Category Archives: Historical-Geographies

In the Space of Theory

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Sparke’s aptly titled book interrogates how contemporary global affairs have stretched, unglued, glued, reconfigured, and (re)invented the presumed ties between states and their “respective” nations both within their putative borders and across/beyond them. He builds each chapter of the book … Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Historical-Geographies, Maps, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Territorial Trap

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Agnew, John. 1994. “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory.” Review of International Political Economy 1(1): 53-80. In a more recent piece, here’s how John Agnew described his influential 1994 article on the Territorial Trap: “The purpose … Continue reading →

Posted in Historical-Geographies, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Scale, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Territorialization of State Power

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Lee Peluso. 1995. “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand.” Theory and Society 24: 385-426. Vandergeest and Peluso’s landmark article concerns the way in which state power is territorialized within the borders of a politically defined space … Continue reading →

Posted in Forests, Historical-Geographies, Law, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Guha: Dominance Without Hegemony?

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Intro & Ch. 1] Intuitively, it’s odd that the Subaltern Studies crowd has drawn so heavily on Gramsci, since he had surprisingly little to … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Critique, Hegemony, Historical-Geographies, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Power, The State, Violence | 5 Comments

Suffering for Territory

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Moore, Donald. 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This is a hard book to summarize because of the intricacy of the argument, its theoretical architectures, and its deep ethnographic empirics—they are … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Governmentality, Historical-Geographies, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 1 Comment

Territory, Place, Scale, Network

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Jessop, Bob, Neil Brenner, and Martin Jones. 2008. “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(3): 389-401. This is an important article—short and to the point. The authors claim that thinking around sociospatial relations has tended to … Continue reading →

Posted in Historical-Geographies, Networks, Place, Scale, Spatiality, Territory | Comments Off on Territory, Place, Scale, Network

Jacobins of the Black Atlantic

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

In the preface to Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss credits the positive reception of her original article to the “unconventional topologies of time and space that it mapped out” (ix). The analogy with topology—a field in mathematics—is particularly … Continue reading →

Posted in Dialectics, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Post-Colonial, Spatiality, Violence | 2 Comments

Hegel’s Dialectic and Haiti

Posted on February 12, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Hegel’s dialectic allows us to think and ask questions about the world in ways that encompasses a key set of fluid relations. As I understand it, these are the relations between the ideal and the material, which is implicitly also … Continue reading →

Posted in Dialectics, GWF Hegel, Historical-Geographies, Violence | 1 Comment