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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
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
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
