Cultural geography 1

Abstract

In the first of three reviews I focus on how cultural geography is exploring modes and forms of power in relation to various contemporary conditions, including research on precaritization, dispossession, the state, and anti-black violence. A common concern in this work is with how power relations and effects are lived as part of the composition of experience. I demonstrate how this emphasis on experience manifests in attention to the specificities of modes of power and their intensities (how the effects of power come to form and are present/absent) and forms (how power relations are arranged into specific shapes or patterns).

Postcolonial Development, (Non)Sovereignty and Affect: Living On in the Wake of Caribbean Political Independence

“…Indeed, affect theory is rarely scaled up and reworked to consider not only the fantasy of sovereign individual agency and control in everyday life, but also relations among ambivalent, heterogeneous feelings about postcolonial national sovereignty as well. Developing such themes explicitly in this paper thus contributes something back to leading Western affect theorists like Ben Anderson (2006Anderson ( , 2016, and indeed in the case study below the hope of independence can be similarly understood as a "type of process in which something better is 'not yet' and thus has disruptive, excessive qualities even as it is immanent to lived and material culture at multiple scales" (Anderson 2006:698). But in this paper addressing such concerns through grounded ethnography in the Caribbean reroutes sovereignty and affect through histories of colonialism, independence, decolonisation, liberalism and neoliberalism into contemporary governance structures of postcolonial development planning.…”

Geographies of Empathy: Affective reconfigurations of Cities, Objects & Places

“…These nouns, like goals, are only tearing apart the society and manifested in feelings of dispossession (B. Anderson, 2017), which are contrary to the notion of empathy. On the contrary, the post-human being is co-produced with the digital and in the digital.…”

“…What we remark from those ideas is that there is a close relationship between the artistic expressions and the affective life by producing intensities of feeling (B. Anderson, 2017;Thrift, 2016). Therefore, the principles of drama can help to build the relationship between the character and the public or spectator.…”

“…crease and decrease in their intensity (B. Anderson, 2017). Secondly, intensity can be understood in many forms (affects, attachment, power), which is the object of this thesis.…”

Place and City: merging our affective and social spatial dimension in the (smart) platial city

“…Place dependency on culture, linguistics, dynamism, time and scale also complicate its boundary definitions (Ballatore, 2016). Furthermore, how cultural, 15 human and social geographies can be represented and how their representation is being theorized is currently under debate (Anderson, 2017). As stated by (Latour, 2005, p. 184) to enable a place involves practices of scaling, spacing and contextualizing.…”