Ecocritical Geopolitics

Popular culture and environmental discourse

Elena dell'Agnese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000394948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

What is the role of popular culture in shaping our discourse about the multifaceted system of material things, subjects and causal agents that we call "environment"? Ecocritical Geopolitics offers a new theoretical perspective and approach to the analysis of environmental discourse in popular culture. It combines ecocriticial and critical geopolitical approaches to explore three main themes: dystopian visions, the relationship between the human, post-human, and "nature" and speciesism and carnism.

The importance of popular culture in the construction of geopolitical discourse is widely recognized. From ecocriticism, we also appreciate that literature, cinema, or theatre can offer a mirror of what the individual author wants to communicate about the relationship between the human being and what can be defined as non-human. This book provides an analysis of environmental discourses with the theoretical tools of critical geopolitics and the analytical methodology of ecocriticism. It develops and disseminates a new scientific approach, defined as "ecocritical geopolitics", to offer an idea of the power of popular culture in the realization of environmental discourse.

Referencing sources as diverse as The Road, The Shape of Water, Lady and the Tramp, and TV cooking shows, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of geography, environmental studies, film studies, and environmental humanities.

1

Theoretical framework

1

Geo(-)graphy, critical geopolitics, popular geopolitics

1.1 “Geo-graphy is about power”

The connection between representation and reality is intrinsic to the very name of the discipline. The word “geo-graphy” comes from the Latin word geōgraphia, which in turn comes from the Ancient Greek γεωγραφία (geōgraphía), from γῆ (gê), land or earth, and γρᾰφω (gráphō), to draw or to write. “Geography” means “writing” or “drawing” the Earth. At the same time, the term “geography” is currently used to refer to the material object, the Earth, with its regional characteristics and differences (see Robert Kaplan’s book, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate, 2012).

This terminological ambiguity, according to which both the object and the representation of the object are defined with the same word, postulates, according to Claude Raffestin (1983), the perfect adaptation between the object of discourse and the discourse. So, geo-graphy, as a discourse, is placed outside historical conditioning, while, far from being a-historical, it is controlled by power. And power, through geographical discourse, manages to make the geo-structure it produces more acceptable. Representation, which is supposed to be the same as reality, but in fact is historically determined and influenced by power, makes reality “normal” and therefore “acceptable.”

Before Raffestin, already Yves Lacoste (1976) in France, and Lucio Gambi (1968) and Massimo Quaini (1974) in Italy had shown how knowledge of the territory, and therefore geography, was an instrument at the service of the prince, to administer, to collect taxes, and to make war. Quaini showed that geography is an instrument of power in a dual sense: it supplies useful information to the ruling classes while simultaneously providing mystifying information to the subaltern classes, thus negating them the chance of a proper knowledge of space and power.

To this path of reasoning, however, Raffestin adds something more. Geography is not just an instrument in the hands of powerful people, it is power in itself, because geography is representation and representation has the power to change reality. This suggestion, clearly connected with Foucault’s idea of power-knowledge (Raffestin 1978), has since been developed in other — but somehow interconnected — contexts of European and American academic thought.

Critical attention to geography as representation, and its power to transform reality, was also urged by Giuseppe Dematteis (Fall and Minca 2013), who, in 1985, published, in Italian, Le metafore della Terra (The Metaphors of the Earth). Here, he takes up the idea of geography as an “active” practice, capable of modifying reality. He writes that: “The ideological function of ‘textbook geography’ is […] complex […] Not only does it make geographical knowledge look like an innocent form of knowledge, and not only does it teach people that what exists is natural and cannot be changed, but also, and more subtly, it teaches people that what exists is normal […] that it is natural because it is normal” (Dematteis 1985, 10).

Then, he adds that “geographical representation, based on evidence and appealing to common sense, produces con-sense […] from which normalized behaviors derive, that is, behaviors that can be integrated into collective practices. These, acting on Earth, transform it into territory, which in turn is the object of geographical representation” (1985, 101).

Geography represents the world and produces consensus, but it is not a specular reproduction of the world. It is just a set of metaphors. Only the awareness that these metaphors are just partial representations of reality can help people to escape, according to Dematteis, from the loop of their “normalizing” effects (dell’Agnese 2008).

In geographical representation, not only information provided by writing or statistics matters. Cartographic visualization counts as a form of power as well. In this regard, Franco Farinelli’s work opens a new page in the analysis of geography as a form of geo-power. Farinelli distinguishes geo-writing and geo-mapping, and their different roles in transforming places into spaces. Mapping means trying to represent a sphere on a flat surface. To do so, one must move away from the sphere, i.e., put one’s perspective above reality, and assume that one can read/dominate the world from above. From the presumption of zenithal vision comes what Farinelli himself defines as “cartographic reason” (Farinelli 1992 and Farinelli 1998), an attitude typical of Western thought, which leads to seeing the world in two dimensions, as if it were a “table.” Thinking in cartographic terms, that is along with cartographic reason, means detaching oneself from reality, and presuming to be able to read/dominate it from above. The notion of “cartographic reason,” as developed by Franco Farinelli (1992), but also by Gunnar Olsson (1998) and Tom Conley (1996), can be seen as “the missing element in social theories of modernity” (Pickles 2004, xi), as it helps to emphasize “the role of mapping in shaping social, spatial and natural identities” (Pickles 2004, xi). The role of maps in the connection between power and knowledge has also been pointed out by Harley (1988) who, drawing on Foucault’s ideas, defines maps as perfect instruments to promote a hierarchical vision of the space they represent.

1.2 Critical geopolitics/popular geopolitics

The awareness of the power of geography to produce and transform the world by describing it is one of the most important developments in contemporary geographical thought. Hence, when Gerard Toal opens his book Critical Geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 1996, 1) with the sentence “Geography is about power,” he is not inventing something new. However, he is formalizing a combination of ideas in a clear theoretical approach and on that approach, he bases a new way of doing and thinking geopolitics. He writes: “Although often assumed to be innocent, the geography of the world is not a product of nature but a product of histories of struggle between competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy, and administer space […]. Geography was not something already possessed by the earth but an active writing of the earth by an expanding, centralizing imperial state. It was not a noun but a verb, a geo-graphing, an earth-writing” (Ó Tuathail 1996, 1).

In this way, he restates the idea that “the land is not only represented, it is also produced by geography.” Starting from Gerald Toal’s contribution, Foucault’s notions of power/knowledge and discourse spark the revolution in geography advocated by Raffestin (1997). Since then, the act of “writing the world” has no longer been seen as a straightforward performance. On the contrary, the idea that writing, representation and mapping are all forms of geo-power is now mainstream among the practitioners of the discipline.

Critical Geopolitics has been defined as “[i]‌maginative, intellectually ambitious […] engaging […] outstanding” (Hague 2011, 417). For this reason, the book has become a reference text for political geography worldwide. However, it is not the first step in this direction. Starting from the conviction that geography is never a non-discursive phenomenon, separated from ideology and politics, but a form of knowledge in the Foucauldian sense, Toal wrote, together with John Agnew, an article in 1992 where they proposed “the re-conceptualization of geopolitics using the concept of discourse” (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992). In the paper, geopolitics is defined as “a discursive practice by which intellectuals of statecraft ‘spatialize’ international politics and represent it as a ‘world’ characterized by particular types of places, peoples and dramas” (Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992, 190). At the beginning of the 1990s, Simon Dalby was also moving in the same direction with the book Creating the Second Cold War (Dalby 1990) and the article “Critical Geopolitics: Discourse, Difference, and Dissent” (Dalby 1991).

The notion of discourse refers to the interpretative, not simply verbal, tools that are put in place for the construction of meaning. In Foucauldian terms “discourses are not simply reflections or (mis)representations of ‘reality’; rather they create their own ‘regimes of truth’— the acceptable formulation of problems and solutions to those problems” (Lees 2004, 102–103). In this perspective, the geopolitical is “a differential discourse that mobilizes spatial logics and imaginaries for processes of identity construction, while presenting itself as merely reporting on the final product of these processes” (Grayson 2018). A geopolitical discourse is always “localized” in time and space and has a “naturalizing” function, i.e., it allows us to accept as “natural” things that are not natural at all. Hence, it must be deconstructed starting from its rhetorical artifices, the reference lexicon, the basic postulates and all those categories which, although they are themselves a product of a given historical and cultural context, are instead considered bearers of an interpretative capacity of absolute value. In this regard, any form of representation that has as its object the depiction of spaces and/or spatially connoted individuals constitutes a form of knowledge/power capable of producing a discursive narrative and deserves to become an object of research, including popular culture.

A geopolitical discourse is also embedded, i.e., deeply rooted in historical, geographical and cultural reality. At times, a certain tradition of thought, and the ensuing discourse, takes precedence over the others and prevails. In this perspective can be read, for example, the imposition of the Westphalian system of the nation-state on all other potential forms of political-spatial control of power. Within this “territorial trap” (Agnew 1994), the dominant geopolitical discourse can be defined as a process of spatial exclusion: “it can be argued that the essential moment of geopolitical discourse is the division of space into ‘our’ place and ‘their’ place” (Dalby 1991, 274), dividing “our” national territory, but also “our” urban neighborhood, from “their” national territory and “their” urban district. Geopolitical discourse not only works by dividing spaces, it also divides human beings associated with them, “its political function being to incorporate and regulate ‘us’ or ‘the same’ by distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’, the same from ‘the other’” (ibid.). According to this theoretical approach, “geopolitics is about the assignment of values to places, and it constructs hierarchies of people and places that matter and those that do not” (Dittmer and Bos 2019, xix).

To understand how a given geopolitical discourse develops, that is which values are assigned to people and places, it is important to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Theoretical framework
• 2 Landscapes and fears: Discourse about the environment (and unavoidably also about race and gender) in dystopian texts and post-apocalyptic narratives
• 3 Posthuman worlds
• 4 Reframing carnism
• Index