Cultural Geography

focus on the economic geographies of capitalist

transformation.

The notion of supplementing the Marxian

focus on the economic production of scale is by

no means original to this chapter. Other

geographers have already sought to bring such

concerns into communication with the Marxian

literature on scale. Most notably, Sallie Marston

(2000) has argued for coupling Marxian atten-

tion to the sphere of economic production with

analysis of the sphere of social reproduction and

its coactive impact on the creative destruction of

scale. Marston’s particular concern is with the

changing relevance of the home and the public

realm as scalar fixes for the expression of femi-

nist agency. In addition to foregrounding the way

in which scales are fixed and undone through

processes of cultural conflict and negotiation,

Marston’s work emphasizes the need to come to

terms with scale-making as an arena in which

domination and resistance are interrelated (see

also Brown, 1997). It is this double concern

with how ideological domination and counter-

hegemonic resistance are together worked out in

an uneven field of circulating power relations

that has guided our approach here. Like Marston,

we do not view scale-jumping as being neatly

dichotomized between ideologically dominant

and resistant forms. Instead, we see the resulting

cultural geographies as reflecting a spectrum of

combinations, sometimes instantiating more the

reconfiguration of the scope of dominative

power relations, sometimes embodying more the

reconfiguration of the scope of resistant power

relations, but always emerging as an entangled

and hybrid product of negotiation and contestation

(see also Sharp et al., 2000).

In order to illustrate such varied combinations

of ideological dominance and resistance we have

chosen three examples, each of which illustrates

scale-jumping from the national to the trans-

national scales. The first, the construction of a

cross-border region called Cascadia, illustrates a

dominant neoliberal elite’s cultural geography of

scale-jumping: a region invented to expand and

entrench entrepreneurial governance across the

border between Canada and the US on the

Pacific Coast. Instantiating neoliberal hegemony

as it does, though, this elite cross-border vision

of Cascadia does not completely obliterate more

counter-hegemonic scale-jumping visions of

the same region as a landscape of ecocentric

governance. Our second case, the landscape vision

attending the development of the Caribbean trad-

ing community (CARICOM), also illustrates a

neoliberal cultural geography of scale-jumping.

But in contrast to the dominant Cascadian vision,

the imagined cultural geography of a common

Caribbean landscape underpinning a united

CARICOM is also closely articulated with the

postcolonial reimagination of the Caribbean as

coherent and united despitethe legacies of inter-

imperial division and rivalry. The depiction of a

CARICOM landscape, then, represents a more

ambivalent scale-jump, one that is simultane-

ously neoliberal and postcolonial. Our third

example represents a more subaltern act of scale-

jumping. It consists of the counter-hegemonic

landscape visions of Mexican–US transnationals

whose border-crossing ways of being in, seeing

and depicting space actively contest the hege-

monically divided landscape of policing and

violence at the US–Mexican border. We do not

seek to romanticize this resistant landscape

vision, and only aim to underline how it exem-

plifies counter-hegemonic scale-jumping in a

time and space that has been predominantly

shaped by the hegemonic cross-border scale-

jumping of production and finance under North

American free trade.

Clearly, the overarching context of all three of

our examples remains that of neoliberalism,

today’s dominant ideology of laissez-faire capi-

talist deregulation and global market-based

governance. In this sense, therefore, we build on

the work of economic geographers concerned

with the renegotiation of scale in the context of

globalization (for example, Roberts, 1998;

Swyngedouw, 1992; 1997a; 1997b). However,

in acknowledging this important economic con-

text we by no means take neoliberal ideology as

some sort of disembodied logic emanating out of

the economic ether. Indeed, one of the signal

ideological features of neoliberalism is precisely

the way it is so often presented as a displaced,

non-political, post-ideological global economic

imperative. As the cultural anthropologists Jean

and John Comaroff underline, ‘there is a strong

argument to be made that neoliberal capitalism,

in its millennial moment, portends the death of

politics by hiding its own ideological underpin-

nings in the dictates of economic efficiency: in

the fetishism of the free market, in the inexorable

expanding needs of business, in the imperatives

of science and technology’ (2000: 322). Against

this pattern of (post-) ideological dissembling, it

is especially important to examine the grounded

embodiment of both neoliberalism and its dis-

contents in particular cultural geographies of

scale-jumping. Thus while our first reason for

including three case studies here is to explore the

varied combinations of ideological domination

and resistance in scale-jumping, our second

reason is to flesh out empirically the varied

cultural geographies of neoliberalism on the

ground. Placingthe problem in this way allows us

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