The Geography of Identity (RATIO: Institute for the Humanities) Book

Deterritorialization, translocality, globalization, postcolonial, postnational, transnational: we are in the midst of a redefinition of space. In the very moment that national and ethnic boundaries are breaking down we encounter paradoxical reinvestments in homeland, territorial integrity, localism, regionalism, and race- and ethnocentrism. How do we make sense of this contradictory mapping of global and local space? How do we understand state and national systems of sovereignty as geographic or place-centered dramas of domination? How do we maneuver between incommensurable histories of the regional and transnational in a postmodern world? The contributors to The Geography of Identity are at the forefront of the new social geography. Their essays investigate a range of topics as categories of analysis we have to reimagine. Contributors include Arjun Appadurai on deterritorialization and the postnational; Joseph Boone on queer desire and urban space; Achille Mbembe on the political culture of the postcolony; Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill on psychic homelands and Irish placenames; Pieter Judson on the geographies of German nationalism; Rashid Khalidi on the repressions within Palestinian historiography; Mark Liechy on media politics in Nepal; Billie Melman on British colonialism and the veil; Saskia Sassen on globalized urban economies and minority laborers; Michael Watts on the interactive geographies of Islam and capitalism in Nigeria; Gwendolyn Wright on the effects of the local on modernist architecture; Victoria Wolcott on African-American numbers-runners and Detroit's underground economy; Bernard Williams on the moral philosophy of space; and Anton Shammas on autocartography. With its explorations of the urban heteroclite, the postcolony and nativist ideologies of place, this volume promises to be a groundbreaking contribution to the remapping of global and local cartographies of culture. Patricia Yaeger is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of Michigan. Read More