Reanimating Regions

Culture, Politics, and Performance

James Riding, Martin Jones, James Riding, Martin Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317395034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Writing regions, undertaking a regional study, was once a standard form of geographic communication and critique. This was until the quantitative revolution in the middle of the previous century and more definitively the critical turn in human geography towards the end of the twentieth century. From then on writing regions as they were experienced phenomenologically, or arguing culturally, historically, and politically with regions, was deemed to be old-fashioned. Yet the region is, and always will be, a central geographical concept, and thinking about regions can tell us a lot about the history of the discipline called geography.

Despite taking up an identifiable place within the geographical imagination in scholarship and beyond, region remains a relatively forgotten, under-used, and in part under-theorised term. Reanimating Regions marks the continued reinvigoration of a set of disciplinary debates surrounding regions, the regional, and regional geography. Across 18 chapters from international, interdisciplinary scholars, this book writes and performs region as a temporary permanence, something held stable, not fixed and absolute, at different points in time, for different purposes. There is, as this expansive volume outlines, no single reading of a region.

Reanimating Regions collectively rebalances the region within geography and geographical thought. In renewing the geography of regions as not only a site of investigation but also as an analytical framework through which to write the world, what emerges is a powerful reworking of the geographic imagination. Read against one another, the chapters weave together timely commentaries on region and regions across the globe, with a particular emphasis upon the regional as played out in the United Kingdom, and regional worlds both within and beyond Europe, offering chapters from Africa and South America. Addressing both the political and the cultural, this volume responds to the need for a consolidated and considered reflection on region, the regional, and regional geography, speaking directly to broader intellectual concerns with performance, aesthetics, identity, mobilities, the environment, and the body.

Part I

Culture

1Writing Regional Cultural Landscape

Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads

David Matless

Writing on a Region

This essay reflects on the writing of two books on one region: In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads (2014), and The Regional Book (2015). The former is a research monograph published in the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers/Wiley-Blackwell book series, the latter a set of geographical descriptions published by Colin Sackett’s Uniformbooks. Their common territory is the Norfolk Broads, a wetland region in eastern England. In the Nature of Landscape drew together two decades of research on the region, revisiting the idea of regional cultural landscape as an ostensibly old-style geographic theme with new possibilities. The Regional Book was a happy offshoot, after Sackett suggested that a particular aspect of the RGS-IBG monograph, the descriptions of regional sites in the opening and closing chapters, might be developed into something more. Having shared various ideas and interests with Sackett over several years, and produced two essays and the cover photograph for Anticipatory History, a volume also produced through Uniformbooks (DeSilvey, Naylor and Sackett, 2011), this was a welcome proposal. The second half of this essay considers the production of these two volumes, closely related if different in style, giving a sense of their content and accounting for their regional writing. Both offer excursions in regional cultural landscape, and, given the themes of this edited collection, it is appropriate to begin by reflecting on this term, in its theoretical implications, its resonance in disciplines beyond geography, and its presence in geography’s past.

Revisiting Regional Cultural Landscape

In November 2006 I spent two weeks in Melbourne, arriving as Australia turned to summer. The Geography department at the University of Melbourne hosted the visit, and alongside seminars much time was spent with Fraser MacDonald, then a lecturer there, discussing regional cultural landscape. Flying from November England to November Australia neatly underlined the ways in which regions at far distance, but with long interconnection, may depart from and meet one another, the English visitor hit here and there on arrival: bright southern light, oak and eucalyptus, bee-eater and blackbird, Christmas floats in sun, suburban cricket, ‘flake’ (shark) and chips.

Working on Broadland, but also on the East Anglian region of Breckland (Matless, 2008), had indicated to me the possibilities of regional cultural landscape, and conversations and excursions in Melbourne confirmed these, and suggested other possible lines of enquiry. A projected joint paper never went beyond five subheadings (‘Registering the regional cultural landscape’, ‘Geographical outlines’, ‘Twentieth century chorographies’, ‘Retheorisations’, ‘Five tenets for regional cultural landscape’), but the themes developed would inform In the Nature of Landscape, when the opportunity arose to bring together work on the Broads in book form. If the grandly programmatic ‘five tenets’ never solidified, the notes towards them shaped subsequent work: contested boundaries and history, claims to cultural authority, iconic sites and landscape types, human-animal-vegetable-mineral, and geographical aesthetics.

‘Regional cultural landscape’ is familiar as a theme, if not always as an exact phrase, from earlier modes of geographical enquiry, and from a wider extra-scholarly topographical literature. One of the aims of In the Nature of Landscape was to revisit the term, given the comprehensive retheorisation, across a range of disciplines, of each of its constituent parts: region, culture, landscape. What would happen if region, culture and landscape, in their various ways rethought, were brought together again? If the theme of this collection is region, it is important to consider how that term may spark with others. Conceptually, as well as geographically, regions do not work in isolation.

The ‘culture’ in a revisited regional cultural landscape may variously indicate ways of life, habits of place, spheres of representation, material objects, forms of media, the province of a ‘cultured’ elite, that which is popular, that which is not nature, the modes through which nature is valued. The varied capacities and complexities of the term culture, and all the tensions running between such definitions, may be embraced in regional study. Landscape, like culture, entails movement across fields, sometimes obviously adjacent and conversant, sometimes ostensibly living in discrete parallel, thickly hedged. The ‘landscape’ in regional cultural landscape thus brings with it those qualities of ‘duplicity’ and ‘tension’ highlighted in cultural geographic work (Daniels, 1989, Matless, 1998, Wylie, 2007), to which might be added a sense of landscape as colloquial, denoting the presence of different voices: a colloquium of different disciplines, the colloquial voice of the vernacular and everyday. Accents of landscape, expert or common, spoken or written, articulate regional multiplicity.

Bringing region, culture and landscape together again does not make for a newly complex, steady template for empirical application, rather their recombination generates a productive charge, from varieties of cultural baggage and intellectual tradition. As with landscape, we might abide in rather than seek to resolve such instability. Strains of recent work in cultural geography and beyond can indicate some of the possibilities here. Thus Fraser MacDonald’s research makes for a Hebridean regional cultural study, with folklore, photography, militarism, geography and archaeology shaping island landscape (MacDonald, 2004, 2006a, 2006b, 2011, 2014). Hayden Lorimer’s works on the Cairngorms and wider Highland Scotland effectively combine into regional cultural analysis, encompassing field study and the geographer citizen, landholding and animal killing, natural histories of flora and fauna, and the animal landscapes of herding Cairngorm reindeer (Lorimer, 2000, 2000, 2006; Lorimer and Lund, 2003; Lorimer and Spedding, 2005). Dydia DeLyser’s Ramona Memories likewise takes a region for scrutiny, the Southern Californian ‘Ramona Country’, defined touristically following Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona (DeLyser, 2005).

Regional cultural landscape also preoccupies scholarship beyond geography, showing how regional questions may serve to entwine theory and description, and retune tradition. Regional landscape enquiry navigates the historic and experimental in performance studies, as in Mike Pearson’s book “In Comes I”: Performance, Memory and Landscape (Pearson, 2006; Daniels, Pearson and Roms, 2010; Matless and Pearson, 2012). Pearson takes a patch of north Lincolnshire to develop the possibilities of performative engagement with landscape; a parallel 2013 volume, Marking Time, offers a Cardiff-based urban companion (Pearson, 2013). Pearson takes region (rather than author, period or genre) as his ‘optic’ (Pearson, 2006: 3), and his work prompts reflection on disciplinary approaches to regional cultural landscape, made in the spirit of the 2001 invitation in Pearson and Shanks’ Theatre/Archaeology: ‘And the folklorist, the archaeologist, the geographer are most welcome to come and stand in our field. We do not want simply to appropriate their methodologies. We want them to look, and to enable us to look through them, at performance’ (Pearson and Shanks, 2001: xiv). If geography and performance studies share regional interest, they perform the region in subtly different fashion. For Pearson region carries novelty, a new term for a relatively new discipline, but for the geographer the word might signal rediscovery, reassertion, reanimation, or an old rut escaped. Performance and geography carry different genealogies to meet over ‘region’, the word migrating between the novel and familiar, the avant-garde and old hat.

With Regard to the Old Hat

The proposal for this volume suggested of the authors that: ‘Importantly they do not argue for a return to an old regional geography of plain description, but rather a relational, co-constitutive understanding of how regions come to be.’ The proposal also indicated that recent neglect of regional study might in part be because regional geography had ‘struggled to shake off its past: a dangerous, conservative, sub-discipline, which can easily be drawn upon by nationalistic factions, through a simplification of identity politics’. Whatever the virtues of new and reanimating approaches, and the rhetorical conventions of a book proposal, is there a risk here of caricaturing the past? And what are the consequences where a ‘reanimation’ of regions is established through a deadening of the old? It is as if we must check that the body is dead before trying to reanimate. The history of regional geography might itself however receive a more subtle, relational understanding, and in the process reanimation might appear less as a leaving behind of a moribund past, than something having due regard for former lives, and the lessons they might carry.

A characterisation of an older regional geography as dangerously conservative or nationalistic belies the complexity of earlier work, and in doing so projects an unproblematic and straightforwardly negative quality onto a term such as ‘conservative’. The history of regional work cuts across, and sometimes blurs, categories such as radical and conservative, progressive and traditional, cosmopolitan and nationalist, and any reclamation and reanimation of the region might proceed from embracing such a political genealogy (Clout, 2009; Graham, 1994; Livingstone, 1992; Matless, 1992). The aesthetic characterisation of older work as simple and limited might also be questioned. There was more to old regional geography than plain description; and indeed there is always more to plain description than plain description. Even if ‘plain description’ is an outcome desired and achieved, that denotes an aesthetic accomplishment worthy of appreciative understanding, if not necessarily emulation. And the old hat might even be worth trying on.

Parallel regional questions are raised by recent work in literary studies, where a new ‘literary geography’ has drawn on cultural geographic work to revisit regional writing. In Ralph Pite’s study of Thomas Hardy, Hardy’s Geography, regionalism becomes central to Hardy’s radicalism, challenging any assumed conjunction of regionalism, conservatism and constraint. For Pite the regional geographic sense works in Hardy’s novels of character and environment to shape a complex ‘clash of registers’ (Pite, 2002: 16; Barrell, 1982). The region is also recast as site and scale for literary innovation and experiment through the excavation of a neglected literary conjunction of the regionalist and modernist, resisting a ‘metronormativity’ aligning modernism with the metropolis (Herring, 2009: 2). Neal Alexander and James Moran’s 2013 collection Regional Modernisms, whose agenda is informed by work in cultural geography, and by relational understandings of the region, finds regional literary energy. Whether attending to established canonical figures such as James Joyce, DH Lawrence or William Carlos Williams, or lesser-known writers such as Sylvia Townsend Warner or Leo Walmsley, Alexander and Moran note: ‘In such instances of regional modernism an internationalist or cosmopolitan sensibility arises, paradoxically, from situations and contexts that are distinctively local or provincial’ (Alexander and Moran, 2013: 2; also Alexander and Cooper, 2012). The call in such work is for ‘geographically attentive modes of reading’ (Alexander and Moran, 2013: 7), exemplified by Alexander’s own study of poet Basil Bunting, whose major 1966 work Briggflatts (Bunting, 2009), a reference point also for In the Nature of Landscape, centres on Northumbria: ‘His regional modernism is characterised both by the imaginative centrality of northern landscapes and cultural paradigms to his writing, and by the refraction of such local and regional attachments through a self-consciously international modernist poetics.’ In Briggflatts, ‘Northumbria emerges as a luminous and multi-faceted affective terrain’ (Alexander, 2013: 200). Alexander’s treatment of Bunting attends to the nuances of geographic scale shaping his work, showing how the regional, national and international are articulated in a nonhierarchical manner, with time and memory enfolded through a dynamic geography. Alexander respects region without seeking to root his subject:

To speak of the poem’s ‘rootedness’ in place is therefore to neglect its grasp of the dynamism of place itself, its manifestation of change in the here-and-now, and to underestimate the entanglement of regional, national and international affiliations in its representational forms. Indeed, Briggflatts eschews the rhetoric of rootedness and dwelling for metaphors of weaving, braiding, and ravelling through which the networks of association and implication that make locations humanly meaningful might be intuited. (217)

If, then, aesthetically and politically, the region carries a past deserving attention, a reanimation of regional geography might benefit from engagement with earlier narratives. The complexities of region’s past, and its possibilities for the present, are indicated in the way in which one key figure from the history of regional geography has been subject to recent evaluation. Patrick Geddes, polymathic influence on regional geographic work in many countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Meller, 1990; Welter, 2002), was revisited in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a pioneer of a radical, ecological Scottish nationalism (Cam...