Week 10 Tutor

Dr. Tom SimpsonLink opens in a new window

Introduction

 

Talk of a ‘spatial turn’ in history arguably belies the degree to which the discipline has always been concerned with the making, unmaking, and remaking of spaces and places. However, there is no doubt that the past few decades have seen historians take inspiration from work in geography, anthropology, and philosophy, and pay heightened attention to new spatial categories—scale, network, and volume, for instance.

 

This session relates back to previous topics and readings on the course—de Certeau and Foucault—to discuss the role of space in critical theory of the later twentieth century. It then introduces the work of the 1990s and 2000s that embedded concepts of space as malleable and relational, considering how such work might be useful to us historians. Finally, the session will explore some recent historical approaches to space, and we will talk through how to relate them to your own specific interests.

 

Seminar questions

• Are historians simply following the lead of other disciplines when it comes to analysing space, or are they adding something new?
• What is the value of new spatial concepts in history—scale, network, volume—relatively to older ones, such as space and place?
• To what extent does attending to space in history mean emphasising the importance of material substance rather than sociocultural and ideational phenomena?
• ‘Historians should prioritise telling histories of spatial categories and concepts, rather than applying these categories and concepts to historical analysis.’ How far do you agree?
• Can historians still take away useful things from older critical theorists of spaces, such as de Certeau, Foucault, and Lefebvre?
• How might your own work benefit from taking a ‘spatial turn’?

 

Core readings

• Paul Stock, ‘History and the Uses of Space’, in id (ed.), The Uses of Space in Early Modern History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 1–18
• Deborah R. Coen, ‘Big Is a Thing of the Past: Climate Change and Methodology in the History of Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 77, 2 (2016), pp. 305–21
• Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), part 1: ‘Setting the Scene’, pp. 1–15

 

Further readings

 

I: Critical theory and space

• Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-27
• Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 239-56
• Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California, 1984), chs. 7 & 9: ‘Walking in the City’ and ‘Spatial Stories’, pp. 91–110, 115–30.

 

II: Relational space and other spatial categories

• Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
• Tim Ingold, Lines: A brief history (London: Routledge, 2007)
• Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977)
• John A. Agnew, ‘Space and Place’, in id & David N. Livingstone (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2011), pp.316-330
• David Harvey, ‘Space as a Key Word’, in id, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006)
• John Agnew, ‘Borders on the mind: re-framing border thinking’, Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 1, No. 4 (2008), pp. 175-191

 

III: A selection of spatial histories and historical approaches to space

• ‘AHR Conversation: How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History’, American Historical Review, 119, 5 (2013), pp. 1431–72
• Franck Billé (ed.), Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020)
• Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)
• James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Scheme to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)
• Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
• Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 2010)
• Charles W.J. Withers & David N. Livingstone (eds.), Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011)
• Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
• Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)
• Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1994)
• Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)
• Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
• Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)
• Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)
• Alan Lester, ‘Spatial concepts and the historical geographies of British colonialism’ in Andrew Thompson (ed.), Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 118–42