Geography And National Identity

This volume of especially commissioned essays explores the geography of - and the role of geography in - national and proto-national identity. Place and national identity are bound together. Attachment to the one is almost always inseparable from the sense of the other. Yet, as this volume shows, the articulated self-conscious linking of place and identity is by and large a modern phenomenon that took root in nineteenth-century Europe. The formation of supra-national states and the much vaunted globalization of culture led many to believe there would be a progressive dilution of national identities and a growing agglomeration of places and nations into larger state units. Precisely the reverse has taken place. The contributors to this book explore the connections between identity and homeland. They show how a place may be perceived as archetypal, endowed with love and celebrated in music and poetry, yet be a pretext for violence and war. They examine the evolution of ideas about identity and their manifestation in a wide variety of settings, from the former Soviet Union to the island states of the South Pacific. Resurgent national identities and their homelands - and the problems associated with their realization - have been and will be with us for a long time: this book throws light on what they are, what they mean, and how they came to be.

Using Scotland as an exemplar, the author explores the relationship between geographical knowledge and national identity.

This groundbreaking work explores the vital importance of territory and space to any genuine understanding of nationalism and identity. Too often, the contributors argue, national identity is analyzed apart from the lands that are integral to its formation, as territory is seen as a commodity to be brokered rather than as central to a group's self-definition. This volume combines theoretical insights with structured case studies on how national identity manifests itself in space and at different geographical scales.

This extraordinary and truly international range of essays illustrates the different manifestations of the geographical imagination by locating myths of national identity and analysing their value in terms of pride, fear and aggression.

This comprehensive book examines the crucial connections between national identity, territory, and scale. Providing a powerful theoretical and organizational framework, the volume identifies four ways in which scale operates dynamically in the formation and maintenance of national identity. Consolidating identities considers the strategies necessary to keep all parts within the fold through educational systems, minority policies, immigration controls, and other forms of traditional state power. Magnifying identities examines the consequences of shifting the scale up and unifying territories that have a sense of a larger, supranational identity. Connecting identities assesses how nations can bridge physical distance, water barriers, or sovereign boundaries. Fragmenting identities looks into the disintegration of national identities and those forces that have the potential to unravel a nation or block its effective formation. Nationalism and national identity remain critical flashpoints in the geopolitical order, as we have seen in the development of a quasi-independent Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, the resurgence of Native American identities in response to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Chinese crackdown on its minority regions. Offering a rich set of case studies from around the world, this essential book affirms the global importance of national identity and scale.

The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among nonelite Americans. In a pathbreaking and richly illustrated examination of this transformation, Martin Bruckner argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres--written, for example, by William Byrd, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark--significantly influenced the formation of identity in America from the 1680s to the 1820s. Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, Bruckner recovers a vibrant culture of geography consisting of property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and school geographies, the nation's first atlases, and sentimental objects such as needlework samplers. By showing how this geographic revolution affected the production of literature, Bruckner demonstrates that the internalization of geography as a kind of language helped shape the literary construction of the modern American subject. Empirically rich and provocative in its readings, The Geographic Revolution in Early America proposes a new, geographical basis for Anglo-Americans' understanding of their character and its expression in pedagogical and literary terms.

How do we understand state and national systems of sovereignty as geographic or place-centered dramas of domination? How do we maneuver between incommensurable histories of the regional and transnational in a postmodern world?