Cultural Geographies: An Introduction by John Horton and Peter Kraftl (review)

In recent years, cultural geographers have produced an important body of work that holds interest for literary scholars as well as a wider audience interested in cultural studies. Cultural Geographies provides an in-depth introduction to this rich body of research about cultural practices and politics. It explores the role of artistic and written representations in understanding social identities and subcultures. Although it is first and foremost a textbook for students of human geography, complete with case studies and learning activities, the text could also serve as a resource and reference for scholars interested in interdisciplinary work. Particularly interesting in this regard are the chapters on textual geographies, performed geographies, and identities. Other chapters deal with cultural production, consumption, architectural geographies, landscapes, material things, emotional and affective geographies, and bodily geographies.

The chapter on textual geographies explores the connections between the discipline of geography and texts of all kinds. This chapter also foregrounds the debates about representation in cultural geography. Due to the standpoint of the authors, who are both British cultural geographers, the emphasis of this chapter, as of most of the book, is on the importance of texts as objects of enquiry for cultural geographical research. The authors do, however, also provide insights that are applicable in reverse, for scholars who are more interested in the importance of cultural geography as a factor in the study of texts and performances. Cultural geographers have turned to fictional texts as sources that can tell us about subjective experiences of particular places and landscapes; a focused study of geographical aspects and their representation can also broaden our understanding of fictional texts.

The following chapter, entitled performed geographies, raises some general questions regarding the nature of art and performances. It then considers musical performances, sporting performances, dance (with a case study on dance, performance art and politics in India), and the performance of everyday life. Horton and Kraftl’s insights on how lifestyles perform and depict places in new ways, and turn places themselves into objects to be consumed or ignored, should be of interest to scholars beyond the disciplinary confines of cultural geography.

This line of thought is further developed in the chapter on identities, which more deeply explores the connection between the social and the spatial. Asserting that identities are always time- and space-specific, Horton and Kraftl turn their eye to the social construction of identity. They provide a short, yet detailed discussion of feminist geographies and the role of gender in public and domestic spaces. In order to illuminate the social construction and performativity of identity with the help of case studies, the authors examine the Australian citizenship test, colonial constructions of childhood in British Columbia, and the role of internet usage in regard to Chinese national identities. Their discussion of geographies of the internet, while just a relatively short introduction to the topic, should be particularly useful to scholars who are interested in the effects and ramifications of new social media.

Throughout this text, Horton and Kraftl engage with a wide spectrum of social and cultural theories. They discuss the multiple meanings and uses of the word “culture,” and they also remind us that knowledge is always situated, and writing is positional and embodied. Last but not least, they provide a richly annotated bibliography of key readings in the field of cultural geographies and neighboring disciplines.