In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionSpatial, Environmental, and Ecocritical Approaches to Holocaust MemoryEmily-Rose Baker (bio), Michael Holden (bio), Diane Otosaka (bio), Sue Vice (bio), and Dominic Williams (bio)The successful implementation of genocide during the Holocaust depended on the spatial organisation of mass murder. From the concentrated ghettos and camps delimited by walls and barbed wire to the open fields and camouflaged forests where victims were shot en masse, Anne Kelly Knowles et al. argue, (...) specific locations, patterns of migration, deportation and evacuation, and other spatial elements such as scale, were all central to the Nazi regime's creation of a "comprehensive geography of oppression."1 This is hardly surprising given the biopolitical logics and colonial fantasies underpinning Lebensraum ('living space'), the territorial concept guiding the genocidal aims of the Third Reich, which designated zones of life as well as the inverse on the European continent. The Holocaust was also experienced spatially by its victims, who were forced to navigate new (and at times familiar) sites and landscapes as those of genocide, and whose testimonies in the aftermath of the event conjured these very places in detail.In recent years, the spaces of the Holocaust have been variously revisited, reconstructed, and reimagined within Holocaust studies scholarship. As a broader part of the 'spatial turn' in the humanities, Holocaust scholars have increasingly employed spatial perspectives of the event to deepen our understanding of the environments in which the Holocaust took place and the transformation of these spaces over time—particularly in the fields of history and social science.2 While drawing on diverse modes of spatialisation from interdisciplinary perspectives, contributions from these fields have tended to privilege methods we might describe as variously 'forensic,' including mapping, model-making, and investigations of material traces of the past.3 This work has resulted in many significant insights, not only into the [End Page 1] contexts and structures of Nazi genocide and the perpetrator imaginings of space, but also the experiences of victims and survivors.4Another significant body of work has attended to space and culture within Holocaust contexts. From early on in the postwar period, particular locations and buildings became identified with the Holocaust, such as the notorious entrance guard house at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which appears on countless book covers as well as within films and artworks. Engaging with spatial insights and methodologies from the perspective of cultural and memory studies, scholars have attested to the production and mnemonic significance of these and less well-known sites, as well as the symbolic spatial worlds and experiences to which they give rise. These include Paul Jaskot and Gavriel Rosenfeld, who have turned respectively to Holocaust and post-Holocaust architectures as commonly overlooked sites of history and memory. Drawing attention to the construction of Holocaust space, Jaskot shows how reading architecture 'as process' rather than static structures laden with symbolic meaning reveals unique histories of forced labor in which "the goals of the SS intersected with victims' experience."5 Rosenfeld demonstrates the ways in which spaces built in response to Nazi genocide after 1945 have been variously "imbued with Jewish significance" by their users and creators, resulting in the rise to prominence of Jewish-identified architects.6 Along similar lines, Michael Meng's work has explored the ways in which Jews and gentiles interact with ruined synagogues, cemeteries and Jewish districts as important remnants of pre-war Jewish life in the post-war period in German and Polish cities.7Studies such as those noted above have tended to focus on cities and public buildings, as well as state and civic policy. But as the spatial histories and geographies of the Holocaust have helped to show, extermination often took place in rural settings (mostly located in Central and Eastern Europe), such as the killing fields where Jews were shot en masse; the forests where victims hid and were hunted by Germans and local collaborators; or the open spaces of the dissolving Reich through which former concentration camp inmates were forced to march during the final year of the war—sites in which, owing to less contained spatial dynamics, violence played out differently.8These kinds of sites, which are sparsely documented and often simply thought of... (shrink)

This paper explores how the "environmental turn" for the last 25 years has been shaping remembrance of the destruction of Europe's Jewish populations. I argue that climate change is not just one more catastrophe to pass into the broad analogical field of the Holocaust. In fact, international Holocaust consciousness and understandings of what we now call the Anthropocene have long been intertwined and mutually constitutive. The paper starts in the 1990s with acclaimed writers Anne Michaels and W.G. Sebald, who sought (...) to recast the Holocaust's significance to modernity against a long backdrop of geologic time. Their memorial fiction, which grounds the history of the Holocaust in the eroding landscapes of Europe, reflects a growing and urgent global concern for the vulnerability of the environment and a sense of man's responsibility for preserving human and biological life. The paper then moves through more contemporary examples of the sublimation of Holocaust memory in discourse about global warming—evident in terms like "climate change denial" and calls to "bear witness" to mass extinction events. For better or worse, journalists and scholars who write about environmental activism frequently call on memory of World War II and genocide in order to redefine what constitutes "grievable life." Example authors include historian Timothy Snyder, who has predicted that climate change may lead to new genocidal wars over Lebensraum ; scientist James Lovelock, who has urged nation states to consider how to limit the coming influx of climate refugees; theorist Bruno Latour, who has argued, via Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt, that we must "name our enemies" in the new climate wars; and essayist Ari Brostoff who has attempted to think climate catastrophe through Walter Benjamin's meditations on the angel of history. The implicit question in all of their work is this: What histories and philosophical traditions can help us redefine humanity's entangled relationship to nature in order to take political responsibility for saving life on Earth? In other words, the Anthropocene requires "a usable past"—but what will that usable past be? (shrink)

The article examines Patrick Modiano's much commented upon semi-autobiographical historiographic metafiction Dora Bruder [The Search Warrant] (1997) through the lens of two interconnected theoretical concepts: the "differend", coined by Jean-François Lyotard to designate a situation where a plaintiff is divested of linguistic and legal means to claim her damage, and the "material witness", as Susan Schuppli has dubbed an object capable of testifying to past violence. I argue that, in the face of the evidential deficit that proceeds from the destruction (...) of the Jewish diaspora of Paris during the Holocaust and from France's post-war memory politics in relation to the Occupation and Deportation, Modiano relies on the French capital's topography and architecture for information about Dora, her parents, and her community. Moreover, like Schuppli, he invests Parisian addresses with juridical significance so that they can become witnesses in the case he builds against wartime and post-war French authorities with a view to countering the differend to which Dora and her likes have been sentenced. (shrink)

Applying an ecocritical lens to Holocaust literature, this paper explores the connection between the natural world and the seemingly unnatural machinations of the Holocaust by placing two writers in conversation: Abraham Sutzkever and Vasily Grossman. For Sutzkever, the famed Yiddish poet of Vilna, poetry was linked to survival and to the environment, sometimes emerging from a bog, wilderness, or mutilated landscape but shining all the more brightly for its mired origins. Grossman, another important documenter of the Holocaust, was a Soviet-Jewish (...) writer known for his reportage, fiction, and compilations of Jewish documents from the Second World War. Like Sutzkever, Grossman was occupied in his work with the earth and its animate and inanimate inhabitants, from the crying stones and soil of Treblinka to the red sunset of a humanity ravaged by genocide. When faced with the almost unnarratable desolation and loss encountered during the Holocaust, both authors turned to their environment as a literary tool, a means of conveying that which could not be conveyed through traditional or accepted language. Nature and the nonhuman world became vehicles for an exploration of trauma and violence that in many ways extended beyond human comprehension, and therefore required a mode of imagining that similarly extended beyond human experience alone. At the same time, both Sutzkever and Grossman can be seen attempting to allow nonhuman nature to speak in its own voice, however inflected by human perspectives the hearing and translation of that voice may be. This paper therefore reveals and highlights the importance of addressing the interactions between human and nonhuman nature in Holocaust literature. (shrink)

Future prize-winning writer Chava Rosenfarb was seventeen years old when she was incarcerated in the Łódź ghetto. In 1972, she published The Tree of Life [Der boym fun lebn] (1972), a fictional chronicle of that experience of the Holocaust. In this three-volume epic novel, Rosenfarb narrates and interlaces the fates of ten Jewish families from pre-war Poland in 1939 to the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944. The "Tree of Life" is revealed to be the name given by the "ghettoniks" (...) to an iconic cherry tree that stands in the shared backyard of a group of apartment complexes inhabited by many of the protagonists in the ghetto. Far from being an anecdotal presence, the cherry tree becomes the center of Rosenfarb's reflections on the impacts of the environment on one's physical and mental health. In this article, The Tree of Life is analyzed from an ecocritical perspective to examine the interconnections between genocidal intent and environmental precariousness. The first part considers the perpetration angle of the Łódź ghetto establishment as a Nazi tool of ecological violence through its excessive economic program of forced labour and its structural health determinants leading to epidemics. We will then investigate the characters' attempts to reconnect to nature through tangible acts of agency (the development of small gardens to grow one's own food) and symbolism (the cherry tree evoking the freedom of the outside world). The purpose of this article is to explore the links between genocide and ecocide within the framework of literary memory, while appreciating the relevance of Chava Rosenfarb's representations of the Holocaust to our era of renewed ecological awareness. (shrink)

Understanding the unique status of uncommemorated trauma sites requires questioning the practice of referring to such sites solely as "mass graves." Indeed, it is the fact that the people once thrown into the pits have never been buried that generates today's ambivalent memory of the past associated with a given place. The unburied—in grassroots perception—threaten social homeostasis. I compare the findings of anthropologists regarding burial practices with the knowledge provided today by forensic/conflict archaeologists and ethnographers, indicating the special status of (...) sites containing unritualized bodies of victims. This more nuanced approach, differentiating "mass graves" from "burial pits" will allow for more complex readings of contemporary interactions with a site, exhibited by local "implicated" bystander communities. Eastern European Holocaust landscapes especially, may thus be open to renewed scrutiny. (shrink)

In the face of escalating environmental and social crises, this essay explores how it might be possible to reweave the threads that connect people to one another, collectively to place, and jointly toward possible futures. Highlighting the potential of a renewed human-environment interface across a range of perspectives and illustrations, and drawing upon concepts such as reinhabitation and practices of placemaking, it is considered here how making connections with people and places that might otherwise be taken for granted can help (...) foster more grounded experiences and cultivate imaginations at the same time. Confronting apparent assertions from some quarters that humankind must move further away from “nature” to address current crises, the central aim of this intervention is to examine how a commitment toward deeper engagement with the world around us can stoke aspirations and attitudes for positive change. (shrink)

This paper proposes different approaches to design, referring to gambiarra practices and artifacts and their relation to complexity theory, evoking critical theorists that take undecidability into account in order to link gambiarra to operations that breed complexity and responsibility. The word gambiarra comes from Brazilian slang and describes an intervention or artifact meant to provide a provisory solution to an unexpected event or crisis. This kind of alternative design differs radically from conventional design because it does not come from formally (...) trained, engineer-minded, projects. Instead, it lacks control, stability and durability. As it offers no permanent solution, it opens room for further accidents and is messy, especially if compared to a conservative model for creation that praises human predominance, soundness and efficiency. Therefore, gambiarra often has negative connotations that this analysis aims to challenge, by relating it to principles of complexity theory. Complexity theory is a transdisciplinary field for research aimed at the organization of living systems, with a vast understanding of networks and what life and govern are. It gathers insights from different disciplines to explore the interconnectivity between individuals, their systems and environment. It unveils how ambivalent information/noise relationships are fundamental for the increase of diversity in a system. It also displays the intelligent dynamics resulting from seemingly insignificant neighborhood relations that collectively make it possible to adapt and continuously change structures. With that in mind, the “deficient” aspect of gambiarra becomes more valuable, as it hints at a potential to generate new information and structures beyond entropic models that perpetuate the same logics across time. Michel Serres’s information theory presented in the book The Parasite is brought up in comparison to gambiarra, in order to explore the potential of interdependent ambiguous relationships that may not fit in dominant forms of discourse. Concomitantly, Vilém Flusser’s notion of responsibility reinforces the argument that a fabric of dynamic differences can emerge out of mutual engagement and indeterminacy. Underlying, this paper concerns with drafting ecological discourses and practices that can embrace contradictions and the plurality of worlds, noticing complex phenomena that have been pushed to the margins, while also decentralizing from hegemonic models. It questions the predominance of the prevailing design paradigm in the search for non-eurocentric and non-anthropocentric human-environment relationships and forms of provision of human needs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place by Setha LowCarlos J. L. BalsasSpatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Placeby setha low London: Routledge, 2017Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place adds clarity to our understanding of the value of ethnographic scholarship in the study of socio-economic, cultural, and developmental transformations. The book is a thorough review of two established conceptual frames of analysis—the social production (...) of space and the social construction of space—coupled with an in-depth discussion of four newer ways to make sense of the world around us: embodied space, language and discourse, emotion and affect, and translocal space. As the world is transformed by a myriad of forces and events occurring simultaneously, its complexity intensifies insurmountably and we require clear and robust concepts, theories, methods, and tools to not only interpret it, but above all to attempt to change it in ways that are more beneficial to our collective co-existence while enabling the flourishing of those most at risk.Readers of Spatializing Culture will find plentiful theoretical constructs, lineages, diverse viewpoints, examples, and overall opportunities for reflecting on how the (built) environment, spaces, and places have been changing mostly due to our behavior. Inspired by Foucault’s take on genealogy, in chapter 2, Setha Low traces the history of space and place according to distinct interpretative schools of thought ranging from philosophical and mathematical, French social theory, geographical, architectural, environmental psychology, to anthropological, and even archeological. Five Venn diagrams are utilized to illustrate the main conceptual relationships between space and place. Most of the book’s in-depth case studies were researched by the author with only a small number investigated and written up by fellow scholars, which Low utilizes in the book with gratitude. The interrelated thematic and distinct geographical scope of the cases is one of the book’s hallmarks. The illustrative case studies come from such faraway places as Latin America (San José, Costa Rica), Asia (Taipei, Taiwan), North America (New York City; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and San [End Page 151] Antonio, Texas), Southern Europe (Smederevska Palanka, Serbia), and the Middle East (Beirut, Lebanon; Cairo, Egypt; and Tel Aviv, Israel).Spatializing Culture was first mentioned to me years ago by a former colleague at the University at Albany, SUNY. His ongoing work in Latin America, coupled with his ethnographic training and prior work in a region of the world also extensively examined by Low in other scholarly works, was likely the reason for bringing it up in a conversation about the latest developments in the field and potential research opportunities. I acquired the book when I was teaching Global Urbanism and Culture and International Urban Planning. I was pleasantly surprised with the book’s thorough conceptual lineage, historic characterizations, attention to detail, comprehensive ethnographic investigations, and implications for transforming reality as well as institutional processes. Spatializing Culture is a welcome addition to urban planning textbooks, which tend to be relatively less critical, are often covered with normative constructs and statistics, and are more institutional in their characterization of problems and recommendations for further action.For the most part, the ethnographic method is qualitative, participa-tory, detailed, and quite comprehensive in characterizing key variables as the researcher found them on the ground. This differs slightly from urban planning’s preoccupation with public policy, policy analysis, rules and regulations, institutionalized procedures, the public good, and overall positivist and rationalist concerns with documenting reality and helping to lead transformative planning processes, whether in the realm of land use, transportation, housing, economic development, infrastructure, or the environment. Although International Urban Planning was to be taught in a rather orthodox manner with recourse to understanding planning cultures, best practices, lessons learned, and implications for similar situations, the Global Urbanism and Culture course was slightly more aligned with the discussions put forward by Low. These included attention to postmodern ideals, the use of creativity in community planning, distinctions between popular and highbrow culture, and the building of iconic structures in contexts of urban regeneration and mega-event planning. As such, my students were somewhat already exposed to issues of embodied spaces and to ideas of... (shrink)

Visual representations of the whole earth permeate modern cultures, shaping how societies imagine globalization and planetary ecological derangement. To explore the complex ways in which these images configure human attitudes toward environments, this essay attends to a series of hegemonic representations of the earth from diverse situations and stages of modernity in conjunction with ideas drawn from Martin Heidegger’s ontological philosophy. I proceed from the insight that for Heidegger modernity is not a singular condition, but entails two contrary determinations of (...) being: “machination,” in which detached subjects reshape an objectified world, and “enordering,” in which fungible and flexible resources circulate endlessly around a closed global space. Taking up these divergent concepts, my argument accentuates basic differences in how the earth has been disclosed in representation over the course of modern history. Through close analyses of world maps from the early modern Netherlands; chalkboard globes from nineteenth-century schoolrooms; and the contemporary geospatial application Google Earth, I show how global visions both articulate and complicate Heidegger’s thinking of machination and enordering. Far from being the culmination of a singular modernity, images of the earth reveal and reinforce a discordant global condition, riven by clashing, equally total disclosures of the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space by Juan HerreraAída R. GuhlincozziCartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Spaceby juan herrera Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022Juan Herrera’s historical recounting of Latino activism in Fruitvale, California, in Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space is stellar. In fact, the case focused on by Herrera as an example of activism producing (...) space and creating change in the name of social justice is not the only top-quality contribution to Latinx geographies to be found in this book. Herrera’s conceptualization of “cartographic memory” builds on the intertwining of Latinx writers and historians with traditional spatial thought from the history of geography. His definition of “cartographic memory” as a “political remaking of urban geography and therefore a selective mapping” adds to the broader oeuvre of activism and space coming out in recent years (14).The geographic location for Cartographic Memory comes from the author’s long history of working in and around Fruitvale as both a volunteer and community member. As a new resident of the Oakland area, Herrera mistakenly navigated himself to Fruitvale, where he found the elements of the place clearly speaking to a cultural aesthetic of Latin-idad. Intrigued, Herrera began volunteering in the area, and learned more of the long activist history of the space. That activist history, Herrera argues, has long been under-studied, or even forgotten, in Chicano activist history, and merits recognition. Herrera’s efforts with [End Page 139] this book go a long way to gathering together that spatial history and reconstructing it for the reader through interviews and oral histories with numerous activists, extensive archival research, and ethnography focusing on the 1960s and 1970s Mexican-American activist mobilization in support of the Chicano movement.The power of the focus on Fruitvale must be recognized, as Herrera also makes space for intently peeling apart the layers of nonprofit funding, social movements, and community-building and support. The chapter, “Revolution Interrupted,” is about the funding situation of the Unity Council in Fruitvale and how the funding structure was constructed over time in the context of the political and economic opportunities of the 1960s. It speaks to how this had a profound effect on the organizers and community given the shift from grassroots to institutional funding. This chapter opens the book with a focus on the national scope of funding opportunities for organizations in the 1960s that focused on race and ethnicity. Through this lens are explored the effects of local political actions—such as the 1969 speech by San Antonio-based Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) leader Jose Angel Gutierrez—on funding at the federal level. Because of the perceived militancy of these remarks, the U.S. Congress became concerned, and eventually passed the 1969 Tax Reform bill, limiting the types of projects that could be funded philanthropically. This type of multi-scale understanding of Fruitvale activism is threaded throughout the entire book, from chapter 1, “Making Place,” in which Herrera summarizes activist perspectives on Fruitvale as emphasizing “not only how the neighborhood itself [produced] a geography of activism but also how it was interconnected to other places of struggle throughout the United States” (emphasis in original; 33).Herrera also navigates the interactions of race, ethnicity, and space, tracing how coalitions, influences on political efforts, and collaboration took place throughout Fruitvale and Oakland during this period. His second chapter, “The Other Minority,” identifies where Black Panther Party-related work occurred; the marketization that began to occur of a non-threatening, non-Black “Latino” identity; the effect that this had on activist efforts; and more. Importantly, in this chapter Herrera’s interviews reveal that part of the interest in these coalitions came from the clear organizational success Black activists had achieved in their [End Page 140] work, leading Mexican American activists in Oakland to pursue similar efforts. One interviewee, Herman Gallegos, a prominent activist at the time, spoke of recalling an event where Black men would gather monthly to focus on leadership. Thinking highly of them, he says that he recognized them as future “mayors, judges... [but] kept thinking... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature by Charlie HaileyBruce B. JanzThe Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Natureby charlie hailey Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021Charlie Hailey’s The Porch is a difficult book to review. This is not because I have to be measured in my praise—it is an excellent book, well written, with a mix of close observations and rigorous research. It is also (...) not difficult to review because it is challenging to read—it is an absolute joy to read. Hailey is a writer with a sense of rhythm and scene; this work could easily be taught in a course on creative nonfiction as it has that sense of writing craft along with its phenomenological acuity.No, The Porch is difficult to review because I get the sense that Hailey is asking us to do something other than evaluate it for the adequacy of its arguments or the originality of its points, or even the beauty of its writing. He is asking us to enter a world with him, to see things we haven’t seen and see those we have seen in a new way. The chapters are titled “Porch,” “Tilt,” “Air,” “Screen,” “Blue,” and “Acclimate,” and these give an idea of the space he is opening up. It is a space somewhere between a material world and the sense we make of it. The author is entirely committed to both, but not fooled by the illusions or uplifting promises of either.The primary porch of the book is on his cabin on the Homosassa River in Florida. It is a porch that is under threat of rising waters due [End Page 142] to climate change and catastrophe due to hurricanes. It is a porch on an estuary fed by a spring, which means that the water quality and clarity varies greatly over the nine miles of the river’s flow. Animal life abounds. It is, in other words, a porch where one is not going to be easily lulled to sleep, at least if paying the slightest bit of attention.It is perhaps unavoidable that talking about this book means talking about the environment. Indeed, on a first reading, this reminded me more of nature writing than architecture writing. The book is, to be sure, a reflection on architecture at its best, which is to say, the lived aspect of built space, the almost imperceptible but nonetheless real ways in which the liminal space of the porch affords the experience of the membrane between nature and culture, the outside and the inside, the public and the private. But it is also nature writing, inasmuch as a common thread in nature writing is to place us in the middle of nature, as part of it. We are not the designers, nor are we the inhabitants; we are those in the milieu, the middle of cause and effect, actor and acted upon, subject and object. It is a rare book on architecture, even vernacular architecture, that achieves this. The tendency is to always look for the optimization of the built environment, the tweak that will succeed in drawing us out into our best selves or the cute or trendy new feature. That is not Hailey’s goal here.If the porch is one of the best places in the built environment to understand the milieu, it must present itself in those terms beyond the author’s own circumstance. Otherwise, this would just be a paeon to a much-loved place. But the book is full of examples of porches, both literary and real, not just as objects or as liminal spaces between nature and culture, but as sites that show us their inhabitants and guests in unguarded and exploratory moments. If the trope of human vs. nature in American letters is of the human coming to terms with his or her own individuality, striving to tame, dominate, or at least fit into nature, and the trope of human in the built environment often ends up as the externalization of our internal, as-yet unrealized natures, this porch does something entirely different. We neither have the self/other... (shrink)

The sounds of the college campus raise important questions of participation, identity, privilege, disability, and marginalization. During the 2019–2020 academic year, three university instructors from distinct disciplines (music, history, and political science) and a student research assistant (history) used sound as a method for inquiring into contested and erased sites on the campus of Western Carolina University, a regional comprehensive university located in the southeastern United States. The project came to be called Sonic Histories. Paid student volunteers were led on (...) a soundwalk and completed three online questionnaires that engaged questions of race and belonging on campus. This study presents findings on how students experience and interpret contested and erased sites through sounds heard and imagined. Sonic Histories explores two central questions. Historically, whose voices have been included and whose have been excluded on college campuses? How can sound promote awareness of racialized spaces and, in turn, achieve social engagement? The authors challenge the triumphant narrative of campus histories, which highlights racial reconciliation and progress while eliding the ways predominantly white campuses still exclude minorities. By re-centering minority voices in campus spaces, the authors explore the systemic exclusion of minorities that has occurred on college campuses across the country. At a time when places of higher education are refining and developing their commitment to diversity and inclusivity—while assessing their past in honest ways—the Sonic Histories project builds upon ongoing initiatives to position the college campus as a scholarly community that lives up to its democratic ideals of inclusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Nature of Space by Milton SantosDave McLaughlinThe Nature of Spaceby milton santos (trans. by brenda baletti) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021When asked to review Milton Santos’s The Nature of Space, I was interested mostly in the book’s core theme. As a literary geographer, my own research focuses heavily on space as an analytical concept and a lived experience; I was keen to read and understand a (...) fresh perspective on this topic. Little did I know that opening this book would connect me to a world of geography scholarship for the most part ignored, actively or otherwise, in the Anglophone academy. For my sins, I was not alone in this ignorance. In 2017, for example, one scholar felt confident in writing that:The English-speaking geographical community knows very little about the theoretical work in geography being produced in the so-called [End Page 147] “global South.” They are unaware, for example, of the work of Brazilian geographer Milton Santos.1It is not my place here to write about the reasons why this is such a mistake. Others, better qualified than me, have already done so.2 My aim here is to do three things. First, to put Santos’s arrival into English-language geography in context; second, to consider briefly his key contribution to defining the nature of space; and finally, to touch on what Santos’s book offers us more broadly.Published in 2021, Brenda Baletti’s translation of Santos’s great work arrived on the crest of a wave of discussions, debates, and scholarly interventions around decoloniality in Western geography. This movement emphasizes uncovering “still colonising frames of knowledge”3—frames “through which the world is apprehended and explained and modelled for the future”—and “craft[ing] ways of thinking harder about and against them.”4 Others have argued that the long wait for an English translation of Santos’s The Nature of Space is evidence of just such modes of thought continuing, unreflectively, among Anglophone academia. In 2019, an English-language translation of Santos’s For a New Geography was published by the University of Minnesota Press, followed by The Nature of Space in 2021. Hopefully, publications indicate that some publishers, at least, are following Stephen Legg’s call to think hard against certain predominant Western frames.The Nature of Space, despite its mere 280 pages, is an opus of sorts. Santos’s style eschews narrow conceptualization in favor of building a solid theory of space on a remarkably broad foundation of thinkers, including Braudel, Merleau-Ponty, Habermas, Latour, and many, many others. This broad foundation is a result not only of his long career and his own widely travelled life; it is necessary due to the slippery and almost-undefinable nature of space itself. In a wonderful section of For a New Geography, Santos lays out the problem facing geographers in defining this concept around which our discipline revolves:I understand why geographers have spent more time defining geography than space as the latter is extremely hard to do. The same could be said of space as Saint Augustine said of time: “if I ask myself if I know [End Page 148] what it is, I respond that I do; but, if I ask myself to define it, I respond that I do not know how.”5Part of this complication, recognized by Santos, is that “space” is a word with many meanings outside academia.6 Yet, geographers also face no simple task in defining this core concept for our own needs. Doreen Massey’s definition from For Space is one of my favorites, not only because it well illustrates the complexity of the term “space,” but also due to the range of reactions it produces in my first-year undergraduate students when I introduce it: Space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality.7 This is a very crunchy sentence! But it gets to the heart of a conceptually complex truth: that space is the dimension in which things happen, a dimension in which we must live at all times, as well as... (shrink)

This paper provides a critical reflection on the nature of ethnic enclaves and segregation by presenting an analytical frame that can be used to capture the contested nature of spatiality in these spaces. By underscoring the dynamics in which differences constitute distinct subject positions, this paper posits a relational orientation to studying spatiality that is based on complex relations among and between subjects and space. To date, few attempts have been made to present an analytical frame for the analysis of (...) the spatiality of ethnic enclaves and segregation in which space becomes contested by different groups, occupants of space, and those external to space. This paper bridges this gap by synthesizing the relational approaches found in Bourdieusian field theory and Lefebvrian spatiality. This paper seeks to make three contributions. First, to provide an explicit theoretical anchor upon which relational and spatial theories converge since the underlying rationale for complementary is usually only implicitly evaluated. In detailing this convergence, the social constitution of reality and an emphasis on the duality between individuals and society as well as society and space are identified as a rationale for relational spatiality. Second, to demonstrate how a collective engagement with Bourdieu’s and Lefebvre’s approaches facilitates a recognition of spatiality as a polysemous social product and producer of social reality in addition to grounding this orientation as a critical dialectic engagement in which both the subjects and knowledge production cannot be neutral. Third, to present an analytical frame for the investigation of ethnic enclaves in and through which ethnic majorities, minorities, occupants of space, and those external to these enclaves constitute different views towards the same space. (shrink)