Reanimating Regions Culture, Politics, and Performance Regions and Cities Series

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.

List of Figures

List of Tables

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction: A New New Regional Geography

Martin Jones

Part I: Culture

1 Writing Regional Cultural Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads

David Matless

2 Regions Rock: Heavy Metal and the Role of Music in the Construction of Regional Identity for the British Midlands

Jesse Heley and Marc Welsh

3 On Parochialism

John Tomaney

4 Mapping Cultures of Regional Perception and Conception: A Cultural Cartography from Northeast Brazil

Jörn Seemann

5 Regionalists and Excursionistes: Catalan ‘Regions’ and National Identity

Venetia Congdon

Part II: Politics

6 A Radical New Regional Geography: Notes on a Revolution

James Riding

7 The Crisis at the Centre of the United Kingdom: Exploring Scottish Independence and Democratically Disruptive Regions

Philip Johnstone

8 From ‘Fly Frontier’ to ‘Cotton Country’: Social Change and Agrarian Transformation in the Northwest of Zimbabwe

Nicholas James

9 Intertwined Spatialities: Discursive Construction(s) of Central Germany

Roger Baars and Antje Schlottmann

10 Regions, Regionalisms and Identities: Towards a Regional Mess

Kaj Zimmerbauer

11 City-Region Building and Geohistorical Matters

David Beel, Martin Jones and Ian Rees Jones

Part III: Performance

12 Radiant Copenhagen: Reimagining Regions through Digital Fiction

Rune Graulund, Kristoffer Ørum and Anders Bojen

13 Tracktivist Topographies: Mapping in the Marches and Marching on the Map in Rural Activist Walking Performance

Jess Allen

14 Animating Terroir in the French Alps

Rory Hill

15 Performing Landscape Using a Locative Media Deep Map App: A Cornish Case Study

Lucy Frears, Erik Geelhoed and Misha Myers

16 Extractive Geographies, Immersive Lives: Performative Explorations of Labour and Materialities in the Southern Peak District

George Jaramillo

Afterword: What’s Next for Regional Geography?

John Agnew

Index

James Riding is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Space and Political Agency Research Group/RELATE Centre of Excellence at the University of Tampere, Finland.

Martin Jones is Professor of Human Geography and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Staffordshire University, UK.