Cultural Geography

30 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

main sources of flammable material used to burn Nike were copies of the Socialist

Worker newspaper.

Of course, another geography concerns the fabric of the city itself. In each of the

stories above, we can see that Trafalgar Square organizes the spaces of repression and expres-

sion of the various groups. It acts as a focal point, drawing protest in. Of course, this might

seem paradoxical. Not only does the monument commemorate Lord Nelson and his victory

at Trafalgar; the Square is also a memorial ground to other great imperial adventures. On

three of its four plinths, Victorian generals stand. Of course, the fourth plinth, in its empti-

ness, is almost a statue, in absence, to the fact of London’s post-imperial present. Well,

maybe. Trafalgar Square, built of empire, still marks imperial pretensions on behalf of the city.

Its cosmopolitanism may mean empire is coming home, but it also means that London’s con-

nections to the wider world are strengthening rather than weakening. This is a postcolonial

city, still walking imperial paths. The monument, then, represents the dead pasts of the city

that still haunt its present endeavours and sense of itself. But, like all monuments, it gathers

in alternative historiestoo. Geographers have been keen to map out the alternative stories to

monuments, perhaps to challenge the feeling that monumental space deadens the idea that

history can move forward (Atkinson and Cosgrove, 1998; Harvey, 1979; Johnson, 1994;

1995; Till, 1999).

I won’t continue with these geographies, since themes touched on here will be picked

up in various sections of this book, for example subjectivity (Section 5) and geopolitics

(Section 8); lines of engagement could also be drawn to issues of postcolonialism (in

Sections 6 and 7) and even social and economic relations (in Sections 1 and 2). I guess

one question mark concerns the role of culture in all of this. In some ways, of course, this

is obvious. We can talk of cultures of more or less anything, from protest to capitalism.

However, these geographies are struggles over meaning. This is not meaning in some

abstract space that lies as a thin film over the surface of the world, or that is the fixed out-

come of some logic of language. These meanings are about interactions and communica-

tions between people: people situated in specific places and times, dealing with the

multiple worlds they inhabit and as these worlds pass through them. Meaning, in this

sense, is forged in these struggles over geography, and struggles for geography; it is not

brought in, as it were, from the outside. More than this, meaning and significance are not

to be reduced to the textual or the symbolic: they are thoroughly embodied, in gestures,

dance, song, voice, noise, the rhythms of life. In these senses, geography makes culture

as much as culture makes geography.

STRUCTURE OF THE HANDBOOK

We have described the broad context and purpose of the Handbook in the Preface.

In the first three sections of this introduction, we hope to have conveyed a sense of

the unfolding intellectual terrains that constitute cultural geography. Finally, now, we would

like to take a little time just to explain the structure of the book and the intentions built

into it.

As you will see, there are nine sections. There could have been more, and of course less.

In some ways, our choice of sections may seem a little odd. Why, for example, does a book

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