Sparke, Matthew. In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State.
This review essay aims to convince American studies scholars of the value of and, even, necessity for geographical theory in the practice of our discipline. To that end, I will summarize some of the core arguments of two books by geographers published in 2005 that I argue have immediate usefulness to Americanists. Central to these arguments are geospatial theories that have been under discussion in geography for some time and are now axiomatic in that field, yet superficially understood outside it. By engaging with some of these concepts about space, I think Americanists can greatly improve the depth and power of our work. After all, considering how careful and thorough most scholars usually are in defining terms crucial to their arguments, for example, gender, nation, and so on, it strikes me as unusual how little theorizing gets done when the main focus is on space. Humanities scholars often use geographical language in purely metaphorical ways, in catchphrases such as “create a space for …” or “mapping identities.” But the production of space is in fact more than a metaphor—it is a social, cultural, and political process. More than ten years ago, however, Neil Smith and Cindi Katz published an essay called “Grounding Metaphor” arguing for a commitment to the materiality of space and cautioning against the conflation of metaphors of space and geography with material spaces and geographies. Gradually, increasing numbers of humanities scholars, including Americanists, look to geographical theory for more complex and appropriate ways to conceptualize space—this essay seeks to further facilitate that intellectual project. To that end, I argue that humanities scholarship today needs an ongoing, relentless critique of its unthinking use of spatial metaphors and language.
Since the advent of post-structuralism and other contemporaneous challenges to academic notions of truth and objectivity such as feminism and the ethnic studies movements, geographers have been hammering out critiques of the previously taken-for-granted way of thinking of space as absolute, and formulating alternatives. Rather than try to summarize the past 30-odd years of debate, I would like here to just sketch the general concepts at issue. Absolute space “is defined and understood through Euclidean geometry … and, for analytical purposes, treated as objective, empirical space (Hubbard et al. 13). Maps are a favorite example of absolute space, showing exact points and lines, borders and locations, yet, as a casual perusal of Brian Harley and David Woodward’s six-volume history of cartography proves, maps have always been highly ideological constructions with very clear political goals.
Even the seemingly scientific, geometric grid of a map “is but one of an indefinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data” (Monmonnier 3). To make this even clearer to humanities scholars, Mark Monmonnier argues that “maps, like speeches and paintings, are authored collections of information and also are subject to distortions arising from ignorance, greed, ideological blindness, or malice” (3). So geographers, including cartographers, have come to believe that “space is not a given neutral and passive geometry but rather is continuously produced through socio-spatial relations” (Hubbard et al. 13). Today most geographers share “a relative understanding of space [that] prioritizes analyses of how space is constituted and given meaning through human endeavour” (13). The rest of this essay will focus on the work of two of the most original and rigorous thinkers working in the field today, Doreen Massey and Matthew Sparke, in an attempt to further foster an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and approaches between geography and American studies.
This is not a traditional book review in that I will not summarize each chapter or section of each book, nor attempt to situate them in their wider fields—there are already several reviews that do that in geography journals. But because the intended audience for this journal is comprised of scholars of American studies, I will target my remarks directly for those readers. First I briefly explain each book’s core argument, then I work through some of the key words that run through both Massey’s and Sparke’s books that I believe will prove interesting and useful to non-geographers, with an eye toward some of the touchstones of recent Americanist work.
Doreen Massey is perhaps the grande dame of critical geography today and a professor at the Open University in the UK; she has also written many textbooks and appears frequently in British national media. Best known outside geography for her 1994 book Space, Place, and Gender, Massey’s work has been mined repeatedly by humanities scholars—cited prominently by Karen Halttunen in the 2005 ASA Presidential Address, for example—interested in the spatial dynamics of gender, race, power, place, class, and national identity. In her new book, For Space, Massey proposes a new conception of space and its challenges. She doesn’t focus only on the spatial theories of geographers themselves, but on “situations and engagements in which the question of space has in some way been entangled” (13). Her book attempts to make sense of the tangled conceptions of space in the academic and popular discourses of philosophy, politics, and globalization.
Matthew Sparke’s book In the Space of Theory also asks us to reconsider some of our taken-for-granted ideas about space—in this case, in the critical discourses about the nation, especially in the cases of the US and Canada. A professor at the University of Washington (full disclosure: he was a member of my Ph.D. committee), Sparke’s research and teaching center on the political and economic geographies of globalization. His book, like Massey’s, engages with a wide array of scholars from outside geography. Sparke’s method is to critique key thinkers on the nation-state showing how an engagement with geographical theories reveals the blind spots or weaknesses in their work, in order to illustrate how a more nuanced geographical theory could sharpen and enhance their arguments. In that sense, his aim is similar to much of my own work with Sheila Hones: to make geographical theory accessible and useful to scholars outside the field by showing its utility in critical practice.
1. Doreen Massey’s For Space
Massey’s new book For Space outlines her thinking about what she calls “the challenge of space, the multiple ruses through which that challenge has been evaded, and the political implications of practising it differently” (13). Opening her book with a creative narrative of the arrival of Cortés from first an Aztec perspective and then from a Spanish point of view, Massey paints a picture of the different geographical imaginations of the two groups. The two narrators each speak from a specific position in terms of history, religion, and views of nature, time, and space. The radical reconceptions of history and of knowledge production in recent decades, in for example postcolonial histories and critique, inform her arguments in this book that “conceiving of space as in the voyages of discovery, as something to be crossed and maybe conquered, has particular ramifications” (4). Seeing space as a flat surface, like a map, makes it seem fixed and unchanging, pre-given and coherent; this absolute, essentializing view of space is implicit in most histories of Cortés and Moctezuma, which privilege the Spanish view of space as something to be crossed and conquered and possessed. Such thinking, Massey argues, “makes it more difficult to see in our mind’s eye the histories the Aztecs too have been living and producing” (4). But, she wants us to ask, what if “we question that habit of thinking of space as a surface” and instead “conceive of a meeting-up of histories” (4). This image of the encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma recurs in her explanations throughout the book as she works through the implications of her reconfiguration of the concept of space.
Massey argues three main points that together outline a new way of thinking space. First, like our identities, which are created through interactions and relations rather than existing as fixed and essential identities, space is also relational and produced through contacts and interactions. (One example of a relational production of space is the “contact zone,” often relegated to only literal border spaces despite Mary Louise Pratt’s original, more flexible definition). I think this concept is easy to grasp because humanities scholars have already accepted the relationality of identity—relational spatiality asks us simply to look at a city or a nation in that way. Tokyo as a space is made up of the people here and the sum of their connections with places within and outside the city—from diplomats to government representatives to trade organizations and of course students and workers and homemakers and homeless people, from all over Japan and the world. The web that we create in our everyday lives, not only in our physical interactions with other people riding in trains and planes and walking on the streets, but also through purchasing imported goods, watching satellite TV, sending text messages and photos with cell phones, e-mailing, and so on, all create the space of the city. This relational construction of social space is consistent with social constructionist theories in now accepted in the humanities, and allows us to theorize the social in a material, concrete way rather than only in the abstract.
The second proposition follows on from that concept of relationality to argue that space is the “sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity.” Admittedly, Massey is prone to mouthfuls of prepositions, but it usually means that she is trying to articulate a very important and specific point, in this case: “the very possibility of any serious recognition of multiplicity and heterogeneity itself depends on a recognition of spatiality” or what she calls elsewhere “thrown-together-ness” (10-11). Sharing space means encountering the existence of others who have different stories and trajectories (12); what you do about that encounter can vary wildly, as we see from the history of colonialism, for example, or in the histories of sexuality and gender in the
Massey calls for an acknowledgment of the co-constitution of space and multiplicity, in part to argue for an awareness of what she calls the geographies of our responsibility. If space is relational, then we are all to some degree responsible for those relations and for that space. This is easy to understand on a so-called “local” level, but what if we define the local as a node in a constellation of networks that reach out beyond the recognized boundaries of a city or nation-state? Rather than dividing the local from the global, seeing space as relational and as produced by and enabling heterogeneity also demands that we see it as in some sense our own responsibility. It is easy to see the political import of this way of thinking space, the implications for conceptions of democracy, community, public space. In fact, in light of Massey’s proposal that space is “the sphere of coexisting heterogeneity,” thinking of the local as somehow unmoored from or opposed to the global is analogous in some ways to a kind of exceptionalism, which we Americanists know something about (9).
Along with the necessity of recognizing the relationality and the multiplicity of space, Massey argues for the radical openness of space, a “simultaneity of stories-so-far” (9). To fully acknowledge this openness, we need to
uproot space from that constellation of concepts in which it has so unquestioningly so often been embedded (stasis; closure; representation) and to settle it among another set of ideas (heterogeneity; relationality; coevalness … liveliness indeed). (13)
Because space is constituted by social relations, it is necessarily “always in process, … never a closed system” (11). Rather than a clear and unified master narrative such as “Modernization” or “Development,” recent political theories argue for a “radical openness of the future”: here Massey cites Laclau and Mouffe at length, as well as Deleuze and Guattari (11). For politics the parallel assertion is also relevant: “only if we conceive of the future as open can we seriously accept or engage in any genuine notion of politics” (11). In this third prong of her argument, Massey reconnects with the previous two and makes her political position clearer as well: “space is indeed a product of relations (first proposition) and for that to be so there must be multiplicity (second proposition)” (11). But the multiplicity of social relations that constitute space do not take place in a fixed, closed, coherent space, but, on the contrary, in a “space of loose ends and missing links” in which change is still possible (12).
2. Matthew Sparke’s In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State
Sparke’s book attends to the geographical imaginations of the nation-state both in political theory and in case studies. His argument centers around two hyphens: the hyphen in “nation-state” and the invisible hyphen in “geo-graphy,” which comes from the Greek roots meaning “graphing the geo” or “earth-writing” (xii). The first hyphen, in nation-state, links (and separates) the state practices of “border policing, migration control, and planning” with the legitimizing national “space-producing social and cultural dynamics” in the form of “taken-for-granted national landscapes” (xiii). Like “nation-state,” the hyphenated “geo-graphy” is a “powerful world-making process,” one that is continually under negotiation and revision (xiv). The graphing of the geo is at the crux of Sparke’s argument and perhaps the hardest, at least for readers who are not already familiar with contemporary geographical theory.
His point is in agreement with Massey’s on the “fundamentally heterogeneous graphing of the geo,” which preserves the potential for critique to intervene in the graphing process (xvi). He draws on Derrida’s work on metaphor to argue that no geography is complete, and all geographies inevitably make other geographies invisible even as they make one visible:
Every geography, whether assumed or explicitly elaborated as such, every mapping, picturing, visualization, landscaping, theorization, and metaphorization of space becomes rereadable … not just for what it includes, but also what it overwrites and covers up in the moment of representing spatially the always already unfinished historical-geographical processes and power relations of its spatial production. (xvi)
The task of the critical geographer, then, is to reread those “anemic geographies,” looking for what they cover up: “the palimpsest of unfinished and worldly geographical struggles” (xxxiv).
In most of the postfoundational (Sparke’s handy term for the general herd of theory-heavy posts: poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial, postnational) theories of the nation-state—here he cites Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Timothy Mitchell, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—the hyphen in nation-state has been much interrogated, far less so the hyphen in geography. Rather, he argues,
these theories have tended to make essentialist assumptions about space … in the context of elaborating otherwise antiessentialist arguments about the state and nation (xv).
The result of these essentialist assumptions about space is, in each case, predictably, a weaker theory of the nation-state—an “anemic geography” that uses spatial concepts or metaphors but whose taken-for-granted notions of space are absolutist, which hobbles its analytical reach. In an article co-authored with Sheila Hones on the spatial language in the ASA Call for Proposals, we put it this way:
we feel that the argument has its foot on the accelerator while the terminology has its foot on the brake . . . . while it explicitly calls for the geographically unconventional and critical in American Studies, it does so in conventional geospatial terms. (188)
It is in the spirit of constructive criticism that Sparke poses his critiques: if the work of these theorists were not useful, why bother? In fact, Sparke constantly affirms the value of the theories he is critiquing, in order to better position his argument in relation to the others and in order to illustrate how much more effective the arguments would be if they were not premised “foundationally fixed ideas about geography” (xv).
3. Keywords: Colonial and Postcolonial
Massey argues that by spatializing the story of modernity, postcolonial critiques “enable an understanding of its positionality, its geographical embeddedness; an understanding of the spatiality of the production of knowledge itself” (63). Exposing the eurocentrism of the narratives of modernity, critics such as Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha reveal
modernity as precisely … about the establishment of an enunciative position which (i) although particular, made a claim for universality, but which (ii) was not to be (could not be) in fact universalised or generalised. (64)
That is, when the story of modernity is framed as “more than the history of Europe’s own adventures,” it becomes visible how the story itself is shaped by its “point of view of Europe as the protagonist,” like a heroic character in a novel exploring “outward from Europe” to the colonies (63). Countering this euro-embedded site of narration, and recalling the Black British political slogan, “we are here because you were there,” this geographical narrative of modernity and its colonial “peripheries” helps to explain how, for example, the values of the French Revolution enabled the Haitian slave rebellion precisely because Toussaint l’Ouverture occupied one trajectory of the “European” project of modernity.
Reconceiving the story of modernity and colonization as a set of stories, each with its own background and actors and histories, “implies a different view of space itself” as a “sphere of coexistence of a multiplicity of trajectories” (63). The story of “discovery” is better seen as “the meeting-up of Moctezuma and Cortés” rather than the story of the “coloniser, as the only active agent, cross[ing] to find the to-be-colonised simply ‘there’” (63). Conceiving of space as relational and coeval, the history of el encuentro can be seen as “the meeting-up of two stories, each already with its own spaces and geographies, two imperial histories: the Aztec and the Spanish” (120). Imagined only from an active, mobile Spanish perspective, the story spatially fixes the Aztec, immobilized and “suspended awaiting our arrival” (120).
When we accept that social space is produced through interrelations and multiplicity, what does that do to our conception of the postcolonial nation? Humanities scholars have long depended on social scientists’ notions of culture, society, and nation as “having an integral relation to bounded spaces, internally coherent and differentiated from each other by separation” (64). This isomorphism of society and space, in which a nation has its bordered area on a map, is exactly the notion that today many critics of globalization rely upon as they mourn the passing of the authentic home (whether national or on a smaller scale), the loss of a “safe haven to which one can retreat” (65). But Massey points out that this is a “nostalgia for something that did not exist”: this way of thinking about space that once “legitimised a whole imperialist era of territorialisation” is actually predicated upon “an imagination of space as already divided-up, of places which are already separated and bounded” (65). This “essentialist, billiard-ball view of place” assumes that territoriality is destiny: “[f]irst the differences between places exist, and then those different places come into contact” (68). Her argument counters this view by proposing that space is always under construction and is both the precondition for and product of multiplicity and heterogeneity. But just because a space is heterogeneous doesn’t mean that power is shared equally; it only means that power can be contested.
The question of colonial and postcolonial nationhood comes up in a somewhat different way in the first chapter of Sparke’s book, in which he juxtaposes two contested instances of Canadian “national narration” in the context of a geographical critique of Homi Bhabha’s theories of the nation (3). A pair of British Columbia First Nations, the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en, brought a case against the Canadian government over land rights, Delgamuukw v. the Queen. Around the same time, in the late 1980s, the government-funded Historical Atlas of Canada was published, providing the first official cartographic story of national origins. As Sparke demonstrates, both these instances rely on not only the geography, but the literal cartography of Canada: during the trial, the narratives of the First Nations and their territorial imagination were publicly heard but ultimately denied, “policed within the spatial abstractions of the state” (28). Meanwhile, the Atlas, also a “seemingly hegemonic narrative of the nation,” includes maps based on the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en territories, showing that it “can also function through its very rigor and ideals of comprehensiveness to open up spaces for counterhegemonic questioning” (29).
The First Nations had to contest the colonial government’s territorial claims by pitting their own “primarily oral knowledge and understanding of territorial jurisdiction” against not only the official maps, but also the “abstracting effect of the court itself: its rules, its norms of behavior, and its general distance from everyday life among the two First Nations” (15). By trying to graph the geo in a way that the court could understand, the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en were in effect “cartographing their lands as First Nations within the abstract state space of Cartesian cartography” (17). Although the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en lost their case and later their appeal, their case serves as an example of the blind spots in Homi Bhabha’s largely metaphorical theory of national narratives, which privileges the performance of counterhegemonic narratives as, seemingly, inherently liberatory. Sparke points out the need to attend to the material power imbalances that characterize some groups’ performance of national narratives, in this case the prevailing power of the state over the First Nations (50). While the public performance of Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en geographical imagination was a pivotal moment in the history of relations between the Canadian government and the First Nations, it was not ultimately liberating. As Sparke points out, the celebration of counterhegemonic national narratives in Bhabha’s theory (emphasizing the “nation” part of nation-state) is too abstract and fails to account for the ways in which the state’s geographical imagination usually wins.
But in the other state-sponsored graphing of the geo, the Atlas, a much more diverse narrative of the nation comes to light. Not only do the First Nations appear throughout the Atlas, both in the sections on pre-history and on the final plate, but the daily life and migration patterns of First Nations are represented in several plates of the Atlas, not merely as an ancient extinct population, but as some of the many “pre-European routes across the land” (40). The last plate of the Atlas actually reproduces the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en map of their territory alongside a 1922 map of British Columbia. Sparke writes:
The plate invites a comparison of this First Nations’ map with that of a colonial survey map thereby allowing readers to question the authority of the colonial cartographic inscription, and to consider the overwriting reterritorializing effect of national cartography more generally. (52)
Showing how the historical geography of Canada is a space produced by the “meeting-up” of European and First Nations peoples and cultures, the Atlas embodies a more relational geography, to return to Massey’s proposals. The juxtaposition of the government map with the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en map bears out Monmonnier’s point mentioned above, that there are infinitely many possible maps of the same data. On the other hand, the contestation and debate over the maps themselves, and the process by which space is produced, in historical geography and in courtrooms and parliaments, is a never-ending process.
4. Keywords: Borders and Globalization
Massey points out that contemporary conversations about globalization typically draw on two contradictory neoliberal arguments about space: the “geography of borderlessness and mobility” marked by free trade and the migration of elite skilled labor on the one hand, and “a geography of border discipline” in which the poor risk their lives trying to find economic opportunities in other countries on the other (86). Her argument is not simply that these two geographies are contradictory, because of course it is conceivable to understand the world through both geographies; many today do. Rather, Massey contends, the problem arises because “each argument is legitimated by an appeal to a geographical imagination hailed as a universal” and those alleged universals contradict one another (165). The longing for a defensible, purified space—from gated communities to fortress Europe—betrays a fear of the collapsing of near and far, a fear of the other often associated with racism, classism, and xenophobia. But, on the other hand, the claim to defend a local space from outsiders can also be a strategy for resisting global capital, as in the example of the Amazon Deni tribe fighting the logging companies for the right to their own land (165). The point Massey makes here is that questions about openness and closure
should not be posed in terms of abstract spatial forms but in terms of the social relations through which the spaces, and that openness and closure, are constructed; the ever-mobile power-geometries of space-time. (166)
Seeing space as a production of interrelations and multiplicity means that “there are spatialised social practices and relations” particular to each encounter, in which openness is sometimes desirable and sometimes not, but always subject to some form of social negotiation (166).
Sparke’s second chapter, on the geographical imaginations of the northwestern US-Canadian region of Cascadia, shows how complicated and contradictory such negotiations can be. Defined largely by business boosters on both sides of the border, Cascadia is a cross-border region that includes, in its most limited version, the US states of Washington and Oregon and the Canadian province of British Columbia; in its largest imagined reach it also includes the provinces of Yukon and Alberta and states of Idaho, Montana, and Alaska (58-59). Pointing out the seeming naturalness and trans-border reach of the region, implied by its name, which alludes to the Cascade Range of the Northern Rocky Mountains, Sparke argues that Cascadia can be seen as a case study in reterritorialization, and a useful corrective to the anemic geography in Arjun Appadurai’s often-cited work on disjunctive “scapes”—technoscapes, ethnoscapes, and so on—in his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. For although Appadurai frequently uses spatial language in his discussions of global and local, borders, and landscapes, his is “an anemic geography of deterritorialization without reterritorialization” in many ways similar to the rhetoric of the Cascadia boosters (57).
Hyping technological advances such as the replacement of dedicated commuter lanes at the border with the “Smart Border” NEXUS system, based on digitally transmitted photo IDs and biometric identification, the Cascadia boosters sell an image of an advanced, efficient business environment with strong economic and transport links to Asia that also offers a commodified version of multiculturalism in the region’s Native population and history, plus great skiing (99-101, 109). By glossing over material realities such as uneven ethnic power relations and destructive consequences of neoliberal economic strategies, the business image of Cascadia, like Appadurai’s book,
too quickly dodge[s] the detailed material questions surrounding who precisely is enabled and who, by contrast, suffers as a consequence of all the deterritorializing dynamics. (64)
Neither do Appadurai’s theories “do much to distinguish between transnationals moved to become refugees by violence and those who move in elite circles of wealth and privilege” (64).
But, Sparke explains, in a counterhegemonic gesture of reterritorialization, the promoters of the “Two Nation Vacation” were scolded that it might also be called the Three Nation Vacation, in recognition of native sovereignty, and pressured to include native tourism groups, who argued that “if anyone was going to be selling native culture and artifacts it should be native peoples themselves” (109). The “ethnoscapes” of the Cascadia region offer interesting counterpoints to the commercial interests that are most vocally promoting it: in 1999, at a meeting of US and Canadian native groups, leaders from both countries and many nations vowed to “work together across a border drawn by colonialists” in an act of native “reterritorialization in the context of deterritorialization,” which moves to reclaim “an ethnoscape of native space that existed before the first round of modern territorialization even took place” (111).
Like Massey, Sparke points out that a critical and material approach to space can help us to explain the disjunctures and contradictions between the discourses of borders and globalization on the one hand, and the struggle for social justice on the other. Rather than resort to absolute conceptions of space and knowledge, however, both argue for a contingent, case-by-case, and power-aware analysis of border geographies and valorizations of the local or the transnational alike.
Cake and Conclusion
Massey recounts an anecdote about visiting her parents in her childhood home and sitting down to a ritual pot of tea and chocolate cake. Her mother had always made the same kind of heavy chocolate cake, and they always shared this treat when she visited. But once, her mother served her a different cake: “light-textured and fluffy” (124). Her mother had found a new recipe and was proud of the result, but her daughters “sent up a wail of complaint—‘Oh Mum…but we like the old chocolate cake’” (124). Massey’s nostalgia for her ‘home’ had been disrupted by a change: “part of the point of going home was to do things as we’d always done them,” as opposed to “joining up with ongoing Mancunian lives” such as her mother’s culinary experiments (124). But, as her story illustrates, even for a critical geographer, the notion of ‘home’ is often bound up with nostalgia such that “the imagination of going home … so frequently means going ‘back’ in both space and time” (124). Part of the challenge of space is to always try to recognize that “you can never simply ‘go back,’ to home or to anywhere else,” because, in the interval, “the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed” (124). Returning to a place you have once been is always in this way a visit to a new place, a meeting-up with people who have changed and where social relationships have altered, producing, in some sense, a new place (still related, of course, to the place it was when you last visited, but not the same).
Americanists may have grown accustomed to the familiar disciplinary conventions of absolute and essentialized space; we might be used to the assumptions that maps are simply visual forms of data useful in history lectures or textbooks. But this essay has tried to argue the advantages of trying out the cakes we can bake with other recipes. Our disciplinary “home” is also a space, produced through our face-to-face and virtual engagements with other scholars and other bodies of knowledge. And we can no more keep American studies rooted in the same fixed and essentialized place than we can stop the turning of the earth or the development of new cake recipes (see also Hones and Leyda 198). As Sparke concludes, “the critical intellectual point [is] that our work” of tracking and interrogating the hegemonic, world-making and geo-graphing forces is continual, and “we must persistently examine our own complicities with dominant discourse in the process” (312).
Works Cited
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Hones, Sheila, and Julia Leyda. “Towards a Critical Geography of American Studies.” Comparative American Studies 2.2 (2004): 185-204.
Hubbard, Phil, Rob Kitchin, Brendan Bartley, and Duncan Fuller. Thinking Geographically: Space, Theory and Contemporary Human Geography. London: Continuum, 2002.
Monmonnier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. 1991. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33-40.
Smith, Neil and Cindi Katz. “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics.” Place and the Politics of Identity. Eds. Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge, 1993. 67-83.