cultural geographies

This paper investigates the relationship between mobility and embodied experiences of quiescence. Rather than conceptualizing quiescence as an experience that is opposite to activity, this paper explores how various experiences of quiescence emerge through the course of a railway journey. The first section of the paper illustrates how particular dispositions of vulnerability have the potential to generate a series of desirable quiescent experiences such as daydreaming and relaxation. The second section explores how these vulnerable dispositions also have the potential to generate a series of less-comfortable quiescent experiences such as lethargy, tiredness and agitation. In doing so, this paper emphasizes the necessity to take seriously how the experience of travel itself impacts on and conditions the affective capacities of the travelling body for feeling in particular ways. In contrast to work within cultural geography that has focused on the conscious, reflective and signifying practices of the body, this paper illuminates how the multiplicity of quotidian quiescent experiences induces a different set of experiential relationships between a more vulnerable body and the timespace of the railway journey.

This article provides a reading of the Old English poem Beowulf, with a focus on its symbolic and political geographies. The key question is the role of place or site in the poem in general terms, and the more specific issue of land. The article first analyses three significant sites in the narrative — the locations of the battles between Beowulf and Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon. Each of these places — the hall, the mere, and the burial-mound — are shot through with powerful emotive, elemental, symbolic and material geographies. Analysis then moves to the politics of land, a resource which is gifted, distributed, disputed and fought over. While part of a larger project which seeks to look at the conceptual and historical relation between land, terrain and territory, this article offers a more modest focused study of a single text from a particular period.

This paper provides a discursive history of neo-Malthusianism in the United States, focusing primarily on the mid-20th century. In the process, I critically examine texts invoking Malthusian arguments in relation to the politics of sex and birth control, class and eugenics, and race and geopolitics, focusing on how they rendered human population growth intelligible in particularly reductive and naturalistic ways. The purpose is to show how this history impinges upon the construction of population-resource theory after WWII, focusing specifically on William Vogt’s Road to survival and Fairfield Osborn’s Our plundered planet. I argue that the production and circulation of generalized models of population-induced conflict in the post-war United States was an important part of the nationalization and government harnessing of science in the name of national security, and relevant to post-war developmentalism and early Cold War containment doctrine. This helps us understand how neo-Malthusian discourse has been deployed as a form of bio-political governance.

Traffic in Souls (Universal, 1913) inaugurated a spate of so-called white slave pictures at a time the US was experiencing a moral panic over prostitution. The film enacts a sexual and racial geography of the industrial city, one that is mobile and aleatory and requires a similarly mobile yet self-possessed subject to navigate it and its dangers successfully. Social reformers staffing the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures sought to steer the narrative outcome of the film toward a certain moral end, one that encouraged the production of a governmental subjectivity for its white, female spectators. This was a ‘constructive’ regulatory agenda toward sexuality through cinema that worked in tension with the more coercive statutory prohibition of prostitution, one that was thoroughly racialized through its exclusion of African Americans from concern.

With a recent resurgence in interest in the geography of religion, questions of the limits, qualities and efficacy of public versus private religiosity have come to the fore. This article is concerned with interpreting the public headquarters of one of the world’s most popular religious broadcasters, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), through the lens of the public/private binary and its use in the secularization paradigm. It is argued that the mediated public engagement of religious broadcasting renders the public/private distinction in the secularization paradigm problematic. Despite the paradigm’s postulation of increasing privatization, religious broadcasters like TBN are fully engaged with a mediatic public. However, the peculiar nature of TBN’s headquarters and its relationship to the broadcaster’s central mission suggest that in the final instance, the secularization paradigm accounts for TBN’s inability to effectively engage a material, embodied public.