying that the U.S.–Mexico border region has changed in
the past twenty years. With the emergence of the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the curtailment of welfare programs, and more
aggressive efforts by the United States to seal the border against
undocumented migrants, the prospect of seeking a
livelihood—particularly for women—has become more tenuous in the
twenty-first century. In the face of the ironic juxtaposition of free
trade and limited mobility, this book takes a new look at women on both
sides of the border to portray them as active participants in the
changing structures of life, often engaging in political struggles. The
contributions—including several chapters by Mexican as well as U.S.
scholars—examine environmental and socioeconomic conditions on the
border as they shape and are shaped by both daily life at the local
level and the global economy. The contributors focus on issues related
to migration, both short- and long-term; empowerment, especially
reflecting shifts in women’s consciousness in the workplace; and
political and social activism in border communities. The chapters
consider a broad range of topics, such as the changing gender
composition of the maquiladora work force over the past decade and
border women’s non-governmental organizations and political activism.
In most of the studies, both sides of the border are considered to
provide insights into differences created by an international boundary
and similarities produced by cross-border interactions. Together, these
chapters show the border region to be a dynamic social, economic,
cultural, and political context in which women face both obstacles and
opportunities for change—and make clear the vital role that women play
in shaping the border region and their own lives. This collection
builds on Susan Tiano and Vicki Ruiz’s groundbreaking volume Women on
the U.S.–Mexico Border by continuing to show the human face of changes
wrought by manufacturing and militarization. By illustrating the
current state of social science research on gender and women’s lives in
the region, it offers fresh perspectives on the material reality of
women’s daily lives in this culturally and historically rich region.
Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity.
(date posted: 16 April 2008)
By Iain Chambers
Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. i+181
pp., US$21.95 (paperback), ISBN:
978-0-8223-4150-5
The cultural theorist Iain Chambers is known for his historically
grounded, philosophically informed, and politically pointed inquiries
into issues of identity, alterity, and migration, and the challenge
postcolonial studies poses to conventional Western thought. With Mediterranean
Crossings,
he challenges insufficient prevailing characterizations of the
Mediterranean by offering a vibrant interdisciplinary and intercultural
interpretation of the region’s culture and history. The “Mediterranean”
as a concept entered the European lexicon only in the early nineteenth
century. As an object of study, it is the product of modern
geographical, political, and historical classifications. Chambers
contends that the region’s fundamentally fluid, hybrid nature has long
been obscured by the categories and strictures imposed by European
discourse and government.
In evocative and erudite prose,
Chambers renders the Mediterranean a mutable space, profoundly marked
by the linguistic, literary, culinary, musical, and intellectual
dissemination of Arab, Jewish, Turkish, and Latin cultures. He brings
to light histories of Mediterranean crossings—of people, goods,
melodies, thought—that are rarely part of orthodox understandings.
Chambers writes in a style that reflects the fluidity of the exchanges
that have formed the region; he segues between major historical events
and local daily routines, backwards and forwards in time, and from one
part of the Mediterranean to another. A sea of endlessly overlapping
cultural and historical currents, the Mediterranean exceeds the
immediate constraints of nationalism and inflexible identity. It offers
scholars an opportunity to rethink the past and present and to imagine
a future beyond the confines of Western humanistic thought.
Spaces
of Belonging: Home, Culture and Identity in 20th-Century French
Autobiography.
(date posted: 3 October 2007)
By Elizabeth H. Jones
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 316pp., $EU88,20 (paperback).
ISBN: 1871-689X
Questions of space, place and
identity have become increasingly prominent throughout the arts and
humanities in recent times. This study begins by investigating the
reasons for this growth in interest and analyses the underlying
assumptions on which interdisciplinary discussions about space are
often based. After tracing back the history of contact between
Geography and Literary Studies from both disciplinary perspectives, it
goes on to discuss recent academic work in the field and seeks to forge
a new conceptual framework through which contemporary discussions of
space and literature can operate.
The book then moves on to a thorough application of the
interdisciplinary model that it has established. Having argued that the
experience of contemporary space has rendered questions of home and
belonging particularly pressing, it undertakes detailed analysis of how
these phenomena are articulated in a selection of recent French life
writing texts. The close, text-led readings reveal that whilst not
often highlighted for their relevance to the analysis of space, these
works do in fact narrate the impact of some of the most significant
cultural experiences of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust
and the AIDS crisis, upon geo-cultural senses of identity. Home is
shown to be a deeply problematic, yet strongly desired, element of the
contemporary world.
The book concludes by addressing the underlying thesis that
contemporary life writing might provide just the ‘postmodern maps’ that
could help not only literary scholars, but also geographers, better
understand the world today.
Contact Information:
Jeffrey S. Smith, Ph.D.
Book Review Editor
118 Seaton Hall / Geography
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506-2904
(785) 532-3412
jssmith7@ksu.edu
Return
to
Journal of Cultural Geography's main page
Last
Updated: 19 September 2008