Gender Geography And Empire

This title was first published 2000: This text is intended to draw together two important developments in contemporary geography: firstly, the recognition of the need to write critical histories of geographical thought and, particularly, the relationship between modern geography and European imperialism; and secondly, the attempt by feminist geographers to countervail the absence of women in the histories. The author focuses on the narratives of British women travellers in West Africa between 1840 and 1915, exploring their contributions to British imperial culture, teh ways in which they wer empowered in the imperial context by virtue of both "race" and class, and their various representations of West African landscapes and peoples. The book argues for the inclusion of women and their experiences in histories of geographical thought and explores the possibilities and problems of combining feminist and post-colonial approaches to these histories.

This book explores the relationships between empire, natural history, and gender in the production of geographical knowledge and its translation between colonial Burma and Britain. Focusing on the work of the plant collector, botanical illustrator, and naturalist, Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe, this book illustrates how natural history was practised and produced by a woman working in the tropics from 1897 to 1921. Drawing on the extensive and under-studied archive of private and official correspondence, diaries, sketchbooks, photographs, paintings, and plant lists of Wheeler-Cuffe, this book advances our conceptual understanding of the 'invisible’ historical geographies underpinning scientific knowledge production, by focusing on the role of a female actor in the complex gendered setting of colonial Burma. Using a bio-geographical approach, this analysis reconceptualises female agency beyond authorship and publication, and stresses how Wheeler-Cuffe represents an instantiation of the occluded contribution of women to the historiography of natural history. This book highlights Wheeler-Cuffe’s production of scientific knowledge about Burma in the context of her relationship, as a white Western woman, with local, indigenous actors and details her practice of fieldwork and its embodied geographies in different parts of Burma, while she maintained the domestic superstructure of a colonial wife. This book will be of interest to advance-level students and researchers in historical and cultural geography; the history of science; feminist geography; women and natural history; colonial Burma and imperialism; and botanical art and illustration.

"This book explores the relationships between empire, natural history and gender in the production of geographical knowledge and its translation between colonial Burma and Britain. Focusing on the work of the plant collector, botanical illustrator and naturalist, Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe, this book illustrates how natural history was practiced and produced by a woman working in the tropics from 1897-1921. Drawing on the extensive and under-studied archive of private and official correspondence, diaries, sketchbooks, photographs, paintings, and plant lists of Wheeler-Cuffe, this book advances our conceptual understanding of the 'invisible' historical geographies underpinning scientific knowledge production, by focusing on the role of a female actor in the complex gendered setting of colonial Burma. Using a bio-geographical approach, this analysis reconceptualizes female agency beyond authorship and publication, and stresses how Wheeler-Cuffe represents an instantiation of the occluded contribution of women to the historiography of natural history. This book highlights Wheeler-Cuffe's production of scientific knowledge about Burma in the context of her relationship, as a white Western woman, with local, indigenous actors and details her practice of fieldwork and its embodied geographies in different parts of Burma, while she maintained the domestic superstructure of a colonial wife. This book will be of interest to advance level students and researchers in historical and cultural geography; the history of science; feminist geography; women and natural history; colonial Burma and imperialism; and botanical art and illustration"--

Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges presents a collection of original readings that address gendered dimensions of empire from a wide range of geographical and temporal settings. Draws on original research on gender and empire in relation to labour, commodities, fashion, politics, mobility, and visuality Includes coverage of gender issues from countries in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia between the eighteenth to twentieth centuries Highlights a range of transnational and transregional connections across the globe Features innovative gender analyses of the circulation of people, ideas, and cultural practices

The authors examine the conduct of men and women in the British Empire, focusing on topics such as politics, medicine, sexuality, childhood, religion and migration and ask why the empire was dominated by men and how that domination affected the conduct of imperial politics.

Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica is among the first Slavery Studies books - and the first in Art History - to juxtapose temperate and tropical slavery. Charmaine A. Nelson explores the central role of geography and its racialized representation as landscape art in imperial conquest. One could easily assume that nineteenth-century Montreal and Jamaica were worlds apart, but through her astute examination of marine landscape art, the author re-connects these two significant British island colonies, sites of colonial ports with profound economic and military value. Through an analysis of prints, illustrated travel books, and maps, the author exposes the fallacy of their disconnection, arguing instead that the separation of these colonies was a retroactive fabrication designed in part to rid Canada of its deeply colonial history as an integral part of Britain's global trading network which enriched the motherland through extensive trade in crops produced by enslaved workers on tropical plantations. The first study to explore James Hakewill's Jamaican landscapes and William Clark's Antiguan genre studies in depth, it also examines the Montreal landscapes of artists including Thomas Davies, Robert Sproule, George Heriot and James Duncan. Breaking new ground, Nelson reveals how gender and race mediated the aesthetic and scientific access of such - mainly white, male - artists. She analyzes this moment of deep political crisis for British slave owners (between the end of the slave trade in 1807 and complete abolition in 1833) who employed visual culture to imagine spaces free of conflict and to alleviate their pervasive anxiety about slave resistance. Nelson explores how vision and cartographic knowledge translated into authority, which allowed colonizers to 'civilize' the terrains of the so-called New World, while belying the oppression of slavery and indigenous displacement.

"The editors of this genuinely brilliant book seem to dare the reader to argue with them from the first page... I would encourage everyone interested in cultural geography, or in the cultural turn within a whole set of human geogrphies, to do likewise." --ANNALS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS "A richly plural and impassioned re-presentation of cultural geography that eschews everything in the way of boundary drawing and fixity. A re-visioning of the field as "a set of engagements with the world," it contains a vibrant atlas of ever shifting possibilities. Throbbing with commitment, and un-disciplined in the most positive sense of that term, it is exactly what a handbook ought to be." --Professor Allan Pred Department of Geography, University of California at Berkeley Ten sections, with a detailed editorial introduction, the Handbook of Cultural Geography presents a comprehensive statement of the relation between the cultural imagination and the geographical imagination. Emphasising the intellectual diversity of the discipline, the Handbook is a textured overview that presents a state-of-the-art assessment of the key questions informing cultural geography, while also looking at resonances between cultural geography and other disciplines.

A Companion to Cultural Geography brings together original contributions from 35 distinguished international scholars to provide a critical overview of this dynamic and influential field of study. Provides accessible overviews of key themes, debates and controversies from a variety of historical and theoretical vantage points Charts significant changes in cultural geography in the twentieth century as well as the principal approaches that currently animate work in the field A valuable resource not just for geographers but also those working in allied fields who wish to get a clear understanding of the contribution geography is making to cross-disciplinary debates