Marijin Nieuwenhuis and David Crouch, eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. xxvii and 201 pp., index. $120.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-7866-0194-0); $39.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-78660-195-7); $37.97 electronic (ISBN 978-1-78660-196-4).
Space as a topic of scholarly study has escaped the bounds of geography. The “spatial turn” has invaded numerous disciplines, which offer their own perspectives on the matter. This collection of ten essays, mostly by British contributors affiliated with the University of Warwick, points to how space has been taken up in political science, literature, theater studies, cultural studies, film, and other fields. It is a welcome addition to the growing, increasingly interdisciplinary theorization of space in all its multitudinous forms, demonstrating how different modes of thought enrich one another.
Some of the essays review well-trodden ground, such as representations of space and relational spaces as argued by Deleuze and Guattari. Poststructuralist ideas pervade the volume, which is richly informed by social theory. Notions of time–space compression, relationality, writing space, emergence, mapping, affect, embodiment, and performativity are not particularly new, but worth summarizing anyway.
A few chapters offer novel non-Western views that challenge dominant Western understandings of space. For example, can Lefebvrian theories be meaningfully applied to Cape Town, with its complex mixture of cultures? Are Western views of space appropriate only for Western spaces? Many of these concern issues of citizenship and belonging. Ghraowi writes of the Palestinian experience in Haifa following the Nakba, or disaster that ensued after the creation of Israel in 1948 and its colonial dispossession of local Arabs, which produced mass trauma that most of the world simply ignores. Watanabe argues for a distinctively Japanese theory of place rooted in the works of Zen philosopher Nishida Kitarō, one that seeks to erase the distinction between place and the body, subject and object, which become united in the form of experience. Another chapter addresses the works of bell hooks, whose deeply personal essays about her home in rural Kentucky seek to decolonize the African-American experience of place. In this reading, the spatial turn and autobiography become inseparable.
Nieuwenhuis, one of the editors, comments on territory and boundaries in the context of international relations (IR) theory. He notes, “Without lines there is no territory, and without territory there can be no state” (p. 119). The “scopic regime” of IR theory, predicated on a Cartesian view of space, reduced geography to a flat, uninteresting surface. Territory, in its historical construction, became a mode of knowing, a way of framing the surface of the earth conducive to the prerogatives of the emerging nation-state. This view was increasingly challenged by the question of how far below and above the earth's surface sovereignty extended.
Some notions of space will strike readers as quite new. Take, for instance, Revill's chapter on sonic spatiality, in which the “fugitive, fragile temporal qualities of sound” (p. 44) produce transient places, or better yet, “a delicate and ephemeral assemblage” (p. 51) of feelings, things, and experiences. Vocalic spaces unite the body, sound, and meaning. This approach elevates polyvocality to a literal level and argues for “a conception of sound as a socio-material assemblage” (p. 58). Others spiral off into bizarre worlds that seem to offer little analytical insight, such as Conway's essay on science fiction movies, which bounces between philosophy and often cheesy films: Here the spatial turn appears in Silent Running, Soylent Green, 2001, The Martian, Logan's Run, and Gravity. Similarly, Gren's “Letter from the Earth” is a bleak summary of the history of geography told from the perspective of the Earth itself, ranging from cartography to the Anthropocene.
The best chapter in the volume is Andrei Belibou's study of Internet cartographies. No collection of perspectives on the spatial turn would be complete without an essay on cyberspace. Belibou contrasts the highly visible world of Google Maps—a scopic regime if there ever was one—with the invisible world of the “darknet,” in which IP addresses are hidden. He uses the works of Edward Casey and Jeffrey Milpas to delve into the meaning of place in this context. Virtual places are easy to get to, but reduce the experience of place to the visual, reinforcing a long tradition of Western ocularcentrism and eliminating the material from a sense of place. Disembodied placelessness substitutes for being in place. The darknet, in contrast, which comprises a tiny fraction of cyberspace, is difficult to access and view, deliberately hidden by layers of encryption to hide the illicit and illegal activities that are often conducted over it.
If I had to criticize this volume, it would be for its inattention to broader concerns of political economy, the world system, class, power, and struggle. Most of the essays are inspired by phenomenology, which is fine, but without a firm connection to a theory of society and social change, it risks becoming an overly personalized and eclectic discussion of everyday life devoid of political context.
The editors are to be congratulated for putting together a series of thought-provoking essays. Like all experiments, some succeed much more than others. The contrast among the chapters will itself lead readers to ask why some approaches to understanding space are more fruitful than others. The book would do well in graduate seminars and be useful for those interested in writing on heretofore little-studied dimensions of spatiality.