Narrating territory, politics and governance

When reflecting on the relationship between, and intersection of, territory, politics and governance, I find myself drawn to fictional writing and popular media. Freed from the scholarly conventions of knowledge generation, methodological rigour and academic referencing, there is something rather refreshing about the creative power of novelists, film directors and television writers to contemplate, interrogate, and speculate on fictional and factual worlds in the past, present and future. In my disciplinary matrix, I would term this either popular and/or everyday geopolitics, while others might refer to popular culture and world politics or cultural anthropology (see, for example, Basham, 2016, Dittmer & Dodds 2008, Jansen, 2009).

The critical acclaim that accompanied the televisual adaption of Margaret Atwood’s The handmaid’s tale (Miller, 2017) speaks to a contemporary appetite for politicised drama, which is unafraid to contemplate weird, unsettling and violent worlds. As others have noted, it seems emblematic of a world where the ‘darker clouds’ of populism, ethnic nationalism, chauvinism and affect-fuelled violence are making themselves felt (see, for example, Davies, 2018). Wendy Brown’s Undoing the demos, reminds us that there is a long history of neoliberal rationality to trace and appreciate, when accounting and auditing the undermining of liberal democratic imaginaries and practices (Brown, 2015).

As a scholar of film, and rapacious reader of novels, I don’t need much encouragement to posit the claim that films such as Frozen river (Hunt, 2008) and novels such as Celeste Ng’s Everything i never told you (2014) are extraordinary mediations on territory, politics and governance (for example, Dodds, 2013). In Frozen river, we follow the stories of two women, one white working class and a younger woman of Sioux heritage, who live and work close to the US-Canadian border. Economic dislocation and sexual discrimination bring the women together in a high-stakes illegal smuggling operation involving Asian nationals made possible by the freezing of the river border. The social and physical qualities of the borderland terrain prove, literally, elemental in their negotiation of border security and the everyday (racist) politics of upstate New York. In Everything i never told you, we learn how a family tragedy shapes the lives of a married couple, a Chinese-American husband and white American wife, through the struggle to deal with self-hate, survivor guilt and sibling rivalries. The racial and gendered politics of small town America make themselves felt in everyday life, from the university, schools and local community somewhere in Ohio. If Frozen River is informed by a post-9/11 zeitgeist, the novel’s backdrop of Cold War America and post-war expressions of the ‘American dream’ inform the narrative arc and emotive qualities of the persona dramatis.

The articles in this special issue speak to me, at least, to the power of story-telling. They tackle on the face of it a diversity of topics – from colonial Kenya to the neo-liberal condition of European cities, alongside peak oil imaginaries and contemporary Mozambique. I want to start with Nichola Harmer’s (2017) paper on ‘crude geopolitics’ because, like me, she likes quoting Margaret Atwood. In an opinion piece on climate change, Atwood channels her dystopian powers to present to readers a series of earthly futures, which curates a peak-like sensibility – where shortages and chaos are endemic and where women bear the brunt of the ensuing violence (Atwood, 2018). Little wonder that television companies are pushing in our direction shows such as Doomsday preppers (Madison, 2011), which follow the endeavours of some American families to prepare for ‘end times’. In Harmer’s reading of ‘crude geopolitics’, she explores peak-oil fiction and the work of novelists to imagine a world of crude shortage and geopolitical crudeness. Strikingly, most of the novels are set in small towns: no longer places for wholesome living, the small town gets re-imagined at the frontline of dislocation and bedlam. If there is hope of survival, it appears to lie in the hands of survivors willing and able to reimagine alternatives to the crude petro-state and operationalise strategies of resilience.

Novelists are not the only ones to suspect that the modern nation-state may not be delivering on its social and political contract to citizens. The liberal democratic state appears to be under ever greater scrutiny in the United States and Europe – the homeland of liberalism (Westbrook, 2016). From decrying the forces that gave rise to Trump and Brexit, there is less confidence in the air that persistent inequalities and environmental degradation can be addressed by prevailing governance structures. Territorial borders matter but making them matter in ways that produce progressive outcomes remains testing. In James Duminy’s (2017) investigation of colonial British East and Southern Africa, we are left in no doubt that the territorialising impulses of colonial governance produces profound implications for human communities and ecologies. Using food, rather than oil as analytical register, this paper deftly explores how the governance legacies of modern colonialism, including geopolitical and bio-political qualities, continue to make themselves felt in the organization of territory. As the analysis of 1940s Kenya reveals, colonial authorities were quite capable of brutal assessments of how and where to secure a ‘population’ rather than specific communities, with interesting implications for the stories we narrate about how states manage their territories, ecologies and communities, human and non-human.

The third paper in this issue continues to contemplate the power of narrative arcs, with a specific focus on ‘rising Africa’. Reading Andrew Brooks’s (2017) work on middle class communities in Mozambique is enlightening for someone who was at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), in the early 1990s when James Sidaway was writing about late Cold War Mozambique and the complex legacies of apartheid South Africa, Cold War militarism, decolonization and Marxist-Leninist ideologies (Sidaway, 1993). In the 1970s and 1980s, Mozambique was a so-called frontline state, which was understood by the white minority governments in Pretoria to be complicit with a Soviet-inspired ‘total onslaught’ (Hanlon, 1986). Brooks, like Sidaway a RHUL PhD graduate, turns his analytical attention to a Mozambique which is busy remaking its connections with the wider world. Nowadays, the talk of elites in Maputo is more likely to be the current and future state of foreign direct investment and market access rather than Cold War agitation and apartheid regimes. But as Brooks cautions, the neo-liberalization of Mozambique has created its own demons. If Africa is ‘rising’, and if Mozambique’s middle class is growing, it has come with caveats. Inequality and precariousness remain endemic but what is intriguing is how Brooks’s interviewees have plenty of authorial scope to narrate their own place within the country’s transition to a market economy.

The final paper in this issue finds us in four European cities: Barcelona, Brussels, Leeds and Turin. I have to confess I would not have thought of this as a quartet, which would attract scholars of the impact and reach of the financial crisis. But Sara González and her colleagues (González, Oosterlynck, Ribera-Fumaz, & Rossi, 2017) remind us that comparative studies are all the richer when we don’t put into conversation the usual suspects such as London and New York. Their paper reminds me of one of my favourite books by a former colleague, Mustafa Dikeç. In Urban rage, we are taken on an emotive roller-coaster of a journey through the experiences of disadvantaged communities in Athens, Ferguson Missouri, Stockholm, Paris, Istanbul and London (Dikeç, 2017). By the end of both texts, the eclectic mixture of cities with different social histories, political responsibilities, and economic profiles, produces a refreshing exposé of the underlying and explicit violence of neo-liberalism. Intriguingly, González and her colleagues reveal the power of story-telling – the political and economic elite in their cities blame the ‘financial crisis’ on external factors and extra-territorial actors – national, regional and global – rather than scrutinize local political models and ways of doing business. In all cases, albeit with distinctive twists, the financial crisis was understood, narrated and acted upon in similar ways – the adoption of austerity, the propagation of tried and tested policies designed to promote resilience and the stoking of national and regional resentments and slights. When in doubt blame nasty bankers, remote foreign capitals, rapacious multinationals and indifferent elites. A medley of political leaders, activists, citizens, academics as well as novelists, film directors and dramatists have had no problem in doing precisely that.

Thirty years after its publication, I still find myself relishing the literary and political qualities of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the vanities – it might be set in New York but greed, vanity, and myopia seem to be running through all of this European tour. As the novel’s protagonist, Sherman McCoy, notes as he is driving towards Manhattan, ‘Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening—and he was among the victors!’ (Wolfe, 1987 quoted in Sykes, 2018, p. 75).

So I hope this latest issue of Territory, Politics, Governance will provide plenty of food for thought. The four papers in this issue showcase a rich body of work undertaken by social scientists but as should be apparent here, the authors are also story-tellers. They combine careful scholarship with a feel for the embodied, dramatic and sensational qualities of neo-liberalism, peak-oil imaginaries, economic development and colonial governance. It seems to me that we return, yet again, to something quite fundamental: how have we, how do we and how well can we live with ourselves and others human, non-human and more than human actors? Even making sense of the ‘we’ (or more than one ‘we’) in all of this is no easy task (Lewis & Maslin, 2018).