ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

For a New New Regional Geography

part I|88 pages

Culture

chapter 1|17 pages

Writing Regional Cultural Landscape

Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads

chapter 2|20 pages

Regions Rock

Heavy Metal and the Role of Music in the Construction of Regional Identity for the British Midlands

chapter 3|17 pages

On Parochialism

chapter 4|16 pages

Mapping Cultures of Regional Perception and Conception

A Cultural Cartography from Northeast Brazil

chapter 5|16 pages

Regionalists and Excursionistes

Catalan ‘Regions’ and National Identity

part II|110 pages

Politics

chapter 6|20 pages

A Radical New Regional Geography

Notes on a Revolution

chapter 7|21 pages

The Crisis at the Centre of the United Kingdom

Exploring Scottish Independence and Democratically Disruptive Regions

chapter 8|21 pages

From ‘Fly Frontier’ to ‘Cotton Country’

Social Change and Agrarian Transformation in the Northwest of Zimbabwe

chapter 9|19 pages

Intertwined Spatialities

Discursive Construction(s) of Central Germany

chapter 10|16 pages

Regions, Regionalisms and Identities

Towards a Regional Mess

part III|97 pages

Performance

chapter 12|14 pages

Radiant Copenhagen

Reimagining Regions through Digital Fiction

chapter 13|21 pages

Tracktivist Topographies

Mapping in the Marches and Marching on the Map in Rural Activist Walking Performance

chapter 14|21 pages

Animating Terroir in the French Alps

chapter 16|15 pages

Extractive Geographies, Immersive Lives

Performative Explorations of Labour and Materialities in the Southern Peak District

chapter |7 pages

Afterword

What's Next for Regional Geography?