Geographies of responsibility

Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential georaphies of both

Political scandal at the end of ideology? The mediatized politics of the Bo Xilai case

In this article, I use the high-profile Bo Xilai case to illustrate the dialectics of media and politics in contemporary China. I start by explaining some of the similarities and key differences between mediatized politics in the West and in China. This leads to an emphasis on the ideological dimension of media logic that is largely missing from discussions derived from a liberal democratic context. I then analyze the dialectics of the mediatized ideological struggle and politicized media logic running through the Bo Xilai scandal. In the last section, I summarize the theoretical contributions that the Chinese case makes to the study of mediatized politics

“Positive parochialism”, local belonging and ecological concerns: Revisiting Common Ground's Parish Maps project

Scepticism about the value of parochialism and local belonging has been a persistent feature of geographical scholarship, which has advocated a relational account of place and a cosmopolitan worldview. This paper revisits the Parish Maps project that was instigated in 1987 by UK arts and environment charity Common Ground, which led to the creation of thousands of maps across the UK and beyond, and was appraised in 1996 by Crouch and Matless in this journal. Drawing on archival materials and in‐depth interviews, we examine the legacy of the project. We argue that Common Ground's vision for Parish Maps represents a “positive parochialism” that confidently asserts the validity of the parish without retreating towards insularity. We complicate this by revealing diverse ways that communities took up Common Ground's vision. We conclude by arguing that the view of parochialism manifest by Parish Maps offers a foundation for ecological concern that remains relevant today, with places offering the potential for solidarities that bring together local and incomer. This “positive parochialism” disturbs assumptions that local attachments are necessarily exclusive and indicates the unresolved challenge of finding ways to realise the value of affect and creative environmental engagement in wider policy and land‐use planning

Grounds for engagement: Dissonances and overlaps at the intersection of contemporary civilizations analysis and postcolonial sociology

This article elucidates grounds for engagement between two fields of the social sciences engaged in critique of Eurocentrism: contemporary civilizations analysis and postcolonial sociology. Between the two fields there are both evident dissonances and points of potential dialogue and engagement. The article identifies three areas of high contention: divergent perceptions of essentialism, commitments to transformative politics and evaluations of the paradigm of multiple modernities. Despite extensive theoretical and normative differences, a notional intersection of the two fields is outlined in the form of three conceptual and methodological shifts. The first is a displacement of ideal typology. The second move is the most original. ‘Intercivilizational encounters’ and ‘intracivilizational encounters’ are re-cast as ‘intercivilizational engagement’. The goal is the demarcation of a discrete position based on a strong version of interaction that goes further than the notion of intercivilizational encounters recently re-developed in civilizational analysis. To illustrate potential grounds for engagement on this point, the article reviews the historiography of ‘connected histories’ and the insights of relational historians. Finally, the article urges for a nuanced definition of ‘region’ and deeper appreciation of the multiplicity of regionalisms as a meeting point for both fields of critique of Eurocentrism

Bye-bye Barack: dislocating afropolitanism, spectral marxism and dialectical disillusionment in two Obama-era novels

In contextually specific and formally distinctive ways, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers are fictional interrogations of Obama’s presidential pledge to resuscitate the American dream on the wake of the global financial crash. This paper explores how they supplement and challenge familiar tropes associated with African and American, rather than African-American, diaspora writing. Given broader debates within transnational literary studies about flows and exchanges (of people, finance, cultural production, dissemination, consumption et al.) linking the global South and North, I consider how these texts grapple with the complexities and complicities of contemporary neoliberalism through the lens of renascent African Marxisms. While my chosen writers could not be described as Marxist, I engage with more materially oriented scholarship, such as Krishnan’s Writing Spatiality in West Africa and Ngugi’s The Rise of the African Novel, to consider how Americanah and Behold the Dreamers circulate in a global literary marketplace where certain texts, not to mention authors, are seen as symptomatic of an African and/or Afropolitan and/or ‘Africapitalist’ renaissance. By grappling with Marxist-inflected scholarship, this paper interrogates the politics, as well as poetics, of the oft-conspicuous airbrushing of those socio-economic, specifically class concerns at the heart of these entangled debates