Geography of Identity

by Patricia Yaeger (Editor)

Deterritorialization, translocality, globalization, postcolonial, postnational, 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.
Deterritorialization, translocality, globalization, postcolonial, postnational, 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.

481 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1996