ABSTRACT
One increasingly important aspect of cultural studies is
what can be called the geographies (or, indeed,
topographies) of culture: the ways in which matters of
meaning are bound up with spaces, places and land-
scapes. One sign of this is that the language of cultural
studies is full of spatial metaphors. Chapter 1 of this
book, for example, understands culture in terms of
‘fields’, ‘maps’ and ‘boundaries’. You will also find that
cultural studies is full of talk of ‘margins’, ‘borders’ and
‘networks’. Yet there is more to this than just language
since there is also a sense that culture – particularly
when it is understood as something that is plural, frag-
mented and contested – cannot be understood outside
the spaces that it marks out (like national boundaries
or gang territories), the places that it makes meaningful
(perhaps the Statue of Liberty or your favourite coffee
shop), the landscapes that it creates (from ‘England’s
green and pleasant land’ to the suburban shopping
mall), and the networks that connect people together
(such as virtual communities of gamers on the
Internet). What this chapter aims to do is to use a
variety of examples, both historical and contemporary,
to show the ways in which issues of culture and
meaning are geographical. It does this through a dis-
cussion which shows how a ‘new’ cultural geography
developed in the late 1980s concerned with the connec-
tions between representations of places at a variety of
scales from the local to the global and relationships of
power. It then goes on to show how this focus on rep-
resentation, although still useful and fundamental to
geography’s place in cultural studies, has a series of
limitations. Firstly, in terms of discussions of mobility
and movement which show how particular cultural
forms are created in the relationships between places,
rather than just in places. Secondly, through dis-
cussions of performativity which demonstrate how
identities are continually being made and remade
through performances in particular spaces. Thirdly,
through a recognition that cultural studies (and cul-
tural geography) needs to take account of the
materiality of objects, technologies and the natural
world. If all this is new to you it is worth starting with
some basic principles of cultural geography.
