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 landscapes. 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’ 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, fragmented 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 discussion which shows how a ‘new’ cultural geography developed in the late 1980s concerned with the connections 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 representation, although still useful and fundamental to geography’s place in cultural studies, has a series of limitations. First, 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. Second, through discussions of performativity, which demonstrate how identities are continually being made and remade through performances in particular spaces. Third, through a recognition that cultural studies (and cultural 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.
