Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper I explore the writings of Pierre Nora on lieux de mémoire (realms of memory). Nora's work is a standard reference in geographical writings on memory, yet there are various assumptions in his work that often go unchallenged. An investigation of the concept of nostalgia allows certain levels of yearning to be made clear in Nora's writings. A melancholic nostalgia for ‘real environments of memory’ and for the unifying power of the nation-state pervades this work. However, Nora hints at the possibility for the survival of memory in the body, and for its defence through the mobilisation of counterhistorical narratives. I conclude through using interdisciplinary theories on embodied memory and sites of countermemory to expand the range of spaces in which the memories of a nation might be constructed, contained, and contested.

The conflation of the West with modernity is being challenged by new critical interventions on the themes of ‘occidentalism’ and ‘plural modernities’. In this paper I bring these themes together into an account of the way the idea of the West has been employed and deployed in the construction of non-Western modernities. This is done in the company of two important figures in the articulation and invention of the West, the Japanese ‘Westerniser’ Fukuzawa Yukichi and the Indian poet and advocate of spiritual Asia Rabindranath Tagore. Fukuzawa and Tagore developed contrasting narratives both of the West and of Asia, narratives which they employed to express novel and distinctive visions of the nature of modern life.

Geopolitical discourses are constitutive moments within the expression and construction of ‘national’ identities. Approaching geopolitics and identities as contested and fluid domains, we examine the relationships between geopolitical narratives and visions of Portugueseness (Portugalidade). The focus is on the frames of geopolitical thought developed in 20th-century Portugal, with particular reference to the post-1945 period and with some consideration of the transformations since 1974 accompanying the collapse of what was both the first and the most enduring European overseas empire. This study of Portuguese geopolitical discourses leads to a conclusion in which we reflect on the significance of relations between the ‘colonial’ and the ‘postcolonial’ and the articulations of East–West and North–South in geopolitical discourses. This permits wider critique concerning the location of geopolitics within 20th-century and contemporary imperialisms.

Drawing on critical security studies and critical geopolitics, I examine how geopolitical discourses of danger circulate in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Whereas some work in this field risks reinscribing the discursive articulation of danger as an inevitable condition of political formation, in this paper I emphasise the need to disaggregate the concept of danger carefully to highlight its operation in specific contexts. I explore these processes across a range of discursive sites from official media to popular music, contrasting findings with material from focus groups composed of socially marginalised populations. I demonstrate the role of discursive constructions of danger or safety in the production and maintenance of the political identity of the new states, and how this is inseparable from material conditions of elite power struggle. I conclude by echoing Hewitt's call for a critical geography that confronts and challenges the domestic exercise of state terror.

In discussing the role of streets and urban spaces as a locus of collective memory, I draw a distinction between overt commemoration of public memory and the accumulation of group memories in the setting of the everyday street. Community struggles over postwar street clearances stimulated interest in the physical layout of the public realm as a gestalt for shared memory, a theme of earlier work on memory and urbanism by Maurice Halbwachs. I show how Aldo Rossi and colleagues put the concept onto a practical footing by making morphological analysis the basis for urban infill, repair, and extension, most ambitiously and controversially in the ‘critical reconstruction’ of modern Berlin.

In this paper I explore discourses and resistances mobilized around the construction of an Orthodox Jewish symbolic and material concrete space, the ‘eruv’, in two localities (one in the United Kingdom, one in the USA) where it has been at the center of heated debate and contestation. Conflicts around the reordering and redefining of this public space expose some of the limits of living with difference and normative versions of multiculturalism in the city. Through a detailed examination of two case studies in the United Kingdom and the United States I conclude that the multicultural city necessitates a recognition of symbolic as well as material spaces—and the interconnections between these—and that the notion of public space warrants interrogation as to how it is imagined, read, and experienced in multiple ways.

In this paper I draw attention to the study of ‘unofficially sacred’ sites in geographies of religion, which provide significant insights into the construction of religious identity and community, and the intersections of sacred and secular. I show that such sites deserve as much attention as places of worship (the more conventional focus in the geographical study of religion) in our understanding of the place of religion in contemporary urban society. In particular, using the case of Islamic religious schools in Singapore, I examine how Muslim identities and community are negotiated within multicultural and multireligious contexts, and particularly within one in which there is a highly ‘educative’ state [Gramsci, 1971 Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (International Publishers, New York)] that seeks to guide nation formation and the manufacture of consensus, and which strives to achieve a secular, modernist vision of society, characterized by economic progress and development. The specific analysis focuses, first, on the role of the state in the social construction of ‘schools’—particularly the ways in which state-constructed definitions of multiculturalism, multiracialism, multireligiosity, and modernity shape Singapore schools and education. Second, I examine the ways in which religious schools (madrasahs) are a means by which some Singapore Muslims maintain and enhance their religious life. Further, I analyze state–religion relations, state strategies of nation-building, strategies of identity and community construction among Muslims in Singapore, as well as the fractured nature of the Muslim community by studying the divergent meanings invested in schools by state and religious groups.