Geographies Of Nationhood

Download or read book Geographies of Nationhood written by Catherine Gibson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geographies of Nationhood examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood. In the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces, the development of ethnographic cartography, as part of the broader field of statistical data visualisation, progressively became a tool that lent legitimacy and an experiential dimension to nationalist arguments, as well as a wide range of alternative spatial configurations that rendered the inhabitants of the Baltic as part of local, imperial, and global geographies. Catherine Gibson argues that map production and the spread of cartographic literacy as a mass phenomenon in Baltic society transformed how people made sense of linguistic, ethnic, and religious similarities and differences by imbuing them with an alleged scientific objectivity that was later used to determine the political structuring of the Baltic region and beyond. Geographies of Nationhood treads new ground by expanding the focus beyond elites to include a diverse range of mapmakers, such as local bureaucrats, commercial enterprises, clergymen, family members, teachers, and landowners. It shifts the focus from imperial learned and military institutions to examine the proliferation of mapmaking across diverse sites in the Empire, including the provincial administration, local learned societies, private homes, and schools. Understanding ethnographic maps in the social context of their production, circulation, consumption, and reception is crucial for assessing their impact as powerful shapers of popular geographical conceptions of nationhood, state-building, and border-drawing.

Download or read book Subaltern Geographies written by Tariq Jazeel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subaltern Geographies explores the intersection between subaltern studies and cultural, urban, historical, and political geography to unravel subaltern perspectives, acknowledging the intricacies involved in conceiving and representing these spaces.

Download or read book Mapping the Nation written by Susan Schulten and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History). In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

Download or read book Geographies of Urban Female Labor and Nationhood in Spanish Culture, 1880–1975 written by Mar Soria and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mar Soria presents an innovative cultural analysis of female workers in Spanish literature and films. Drawing from nation-building theories, the work of feminist geographers, and ideas about the construction of the marginal subject in society, Soria examines how working women were perceived as Other in Spain from 1880 to 1975. By studying the representation of these marginalized individuals in a diverse array of cultural artifacts, Soria contends that urban women workers symbolized the desires and anxieties of a nation caught between traditional values and rapidly shifting socioeconomic forces. Specifically, the representation of urban female work became a mode of reinforcing and contesting dominant discourses of gender, class, space, and nationhood in critical moments after 1880, when social and economic upheavals resulted in fears of impending national instability. Through these cultural artifacts Spaniards wrestled with the unresolved contradictions in the gender and class ideologies used to construct and maintain the national imaginary. ? Whether for reasons of inattention or disregard of issues surrounding class dynamics, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literary and cultural critics have assumed that working women played only a minimal role in the development of Spain as a modern nation. As a result, relatively few critics have investigated cultural narratives of female labor during this period. Soria demonstrates that without considering the role working women played in the construction and modernization of Spain, our understanding of Spanish culture and life at that time remains incomplete.

Download or read book Invisible Countries written by Joshua Keating and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thoughtful analysis of how our world's borders came to be and why we may be emerging from a lengthy period of "cartographical stasis" What is a country? While certain basic criteria--borders, a government, and recognition from other countries--seem obvious, journalist Joshua Keating's book explores exceptions to these rules, including self-proclaimed countries such as Abkhazia, Kurdistan, and Somaliland, a Mohawk reservation straddling the U.S.-Canada border, and an island nation whose very existence is threatened by climate change. Through stories about these would-be countries' efforts at self-determination, as well as their respective challenges, Keating shows that there is no universal legal authority determining what a country is. He argues that although our current world map appears fairly static, economic, cultural, and environmental forces in the places he describes may spark change. Keating ably ties history to incisive and sympathetic observations drawn from his travels and personal interviews with residents, political leaders, and scholars in each of these "invisible countries."

Download or read book Geography and Nationalist Visions of Interwar Yugoslavia written by Vedran Duančić and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-21 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first historical work to examine the notion of national territories in Yugoslavia – a concept fundamental for the understanding of Yugoslav history. Exploring the intertwined histories of geography as an emerging discipline in the South Slavic lands and geographical works describing interwar Yugoslavia, the book focuses on the engagement of geographers in the on-going political conflict over the national question. Duančić shows that geographers were uniquely equipped to address the creation of the new country and the numerous problems it faced, as they provided accounts of Yugoslavia’s past, present, and even future, all of which were understood as inherently embedded in geography. By analyzing a large body of geographical narratives on the Yugoslav state, the book follows both the attempts to “naturalize” and present Yugoslavia as a sustainable political and cultural unit, as well as the attempts to challenge its existence by pointing to unresolvable, geographically conditioned tensions within it. The book approaches geographical discourse in Yugoslavia as part of a wider European scientific network, pointing to similarities and specifically Yugoslav characteristics.

Download or read book Geography, Science and National Identity written by Charles W. J. Withers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-04 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Withers' book brings together work on the history of geography and the history of science with extensive archival analysis to explore how geographical knowledge has been used to shape an understanding of the nation. Using Scotland as an exemplar, the author places geographical knowledge in its wider intellectual context to afford insights into perspectives of empire, national identity and the geographies of science. In so doing, he advances a new area of geographical enquiry, the historical geography of geographical knowledge, and demonstrates how and why different forms of geographical knowledge have been used in the past to constitute national identity, and where those forms were constructed and received. The book will make an important contribution to the study of nationhood and empire and will therefore interest historians, as well as students of historical geography and historians of science. It is theoretically engaging, empirically rich and beautifully illustrated.