Abstract
At a multidisciplinary conference in Europe last year I overhead a professor of English talking about the current zeitgeist in his discipline: ‘Everyone’s fascinated right now with the land, the soil, the geo . . . what we need is a new intellectual agenda; something like “earth writing”, maybe, or “geo . . . graphy”’. Our own discipline’s lack of presence within some circles of cultural studies is echoed in, and partially rectified by, the edited volume Land and Identity: Theory, Memory and Practice which is part of Rodopi’s ‘Spatial Practices’ book series. This specific collection developed out of a 2009 conference held at the University of Derby which featured research on land and identity. It is, as the publishers declare, an example of the topographical turn in cultural studies. The book’s three sections ‘land and identity’, ‘landscapes of memory’ and ‘literary landscapes’ contain 10 numbered chapters driven mostly around literary critique. There are ruminatory examinations of themes of land, nature, landscape, identity and belonging as they emerge through texts that include William Gilpin’s picturesque travel writing, Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks, a photograph of Hitler gazing at an architectural model of his birthplace Lintz, the ‘unbelonging’ of second generation Irish writers in Britain, the topos of J.L Carr’s ironic novella A Month in the Country, and postmodern renderings of the city in cyberpunk novels and film. They are interesting, but also, ever-so-slightly arbitrary. Many of the chapters declare no intellectual objective and seem to lack a sense of purpose or direction beyond describing the appearance of geographical themes. Perhaps it is unfair to expect an emergent field to have coherent analytical purchase or singular shared agenda. The book’s two editor-authored chapters (the Introduction and Afterword) serve to take on this task. The introduction crafts an epistemological platform for land and identity studies out of the works of Raymond Williams, Homi Bhabha, Benedict Anderson, Paul Gilroy and Edward Said. Concepts of territoriality, place, landscape and others are then fleshed out through enamoured coverage of 1990s geographical thought. Core ideas of the land-identity project, we learn, come from cultural turn classics by Soja, Daniels and Cosgrove, Cresswell, and Massey. Thrift’s early non-representational theory and more recent material by Wylie and Lorimer are mentioned, but only in the briefest of terms. The afterword is much more stimulating and informative. It situates land and identity studies within recent ficto-criticism, new travel literatures, new ethnography and psycho-geographies offering some ‘gentle coordinates’ for future work. For example, the discussion of D.J. Waldie’s suburban memoir of Lakewood California, holy land, is a fantastic demonstration of how the work of writers familiar to cultural geographers (Michel De Certeau, Guy Debord, Kathleen Stewart, Lucy Lippard and Rebecca Solnit) can be applied to a variety of texts to pose new questions and enliven our ‘geo . . . graphies’. Those looking for a more focused and advanced study on geography and the humanities will find Routledge’s own edited volume Envisioning Landscape more rewarding. Land and Identity speaks from an inevitably more naive position and the kinds of insight it offers reflects that.
Sharon Macdonald’s Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today covers many of the same themes touched on in Land and Identity including debates around authenticity, awkward negotiations of national identity, and tensions surrounding the increasing coincidence of tourism and trauma. Memorylands, as a single-authored volume firmly embedded within the discipline of social and cultural anthropology, is able to achieve substantial depth and analytic focus. At the same time it also functions as a clear and engaging introduction to those memory-related debates, problems and vocabularies currently circulating in the humanities and social sciences. The nine essays are eclectic in both their setting and their intellectual objectives, but they manage to maintain a singular imperative to map what Mcdonald calls ‘the European memory-heritage-identity complex’; something she understands as an assemblage of ‘practices, affects and physical things which includes such parts as memorial services, nostalgia and historical artefacts’ (p. 6). I was drawn in particular to Chapter four, ‘Feeling the Past: embodiment, place and nostalgia’, which provides a fantastic orientation to work within anthropology and beyond on memory, embodiment, phenomenology and the felt materiality of the past. These themes are explained through discussion of some fascinating topics from the ‘sensory density’ of domestic homes, and the cultural potency of the corpse, through to the more public post-socialist nostalgic longing (Ostalgie) for the GDR as evidenced by a growing demand for East German-branded consumer goods. The book’s principal strength is in the clarity and persuasiveness with which it explains how contemporary Europe gets performed and maintained by the author’s key analytic ‘past-presencing’, a phrase Mcdonald develops to elaborate on the wide range of phenomena associated with memory’s operation as both a personal experience and potential instrument of social power. Memorylands provides a welcome and accessible synthesis that cultural geographers will appreciate.