Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This paper is concerned with discourses of threat and security deployed by the United States and India after September 11. In the context of the United States these discourses have been used to justify war in Afghanistan and in Iraq and have revolved around the subject of the Muslim male as perpetually dangerous. Eager to support the United States in its war against terror, India echoed the construction of the Muslim male as dangerous, which served to fulfill India's own internal and regional supremacy agendas. Bolstered, therefore, by the emerging discourse of Muslim terrorists, in 2002 the Hindu Right was complicit in orchestrating genocide against Muslims in Gujarat where 2000 Muslims were killed and 150000 Muslims were rendered homeless. Examining these and other incidents, I examine the similarity in discourses of threat and security deployed by the United States and India. I argue that the similarity in discourses emerges because of a particular understanding of time and space. I make two interconnected arguments: first, time and the very understanding and construction of history are distorted, collapsed, and twisted such that revenge for past atrocities and the threat of future ones are used to justify preemptive military action. Second, there is a particular geography to this doctrine of threat and security that is being established by demarcating us against them. This new spatial arrangement is being formed contingent on a particular understanding of time and history as a linear singular narrative and on the creation of political alliances between India, the United States, and Israel.

This paper begins as an investigation of the spatiality of the state in Turkey. In everyday life the state is experienced and recognized through a multiplicity of sites, agents, institutions, techniques, and regulatory capacities. Given this fragmentation, I ask how it is that the state is conceptualized as having a reality beyond its incoherence. Through a discursive analysis of focus-group discussions with lower-class and lower-middle-class men and women in Istanbul, I trace the spatial–temporal techniques through which state power is enacted. I argue that this power operates through referral and deferral, circulation and arrest; it is the power both to set in motion and to suspend the circulation of people, documents, money, and influence that marks out the space–time of the state. Further, my reading of focus-group texts suggests that it is through the operation of the space–time of the state that individuals both submit to state power and become subjects of rights—that is, citizens. At once establishing the authority of the state and the self-recognition of the subject, the Althusserian turn towards the law is a gesture of conscience or guilt. However, I argue that not all subjects are equally guilty in their imagined relationship to the state, some are more guilty than others, and, in this inequality, difference enters into the process of subjection. Focus-group participants discuss how acts such as showing identity cards or performing labor function both to assert their innocence and to mark them as guilty. By tracing out how spatial techniques of power and processes of subjection are discussed among particular groups of people in Istanbul, I hope to speak in an alternative voice to the usual top-down narration of the Turkish ‘strong state’. Finally, this paper is an attempt to wrap an argument around the secret of the state, around the desire, despair, and guilt that infuse the relational production of citizen and state.

Western travelers move throughout the world—especially to places in ‘the East’—believing themselves to be harbingers of modernity, spreading capitalism, socioeconomic development, Western culture, and other promises of modernization to places they assume are existing in states of pristine Otherness. In this paper I look at interactions between travelers and locals that reveal differing spatial imaginaries of ‘modernity’, and at how these reflect and produce different narratives of who is modern and where modernity exists. By using ethnographic material, I examine discursive and material interactions surrounding modernity through the examples of travelers' practices of photography, dress, and knowledge of Muslim women's veiling. In this paper I look to a located, gendered, and particular expression of an Islamic modernity, one that embraces improvements in quality of life that modern technologies of health care, agricultural production, and sanitation may bring, and which simultaneously embraces nonsecular ways of being in the world.

This paper concerns a group of educated women of independent means and their relationship to a Norfolk village and its people in the early 20th and mid-20th century. The focal figure is Marietta Pallis (1882–1963), ecologist and artist, who rented and then owned the marshland property of Long Gores, Hickling. In this paper we consider Pallis and friends' engagement with land and its management, their relationship to the locality as residents and employers of servants, and their literary consideration of local culture in terms of architecture and dialect. We emphasise the currencies of the local informing their actions, and reactions to them, and the related geographies of private life. Pallis and friends' relationship to land, their relationship to people, and their commentary on local character and identity make sense through and foster geographies of local life.

In this paper I examine how new forms of multicultural intimacy are imagined in contemporary Britain, and how they are invested with particular ideals of mixing, loving thy neighbour, and feelings for the nation. I trace these discursive themes in a myriad of social locations and forms—a television documentary titled The Last White Kids, reviews of the documentary in the press, and government policies on community cohesion. A key point of this paper is that racial, ethnic, and cultural relations are not only negotiated and ‘managed’ in literal spatial locations, but also imagined through specific emotional and ethical injunctions, such as ‘embracing the other’ and loving they neighbour. Moreover, these injunctions are imagined in the ambivalent spatial terms of obligations to, and dangers of, proximity—an ambivalence that is inflected with articulations of ‘race’, class, and gender. The analysis thus explores how the imperative of neighbourly love refers to both the desires for and anxieties about what the intimacy stems from and fosters. Who gets close to whom, and under what circumstances, is not left to chance.

In this paper I discuss how a differently conceived performative and architectural understanding of Utopia can help us to rework and extend notions of utopianism that have received renewed attention in recent times. In developing this point, I argue that, although notions of dwelling and comfort are key to Utopia and architecture, the ‘unhomely’ and ‘unsettling’, which also appear in aspects of thought on performativity, are a crucial and as-yet greatly underscrutinised part of thinking about Utopia. I attempt to question what we consider ‘good’ or desirable, and hence to enlarge the frame of what we consider ‘utopian’. Through this, I consider the potential beginnings of an extended uncanny Utopian ethics.

Recent work in disability studies has drawn attention to the changing relationship between the visual representations of disability and contemporary US capitalism. One change identified is a newfound cultural recognition of disabled sexuality. In this paper I extend these arguments by considering the kinds of sexuality projected onto the disabled body at the intersection of regimes of disability, sexuality, and neoliberalism. I provide a governmentality/queer reading of visual representations of disabled sexuality and of two self-help disabled sex manuals to argue that interest in disabled sex may witness an investment in the ongoing production of normative sexualities, what Foucault called a ‘truth of the self, within the context of neoliberal spatialities of disability. Based on dominant cultural understandings of sex as ‘natural’, ‘predictable’, and ‘representable’, these self-help manuals serve to produce a framework that depoliticizes the claims of disability culture movements. These manuals render the project of disabled sexual liberation a personal project of self-governance that scarcely challenges contemporary structures of (neo)liberalism.

In this paper the political fortunes and identities of Irish Catholics in US and Canadian cities are explored through a comparative study of Buffalo and Toronto. Local spaces of political administration in the urban arena, such as wards, were significant in affecting the generation of sociopolitical networks of power which in turn had implications for the sense of political identity and involvement felt by Irish Catholics within these two places. The importance of such spaces, however, was also contingent on the interaction between these cities' Irish Catholic populations and wider geographies of social, economic, and ethnoreligious relations over time as well as on the topographies and traditions of political power that extended beyond the municipal scale in both societies.