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Geographical Imagination in the Twilight of the "American Century”

David Langstaff

Kommentar

In its everyday usage, the term “geography” is typically invoked to designate an arena of specialized knowledge concerned with maps and mapping, with spatial representations of peoples and environments, of territories and landscapes. In this popular sense, the notion of “space” is essentially geometric—space is little more than an empty container for representations of the shape, size, and relative position of objects, of the distances or boundaries between them. As young schoolchildren, most of us come to understand maps as simply practical tools for navigation, or else as banal artifacts we’ve had to encounter in compulsory exercises of rote memorization and regurgitation (e.g. identify this or that country, region, or capital city on a map). The field of Critical Geography, however, unsettles any presumption of space as an empty container for the already given, instead positing space as a question, an analytic, a constellation of socioecological relations that are historically situated and politically contested. ----- This course provides a broad survey of contemporary methods, approaches, and thematic concerns within the expansive and internally differentiated field of Critical Geography, emphasizing its stakes for grappling with a “long twentieth century” (in Giovanni Arrighi’s words) profoundly shaped by the rise and fall of U.S. hegemony. How might questions of space, time, and cartography need to be rethought, not only in the twilight of the historical period Henry Luce famously dubbed “the American Century,” but in light of the so-called Anthropocene, wherein the geological force of humanity threatens to unfold across a timescale that exceeds even human existence? How might a critical geographic imagination illuminate the uneven prospects and perils of this time of uncertainty and transition? In exploring such questions, we will engage Marxist, feminist, Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, posthuman, environmentalist, affective, and abolitionist geographical traditions, drawing on thinkers such as Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Natchee Blu Barnd, Neil Smith, Katherine McKittrick, Anna Tsing, André Mesquita, William Cronon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Lauren Berlant, among others. Schließen

13 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Mi, 14:00 - 16:00 13 Termine

Mi, 17.04.2024 14:00 - 16:00

Dozenten:
David Langstaff