cultural geographies

This article takes the subject of the rise of racial discourse in the 19th century as a focus for extending critical race theory (CRT) in Cultural and Historical Geography. It pursues a critique beyond the familiar claim of race's legitimatory function to elicit the fundamentally unstable and crisis-ridden origins of innatist thought. Crucially, this requires a situated account —one that emphasizes the singular challenge that Australian colonial encounters aroused in Enlightenment notions of human unity and development. Far from confirming European views of `savage' others, it argues that nature/native encounters on that continent precipitated a crisis in existing ideas — all the more contentious to today —of what it meant to be human. And, in emphasizing the palpably material sense in which Australia problematized European classificatory schema, the article opens one pathway from representational to `more than representational' accounts in Cultural Geography. It also offers a potentially transformative understanding of the violence of humanism, in relation to both human and nonhuman.

Focusing on youth camp development in Germany and the United States during the interwar period, this article argues not only that such camps played a crucial role in the ways in which national societies dealt with their youth, but also that their history forces us to rethink relations between place-making, nationhood, and modern governing. First, the article addresses the historiography of youth movements in relation to current debates about spatiality, nationalism, and governmentality. The main part of the article examines organized camps, in particular by the German Bünde, the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), and the American Boy Scouts, focusing on their transition from relatively spontaneous activities of particular social movements, to objects of professional design, national-scale planning and intricate management in the interwar period. This development demonstrates how in the seemingly trivial activity of camping, nationalism is interwoven with the project of conducting youth through contact with nature. Despite divergent contexts and political ideologies, youth camp development in this period constituted a set of practices in which the natural environment was deployed to improve the nation's youth, and to eventually reproduce them as governable subjects.

This article explores the process by which the cultural history of Royal Palm Hammock, the most visited site within Everglades National Park, Florida, informs the landscape's natural history. To understand this process, I analyze the scientific literature, including naturalists' fieldwork reports, surveys, fieldnotes and other archival material spanning the late 1800s to the mid-1930s, as well as ethnographic interviews conducted with local Everglades hunters who depended upon this landscape during the latter part of this era. As I demonstrate, local people, serving as guides and informants, critically contributed to the production of ecological knowledge about Royal Palm Hammock, though the evidence of these contributions has been distorted by the natural history literature's negative stereotypes of local landscape practices.

This article is based on a study of Madipur widow colony in west Delhi, built as part of the UN International Year of Shelter for the Homeless in 1987. Designed to accommodate widows from squatter settlements in Delhi, very few of the original houses now survive and very few of the original owners remain. The spatial stories of the participants suggest how and why and under what circumstances a State's visions of empowerment as translated into utopian architectural projects are transformed by the people who inhabit them. They illustrate how a particular set of `spatial opportunities' built into the widow colony are manipulated and seized upon by the participants to produce an uneven geography of architecture and empowerment. This article thus extends the important work on critical geographies of architecture to the architecture of low-income housing in the global South.