This article was downloaded by: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] On: 28 August 2009 Access details: Access Details:

[subscription number 912931706] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Social & Cultural Geography

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713708888

Book Reviews
Patrick J. Duffy a; Serin D. Houston b; Keld Buciek c; Chris Perkins d a Department of Geography, National University of Ireland Maynooth, b Department of Geography, Syracuse University, c Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change, Roskilde University, d Geography, SED, University of Manchester, Online Publication Date: 01 September 2009

To cite this Article Duffy, Patrick J., Houston, Serin D., Buciek, Keld and Perkins, Chris(2009)'Book Reviews',Social & Cultural

Geography,10:6,713 720
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14649360903069868 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360903069868

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 10, No. 6, September 2009

Book reviews
Miles Ogborn Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. xxiii 318pp., $40 cloth (ISBN-13 978-0226-62041-1). This book addresses two themes which have been in vogue for at least the past decade. The rst is the history of the Book, and the role of its regulation, production, circulation, and readership in the construction of the modern world. The second principal concern of Ogborns Indian Ink is the historical geography of writing and print which is as important as its history, especially in relation to colonialism. So, this is a study of the ink that was spilled by the East India Company in Asia and Europe, positioned in the broader context of the imperial use and control of writing and print as a politically and technologically signicant shaper of global relations. The rst chapter picks up an earlier debate on the role of writing in the construction of an imperial archive and its continuing inuence on understanding the post-colonial world. The production and control of knowledge and power by European colonial states from the seventeenth century is mapped out in the ows of written and printed documents through colonial spaces and journeys. Geographers probably have more to contribute to the writing of imperialism than other disciplines. Empires historically expanding global reach allows for a different analysis of the role of manuscript letters, printed books and pamphlets, surveys, maps or scientic treatises in linking new and old worlds in complex circuits of knowledge. Chapter 2 discusses the early performance of Company writings and their material expression in royal letters of commission (to keep trading accounts and to obtain permits from local Indian magnatesaccompanied by appropriate ceremonials) as well as rules and regulations, weights and measures and descriptions and data for subsequent expeditions. Chapter 3 focuses on later seventeenth-century Company bureaucracy relating to bookkeeping, regulation of factories (trading ports) in India and the management of power relationships between London and these far-ung trading outposts: the writings of the Company, in form, style, and storage expressed a hierarchy of power and control which reected a metropolitan vision of social and moral order. The annual letters, detailing the types, colour, quality, lengths, and patterns of cloth, how business should be conducted and so on, are interesting reections on writing and accounting strategies adopted to overcome the vast time-space distances for smooth running of Company business. Printing meant simultaneous access to a growing audience which was critically important in the formation of public and political discourse on imperial trade. What Ogborn calls, in Chapter 4, the political geography of

Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 16:55 28 August 2009

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/09/060713-8 q 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14649360903069868

714

Book reviews in a book, printed in many copies, for later use by other Englishmen. Printing was a political technology designed to centralise and x the administration of knowledge through publishing standardised grammars, dictionaries, typographies, codes of law, eliminating the inconsistencies, irregularities in native script and orthography that would make this distant colony amenable to a centralised imperial order. This is a comprehensive piece of scholarship: the detail at times is overwhelming, reecting the richness of the Company archive. The narrative is woven through the warp and weft of a multitudinous dramatis personae of important players in the colonial world of the East India Company. Their stories illustrate the political and technical use of script and print over three centuriesfrom Company captains like Alexander Sharpeigh, or executive agent Streynmsham Master, Company Governor Josiah Child to printing press operatives like Charles Wilkins and Nathaniel Halhead. Patrick J. Duffy Department of Geography National University of Ireland Maynooth q 2009 Patrick J. Duffy

print was important from the outsetthe royal or episcopal gateways which regulated by licence the spaces of production and readership and so the ow of printed information. Prohibiting or outlawing alternative voices in print was as signicant as actual publication. Pamphlet propaganda wars (with the Dutch) illustrate the strategic place of print in imperial aggrandisement. Following the mid-seventeenth-century explosion in print (with more printed publications in 1640 1660 than in the previous 150 years), competing merchant companies were aware of the power of print in publicising and protecting their mercantile interests. Into the eighteenth century, pamphlets, petitions, broadsides and coffee houses were powerful discursive sites in the imperial metropole of London. Chapter 5 examines the manner in which print fed into the early development of the stock market with the regular publication of data on stock price movements, surely a signicant indicator of the relationship between knowledge, economy and society. Ogborn looks at how print explained empire in Chapter 6. The management of the production of printed works in India made it an imperial technology, reected in Lord Wellesleys early nineteenth-century unsuccessful grand plan to make print one of the engines of empire. The rst grammar in Bengali was designed to regulate relations between the Natives of Europe who are to rule, and the inhabitants of India who are to obey (p. 212). The ultimate objective was to facilitate imperial governance by English ofcials who would know and implement Indian legal and accounting systems. A Mughal administrator cast a jaundiced eye on the strategic use of writing by colonial authority in the later eighteenth century: everything the Englishmen learned from local elites they set down in writing and stored away

Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 16:55 28 August 2009

Katherine McKittrick Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xxxi 190pp., $20.00 paperback (ISBN 08166-4702-X)., $60.00 hardback (ISBN 08166-4701-1). Demonic Grounds endeavors to interrupt prevailing assumptions about disciplinary isolation, the spatiality of blackness within North America, and the whereabouts of

Book reviews racism. Katherine McKittrick fuses black studies, geography, and social theory to produce an insightful rendering of the presence and spatial knowledge of black women within the USA and Canada. Her project to rematerialize and make visible black womens geographies persistently attends to questions of where and troubles presumptions about the naturalization of space, race, gender, and sexuality. It also exposes how black women have been integral to US and Canadian narratives of place. As she states, geographies of black femininity . . . are not necessarily marginal, but are central to how we know and understand space and place (p. 62, emphasis in original). Through delineating what she calls black geographiessubaltern or alternative geographic patterns that work alongside and beyond traditional geographies and site a terrain of struggle (p. 7)McKittrick illuminates how geography and black studies gain nuance and depth when considered in tandem. McKittrick strives to give esh to inbetween spaces (p. 47) as an avenue for expanding the landscape of social change and to emphasize the existence and centrality of black women historically and in the historical present. She effectively negotiates the tenuous line that many feminists tread between theorizing the body and locating the body as an object of study. She draws upon an array of sources, ranging from biographies of former slaves to the music of Spearhead, a contemporary band, to showcase the absented presence of black womens geographies. She sheds light on black womens geographies to help upend presumed and forged links between inequality and place. The text moves through historical and contemporary accounts of race, sexuality, and place to engage with deep time and space, a geographic framing that counters linear and teleological representations. McKittrick outlines the theoretical possibilities arising through

715

deep space and the poetics of landscape (as articulated by Edouard Glissant) to outline new ways for unpacking black womens geographies (Chapter 1): Deep space and a poetics of landscape reposition black geographies through taking notice of the ways in which space and place are fundamentally tied to the material landscape and daily social processes (p. 17, emphasis in the original). Related, she discusses the hiding places of former slaves to tease out the notion of paradoxical space (Chapter 2). This garreting illustrates the embodied realities of captivity and makes clear how such places constitute sites/sights between the visible and invisible, the center and margin. Extending these ideas, McKittrick later outlines the inventions of Man, Mans geographies, and interhuman geographies (p. 123) as she examines how particular hierarchies and inequalities are cast as natural truths and etched into the social and physical landscape (Chapter 5). Challenging normative perspectives emerges through other avenues as well, such as McKittricks questioning of the historical amnesia regarding racism in Canada evidenced through expressions of surprise and wonder (Chapter 4) and her exploration of the material and theoretical manifestations of the auction block (Chapter 3). Through each of these discussions, Demonic Grounds expresses an intensely human approachreplete with the pain and joys of struggleto geography and black studies. While this is an exciting tour de force of interdisciplinarity, my engagement with the text could have been even deeper if McKittrick had offered more contextualization of the highlighted authors. She presumes a certain awareness of the literature and art forms referenced and does not fully explicate why or how these authors/texts/musicians were chosen as valuable references. I also kept expecting some theoretical foray into performance and the performative. It seems like this mode of analysis

Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 16:55 28 August 2009

716

Book reviews Academic books seldom obey the laws of market supply and demand. Very often such books are published more as a result of supply than as a result of a market demanding new knowledge of specic topics. In recent years several geography-related books have been published about the Nordic region, in which the editors have collected papers from a number of scholars coming from the Nordic region for the purpose of marketing Nordic perspectives. One is entitled Voices from the North (Simonsen and Ohman 2003), another, which is the book being reviewed here, is called Nordic Landscapes by Jones and Olwig. I have chosen a less formal alternative to a normal review, downsizing the examination of bits and pieces, since the nature of Nordic Landscapes invites discussions on its framework. The two books mentioned above are connected in several ways. Relevant for the discussion here is the fact that Olwig in Voices argues for a particular Nordic conception of landscape as polity and place, not least based on his personal road to such a notion. In his article he more or less describes the whole concept of Nordic Landscapes, or as the book was once termed: Nordscapes. Interestingly, however, Olwig nishes his article in Voices by stating that There is no Nordic essence, nor an essential Nordic landscape geography, while at the same time arguing that the Nordic idea of landscape, remains untold . . . Work needs to be done to reconstruct that history. These might be confusing statements, but maybe the answer to this confusion should be found in the fact that both editors of Nordic Landscapes are non-Nordic, still maintaining an outside perspective on the Nordic region, despite having lived in the area for many years. In that respect, the whole book could be interpreted as a project of identity. Olwig ends his argument in Voices by stating: In some ways it is easier to see Norden from the

would resonate with the project given the array of sources that McKittrick relies upon. I found myself considering the material implications of her arguments as well. What does it mean for black women to have their centrality highlighted and known? How do theories of the body and corporeality translate into the tangible remaking of spaces? How do we more than just discursively reterritorialize or scale the body? Put differently, I wonder how this nexus of geography and black studies both unsettles assumptions and propels concrete change. Finally, recurring discussions about embodied epistemologies and the humanness of living prompted me to ponder the growing literature on emotional geographies. I question how McKittricks claims about the placement and whereness of black women could have been augmented and extended through these conversations. Although I am still mulling over the above queries and hesitations, I take this as a good sign. My curiosity is piqued; I want to hear more. Clearly, this is an innovative, provocative, and compelling book. It simultaneously requires us to locate and describe spatiality in many sites and confront our own disciplinary, scholarly, and personal erasures. McKittrick interrupts intellectual business as usual and offers discerning portrayals of collective haunting as she simultaneously imagines a more just future. Serin D. Houston Department of Geography Syracuse University q 2009 Serin D. Houston Michael Jones and Kenneth R. Olwig (eds) Nordic LandscapesRegion and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 578pp., $35 paperback (ISBN 978 0 8166 3915 1), $105 cloth (ISBN 978 0 8166 3914 4).

Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 16:55 28 August 2009

Book reviews outside, where national identities become weaker, and common denominators stronger. The more cosmopolitan our world becomes, however, the more we all become outsiders, and the more we are able to reect on the value of our more local identities. This might explain the renewal of interest in Nordic landscapes. Whose interest one might ask? Jones and Olwig are well-known scholars within the international debate on landscapes, to which they have made substantial contributions. Nordic Landscapes is an approximately 600page long anthology of historical geography, twenty-two chapters, framed by an introduction positioning the book as a reection upon the relationship between landscape and regional belonging. Michael Conzons The Making of the American Landscape from 1990 is referred to as the source of inspiration for Nordic Landscapes. Nordic Landscapes contains chapters on Greenland, Iceland, Norway, The Faroe Islands, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. The space here does not allow for the scrutinizing of the different contributions, some are good, some are bad and some are too old or are re-writings of older and already published material. The chapters on Finland and Greenland should be highlighted as interesting contributions to the discussions on relations between landscape, region and identity. However, many chapters should have been worked over much more with respect to quality, relevance, length and/or relation to the idea of the book. This, of course, is mostly the responsibility of the editors. The main focus is on the political landscape where people acting with different political motives to shape the landscape. In this respect, however, Nordic Landscapes fails as a coherent work. This is due to several problematic elements in the framing of the anthology. First of all the book lacks an account of the relations, differences and similarities between the different levels of identity being identied in the

717

introduction (individual, group, place, and regional identity) and the concept of belonging employed in the subtitle of the book. Likewise discussions of the relationship between landscape and region are underdeveloped. Only the chapter by Anssi Paasi tries to examine the topic in greater detail. The second problem concerning framing relates to the discrepancy between the academic level of the framing chapters and the different thematic contributions. The framing chaptersgiving a geographical overview on the features of the physical landscapes, topography and regional characteristics of the different parts of the Nordic areaare highly descriptive in an ideographic tradition and hardly any of the more academic discussions in the book put these framing chapters to any use. The book seems to try to satisfy an all too broad spectrum of interests. Thirdly, the geographic framing of the book is peculiar. I am writing this review in the southernmost part of what most Europeans regard as Norden, that is in the old German duchy of Lauenburg, just north of the Elbe river, now part of the German federal state Schleswig-Holstein. This region as well as the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern along the Baltic Sea is referred to as part of Norden in Germany. However, the editors of Nordic Landscapes have chosen not to include these regions (as well as the regions along the Polish Baltic seashore etc.) on the ground that they were never culturally Danish (p. 9). This is a peculiar argument, taking the overall framing chapters into consideration, since these demarcate the North through the geomorphological result of the last two ice ages. Northern Germany as well as the northern part of Poland in fact have exactly the same geomorphological history as the rest of the North. The omission of the landscapes of Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Poland etc. is

Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 16:55 28 August 2009

718

Book reviews partprofessions that even today are in use in Germany. The Estates (including die Ritter- und Landschaft), the Prince, Clergy, Citizens, professions etc. assembled in the Landtag (parliament, literally the day matters of the land is settled) to make laws, settle land disputes, agree on taxes etc. (see, for example, Kenzler 1997). This division between Land and Landschaft (between a geographical area and the political representation of that area) was alive in Germany until the end of the nineteenth century and many traces hereof are still in use in the administration today. It strongly inspired the Danish/Scandinavian land-administration on several occasions historically. In the course of time, the meaning of Land and Landschaft changed (probably due to changes in the power relations between the different estates), and landscape gradually also became a pictorial way of representing the surroundings in the shape of a spatially distanced scene. Today the many conceptualizations of landscape exist side by side, and there is little ground for elevating one of these understandings of landscape as being more Nordic than another. On the contrary, the Nordic way of thinking about this comes from the south, like so many other ideas.

problematic with respect to two other issues: any attempt to understand what today is the North, without reecting on the Baltic Sea region and the important geo-political signicance of this region, including the inuence of the Hansa-city empire on creating political landscapes all over the North, can only be a failure. The history of the coastal landscapes in the North is one of the most important elements in understanding this European region. It is remarkable that Nordic Landscapes does not in any way address this. Closest to this issue is a chapter on a fjordscape in western Norway, but in fact this relates only to farming and artists imaginations. The many kilometers of coastline and the landscapes of the many different coastal cultures in the region create key dimensions of specic regional identities (see the chapter by Paasi, p. 519), which were well worth exploring in a book like this. One last issue is worth mentioning in line with this: Jones and Olwig argue that understanding landscape as a legal and territorial domain of a polity is a specic Nordic conceptualization of landscape. I have my doubts as to whether this is true. On the contrary, it seems an evocation of the classic German concept. In Germany landscapes as expressions of polity, which is the angle Nordic Landscapes is trying to pursue, an angle that, in particular, Olwig in numerous publications has argued for, is clearer and more pronounced than in most of the cases in the anthology. The German root to the concept of landscape/Landschaft is social/political, since Landschaft for perhaps as long as 900 years in Germany has been synonymous with landestates/professions (Stande). These estates represented the Land in legal matters etc. and included the knighthood (German Ritterschaft), together called das Stande herrschaft. To support the organization and administration of the Land professions like Landmarschall, Landrat etc. played their

Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 16:55 28 August 2009

References
Kenzler, C. (1997) Die Ritter- und Landschaft im Herzugtum Sachsen-Lauenburg in der fruhen Neuzeit. Hamburg: Lauenburgische Akademie, Verlag Kovac. Simonsen, K. and Ohman, J. (eds) (2003) Voices from the North: New Trends in Nordic Human Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Keld Buciek Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change Roskilde University q 2009 Keld Buciek

Book reviews Peta Mitchell Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity: The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction New York and London: Routedge, 2008. xi 218pp., $95 hardback (ISBN 978-0-41595597-3). The late twentieth century has been a period when the gure of the map has increasingly been deployed in ction, in theory and in critical work. In this period social, economic and epistemological change has encouraged an increasingly complex body of poststructuralist theory, that emphasizes space instead of time and focuses attention away from modernist obsessions with the nation state, and its standardized and practical representation in cartography, towards a more nuanced and reexive world, characterized by ows, networks, global processes and a newly signicant assertion of local rights and action. Instead of representing the world, mapping has come to embody subjective and affective practices. Mitchells aim is to show how this change has been reected by authors whose ctional work deploys mapping metaphors, and to demonstrate how these metaphors themselves are morphing in the light of postmodern orthodoxies. In ctional discourse mapping metaphors have long been deployed as devices indicating control, power and governance. But this certainty has been replaced by a more subjective emphasis in contemporary narrative. Mitchell traces this changing shift in the use of mapping as a metaphor by authors back to the work of Alfred Korzybski in the late 1940s, when the constitutive power of mapping as a self-reexive device was rst theorized. In her rst chapter she sets out this the terrain of her thesis. Here she triangulates between the interrelatedness of postmodern
Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 16:55 28 August 2009

719

metaphor, textuality and cartography, drawing on Lakoff and and Johnsons experiential and transformative understanding of metaphor, Derridean and Barthean notions of intertextuality and Jamesons thesis of cognitive mapping. Her second chapter paraphrases critical cartographic work outlining a Foucauldian spatial and cartographic genealogy sourced in the main from Pickles (2004). The more subjective elements of mapping metaphors are picked up in a third chapter that explores how the subject has increasingly been regured as a nomad traversing space, with a particular focus upon Michael Ondaatjes The English Patient, Milorad Pavics Dictionary of the Khazars, and Jean ette Wintersons Sexing the Cherry. She then moves on to consider the guring of postindustrial cities as urban labyrinths with a particular focus on Walter Benjamin, the Situationists, Kevin Lynch and Fredric Jameson, de Certeau, Micel Butors Passing Time, Calvinos Invisible Cities, and Ontaatjes In the Skin of a Lion. The nal chapter stresses metamorphosis, drawing on Deleuzian readings of Kafka and Saramangos The Tale of the Unknown Island and arguing that mapping metaphors in post-modernity at once signal constant immanence, but also a constant reference to earlier established xitive qualities of mapping. There is no serious attempt to draw these disparate threads together, instead the narrative draws to a sudden end, simply repeating the assertions that it started from. Mitchells thesis is closely argued and supported by 31 pages of notes. The bibliography is surprisingly shortonly six pages of references. A useful index allows the reader to follow up references to authors and themes. But how persuasive are the arguments? There is very little that is new in here. Mitchell rehearses ideas developed persuasively twenty years ago by Graham Huggan and

720

Book reviews Also Mitchells style of writing makes the argument hard to access. Pseuds corner in Private Eye could use many of her often arcane, obscure and pretentious generalizations! What do you make, for example, of In short, with its emphasis upon process, connections, contiguity, experience, cognition, strategic language, and performativity, postmodern cartographic metaphor not only deconstructs the ideal of total transcendance but also the dystopia of subjective nihilism (p. 169). All too often the argument depends upon a complex linguistic structure to render the self- evident as complex! So overall Im afraid I nd it hard to recommend this text. Scholars of critical cartography will nd little new in here. Students will think it indigestible. Researchers in literary studies might be seduced, but are better advised to look elsewhere for their insights.

Tom Conley, name checking just about everyone from the fashionable pantheon of poststructuralist orthodoxy and applying these ideas to a seriously limited number of sometimes pretentious novels, eliding mass culture, or indeed mass cartography. The evidential basis for the argument is very thin. Indeed the thesis is strangely backwards looking. The eleven poorly reproduced examples of mapping that illustrate her thesis are almost all cliches highlighting represen tations and aspects of visual culture that have been written about before, and hark back to another age of published mappingthe Walter Crane Imperial Map is the most modern image displayed here. It is as if the visual world has not changed for over a century! Mitchell almost completely ignores the real world of mapping, the rich possibilities opened out by geovisualization, media mapping, and mass-market twentieth-century mapping. She largely ignores the implications of interactivity and the rise of GIS. The profound technological shifts occasioned by the web, mash-ups and the rise of crowd-sourced alternatives are absent from this account: everyday mapping practices are themselves morphing into a much more democratic form, that might have strongly supported her argument, but are completely ignored here.

Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 16:55 28 August 2009

Reference
Pickles, J. (2004) A History of Spaces. London: Routledge.

Chris Perkins Geography, SED University of Manchester q 2009 Chris Perkins