Alastair Bonnett
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 76350 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Alastair Bonnett |
| PRENOMES | Alastair |
| SOBRENOME | Bonnett |
| ASSINATURA | BONNETT A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Newcastle University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7052-9298 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 56 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 728 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1989 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
The mapping revolution
The rapid expansion of the use of maps across everyday life as well as the sciences and arts is changing our relationship to cartography. This article argues that we are experiencing a ‘mapping revolution’. As the importance of mapping becomes clear, so to does the importance of considering both the diverse traditions of mapping and the potential of mapping in the field of astrogeography
Understanding the 2024 UK riots
To introduce this Special Section, we reflect on the riots that took place in the United Kingdom in late July and early August 2024 and the questions, issues and challenges that this raises for geography as a discipline and for our practice as geographers. We challenge the silences and absences that have prevailed since the riots took place and raise questions about several issues that remain under-explored. We address the ways in which far-right…
Translating India to India
This paper addresses the geography of translation by exploring the language of ‘spiritual consumerism’ in India. Drawing on examples from the Indian company Patanjali's ‘saffron capitalism’, we trace the politically, culturally, and religiously charged nature of ‘travelling translation’ and ‘self‐translation’. Our focus is on commercial language that has journeyed and returned ‘back home’, validating notions of Indian uniqueness in the context of…
Interventions in walking methods in political geography
Feral Atlas
Feral Atlas is an online encyclopaedia concerned with the calamitous encounter between the human and non-human. The heart of the project is 79 ‘field reports’ on such diverse topics as ‘radioactive
White Identities
White Identities provides a comprehensive overview of this debate, drawing together the various strands of recent research into an accessible but challenging introduction. The author argues that 'White Studies', as it is presently conceived, is an American project, reflecting American interpretations of race and history. However the book shows that the impact of white identities is international in scope and significance. Thus, only a thorough hi…
Multiple racializations in a multiply modern world
In the context of increasing dissatisfaction with "Eurocentric" models of racialization, this paper draws on the idea of plural modernities to offer an alternative. It argues that diverse modernities and racializations are "co-evolving" and interwoven and that these processes have been profoundly shaped by, but cannot be reduced to merely a set of local reflections of, Western influence. After introducing and contextualizing these themes, the pap…
Whiteness
Whiteness is introduced as the central term in European racial classification systems. This entry outlines its historical development and connection to European colonialism, and addresses its role both within the history of geography and as a category for analysis within contemporary human geography. The interest in whiteness in the 1990s and 2000s emerged predominantly through studies of its role in Western rural and urban locations but it is al…
Situationists/Situationist Geography
The situationists were a Marxist inspired avant‐garde activist group that sought to re‐invent revolutionary theory for a late modern consumer society. To this end they developed the concept of “the society of the spectacle.” They also claimed that political praxis should take place at the level of everyday life and everyday space, a claim that led them to develop “psychogeography.”
The enchanted path
Geographers have a developing interest in the place of enchantment and the ‘extra‐ordinary’ in the modern city. The paper shows that magic has a significant role in the work of many psychogeographical writers, artists and activists, and argues that this phenomenon needs to be understood in the context of the wider use of magic as a site and symbol of creativity and subversion in modernist cultural expression. Drawing on a survey of British psycho…
Environmental crisis, narcissism and the work of grief
This article explores the relationship between environmental crisis, narcissism and the work of grief. In the first section, we provide an overview of the way narcissism has re-emerged in recent scholarship within cultural geography and environmental psychology. Developing and in part challenging the normative focus on selfish, self-destructive consumption that we identify as a major strand in the literature, we draw out themes of daunting loss. …
Constructions of Whiteness in European and American Anti-Racism
Unruly Places
Radicalism, Anti-Racism and Representation
Progressive Nostalgia in Novel Living Arrangements
This paper examines the relationship between a desire to create novel living arrangements and yearning for a ‘better’ past. It is argued that a critical engagement with nostalgia can be used to open up issues of historical persistence and ambiguity. The paper draws on exploratory analysis carried out on examples of three emerging forms of residential space (the new urbanism, home zones and cohousing). The paper seeks to identify the contradiction…
Racism in the Modern World
Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt (eds), Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011, 378 pp., £55.00 hb. (ISBN 978
Mobile nostalgias
Drawing on interviews with ex‐residents of Tyneside (United Kingdom), this paper builds on recent reappraisals of nostalgia as a ‘productive’ and ‘living’ disposition, to show how fond memories and a sense of loss shape and sustain engagement with the city. In contrast to recent attempts to identify active nostalgia only with its ‘reflective’ forms, or to separate out ‘official’ and ‘non‐official’ nostalgia, the paper demonstrates that nostalgias…
The Critical Traditionalism of Ashis Nandy
This article offers an analysis of the construction and deployment of the ideas of 'the West' and 'tradition' in the social commentary of Ashis Nandy. It argues that Nandy's 'critical' defence of tradition is framed and animated by occidentalism and renders tradition into a paradoxical space of redemption and innocence. The first part of the paper shows that Nandy's nativist narratives of loss and his suspicion of political ideologies place him b…
Left in the Past
Radicalism, Antiracism, and Nostalgia
Drawing on the example of British antiracism, I argue that nostalgia is an integral and constitutive force within the radical imagination. The first section of the paper is historical and contextual. It shows how attachments to the past and associated feelings of loss and regret (attachments and emotions which combine to form nostalgia) became marginalised and repressed within modern radicalism. The second section looks at how antinostalgia and n…
The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography
This article argues that British psychogeography is an arena of conflict between two important and unresolved strands within radicalism: the use of the past to critique industrial modernity and the suppression of nostalgia. The article begins by outlining the emergence of nostalgia as a site of dilemma and creativity within political radicalism. It is shown that as nostalgia became marginalized within mainstream radicalism it became available as …
Area 's aims and scope and Editor's report 2007
Area aims to be the debating forum for geographers as well as for scholars from other disciplines involved in geographical research. Being one of the most widely read and browsed journals within geography means that our papers get noticed by a wide audience. Of course, more specialist journals have an important function to perform. Yet I have always believed that it is intellectually productive to get, say, a cultural geographer reading the work …
White Studies revisited
Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlastair Bonnett ALISTAIR BONNETT is Professor of Social Geography at the University of Newcastle
The need for sustainable conferences
Academics enjoy their geographical mobility. Geographers, perhaps, enjoy it most of all. Geography is, after all, the world discipline. Some of us can feel a trifle despondent if we do not have a plane ticket somewhere at hand. Many of these tickets take us to conferences. Our conferences are a necessity, an expectation ... and they need to change. In this editorial I make a personal plea for sustainable conferencing. Attending the AAG Annual Mee…
Pale Face, Red Mask
Drawing on examples of white imitation, this article discusses the racialization of facial expression. Taking the white imitator Grey Owl as my principal example, I argue that the employment of facial expressions as racial symbols is beset by a tenacious ambiguity. The genesis of the stern yet fierce “Indian look” is discussed in the context of the employment and deployment of the “noble savage” within European primitivism and racism. The article…
Geography, 'race' and Whiteness
Who was white? The disappearance of non-European white identities and the formation of European racial whiteness
This article provides a critical history of the conflation of European and white identities. It commences with an overview of pre-modern white identities in China and the Middle East. The production of a racialized European white identity is then examined. The obsessional, exclusionary character of European racial whiteness is related to the gradual marginalization of non-European white identities. Drawing primarily on late nineteenth-century and…
How the British Working Class Became White
This article offers an explanation of how and why the British working class, from being marginal to white identity in the nineteenth century, came to adopt and adapt this identity in the twentieth century. The changing position of whiteness within the symbolic constitution of capitalism is discussed. More specifically, the transition from whiteness as bourgeois identity within Victorian, relatively laissez-faire, capitalism to whiteness as a popu…
White Studies
Constructions of 'race', place and discipline
Drawing on key student texts this article examines the development of 'racial' studies within geography. Three contemporary approaches are delineated: empiricism, the geography of 'race' relations, and social constructionism. Each of these paradigms is seen to constitute different objects and methods of geographical 'racial' inquiry. After noting the critiques made of the empiricist and 'race' relations perspectives, the essay focuses in more det…
Mobile nostalgias
Drawing on interviews with ex‐residents of Tyneside (United Kingdom), this paper builds on recent reappraisals of nostalgia as a ‘productive’ and ‘living’ disposition, to show how fond memories and a sense of loss shape and sustain engagement with the city. In contrast to recent attempts to identify active nostalgia only with its ‘reflective’ forms, or to separate out ‘official’ and ‘non‐official’ nostalgia, the paper demonstrates that nostalgias…
Situationism, Geography, and Poststructuralism
After an introduction to situationism and the theory of the spectacle, the movement's intellectual roots in postwar French Marxism are summarised. The situationist theory of social subversion and a contemporary example of the practice are then introduced. Situationism's critique of human geography and the development of similar perspectives within geography and other disciplines are assessed. It is suggested that situationism immobilises politica…
The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography
This article argues that British psychogeography is an arena of conflict between two important and unresolved strands within radicalism: the use of the past to critique industrial modernity and the suppression of nostalgia. The article begins by outlining the emergence of nostalgia as a site of dilemma and creativity within political radicalism. It is shown that as nostalgia became marginalized within mainstream radicalism it became available as …
Art, Ideology, and Everyday Space
This is a paper about the transgression of the boundary between art and everyday space. It traces the development of a practical and theoretical critique of this divide from Dada and surrealism to situationism and postmodernism, whilst showing how these movements have themselves often perpetuated a specialized notion of cultural production. The ultimate failure of these movements, with the exception of situationism, to develop a coherent and effe…
Geography as the world discipline
This article addresses and connects two areas of controversy within contemporary geography: the parochialism of contemporary human geography and the gulf between university and non‐university geography. It is argued that we can find the cause of the latter phenomenon in the origin of the former, namely in academic geography's unwillingness to re‐imagine the ‘global claim’ that it has inherited from its imperial past. This difficulty has created t…
The Nostalgias of Situationist Subversion
This article examines the role of nostalgia within situationist theory and politics. After introducing the Situationist International and the need to rethink the politics of nostalgia, it is shown that nostalgia had both a productive and a disruptive place in situationist thought; that it enabled some of their key insights yet also introduced incoherence and tensions into their political project. This productive and disruptive relationship is exp…
The metropolis and white modernity
Drawing largely on Latin and North American and British examples, the three sections of this article each provide a different illustration of the relationship between whiteness, modernity and the urban. The article, first, offers a critique of the lack of engagement with the issue of racialization apparent within some recent studies of urban westernization. This section proceeds to illustrate the association between whiteness, modernity and the u…
Fitting into Categories or Falling Between Them? Rethinking ethnic classification
The collection of ethnic and racial statistics has become common in a growing number of institutional settings. Yet contemporary approaches to race and ethnicity suggest that the very process of compelling people to assign themselves to one of a small number of racial or ethnic 'boxes' is, at best, essentialist and, at worst, racist. This article will explore this problematic terrain, and venture a pathway through it, with the aid of findings fro…
The New Primitives
This paper explores the beliefs and practices of the mythopoetic men's movement. More specifically, it focuses on the movement's adherents' representations of “racial” identity and wilderness. After introducing the movement, I argue that, a) the mythopoetic men's movement creatively reworks colonialist fantasies of non‐Western societies and landscapes, and b) that this process acts to naturalize the movement's adherents' contradictory experiences…
From White to Western
Drawing on British works of imperial and social commentary, this article shows how a literature of white crisis emerged between 1890-1930. It was a literature that, whilst claiming to defend and affirm white identity, in fact exposed the limits of whiteness as a form of social solidarity. It is shown how these studies drew together a variety of challenges deemed to be facing the white race and, more specifically, how they exhibited a contradictor…
Interventions in walking methods in political geography
Constructions of Anti-racist Education in Britain and Canada
The aim of this paper is to compare constructions of anti-racist education in Canada and Britain. Particular attention is given to developments in the province of Ontario and in England and Wales. It is argued that the ideological characteristics of anti-racism in each country have been shaped by particular national and local discourses of 'racial', national and political identity. We show that while the impact of anti-racism on educational polic…
Multiple racializations in a multiply modern world
In the context of increasing dissatisfaction with "Eurocentric" models of racialization, this paper draws on the idea of plural modernities to offer an alternative. It argues that diverse modernities and racializations are "co-evolving" and interwoven and that these processes have been profoundly shaped by, but cannot be reduced to merely a set of local reflections of, Western influence. After introducing and contextualizing these themes, the pap…
White Studies revisited
Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlastair Bonnett ALISTAIR BONNETT is Professor of Social Geography at the University of Newcastle
Occidentalism and Plural Modernities
The conflation of the West with modernity is being challenged by new critical interventions on the themes of 'occidentalism' and 'plural modernities'. In this paper I bring these themes together into an account of the way the idea of the West has been employed and deployed in the construction of non-Western modernities. This is done in the company of two important figures in the articulation and invention of the West, the Japanese 'Westerniser' F…
Adjusting to Equity
This article traces the development of race equity initiatives in Peru in the context of economic “liberalisation” and Western cultural hegemony. Drawing on interviews with Peruvian antiracist educators, we argue that the development of race equity programmes is being shaped by contradictory sociopolitical pressures. On the one hand, these initiatives reflect the forces of neoliberal intervention and reorganisation. On the other, they are the pro…
The Americanisation of Anti-Racism? Global Power and Hegemony in Ethnic Equity
Following recent debate on US influence on anti-racism around the world, this article offers a critical assessment of how anti-racism is being shaped and disseminated. It is argued that the US-Americanisation of anti-racism is autonomous of US political will or action and has a complex and contingent relationship with neo-liberal globalisation. After considering how these themes suggest a revision in Gramscian perspectives on hegemony, the paper …
Feral Atlas
Feral Atlas is an online encyclopaedia concerned with the calamitous encounter between the human and non-human. The heart of the project is 79 ‘field reports’ on such diverse topics as ‘radioactive
Environmental crisis, narcissism and the work of grief
This article explores the relationship between environmental crisis, narcissism and the work of grief. In the first section, we provide an overview of the way narcissism has re-emerged in recent scholarship within cultural geography and environmental psychology. Developing and in part challenging the normative focus on selfish, self-destructive consumption that we identify as a major strand in the literature, we draw out themes of daunting loss. …
Radicalism, Antiracism, and Nostalgia
Drawing on the example of British antiracism, I argue that nostalgia is an integral and constitutive force within the radical imagination. The first section of the paper is historical and contextual. It shows how attachments to the past and associated feelings of loss and regret (attachments and emotions which combine to form nostalgia) became marginalised and repressed within modern radicalism. The second section looks at how antinostalgia and n…
Situationism, Geography, and Poststructuralism
After an introduction to situationism and the theory of the spectacle, the movement's intellectual roots in postwar French Marxism are summarised. The situationist theory of social subversion and a contemporary example of the practice are then introduced. Situationism's critique of human geography and the development of similar perspectives within geography and other disciplines are assessed. It is suggested that situationism immobilises politica…
Anti‐racism in ‘White’ Areas
This paper discusses the development of anti‐racist consciousness amongst educationalists in a predominantly white location in Britain (Tyneside). The notion that the emergence of anti‐racism in ‘white’ areas can be adequately conceptualized in terms of anti‐racism's move from ‘multiracial’ locations is rejected. It is argued that the development of anti‐racist attitudes amongst Tyneside educationalists needs to be examined in terms of their expe…
Art, Ideology, and Everyday Space
This is a paper about the transgression of the boundary between art and everyday space. It traces the development of a practical and theoretical critique of this divide from Dada and surrealism to situationism and postmodernism, whilst showing how these movements have themselves often perpetuated a specialized notion of cultural production. The ultimate failure of these movements, with the exception of situationism, to develop a coherent and effe…
Forever 'white'? Challenges and alternatives to a 'racial' monolith
The Formation of Public Professional Radical Consciousness
This paper presents a theory and case study of the formation of public professional radicalism. Theories of 'new class' and 'middle class' radicalism are criticise for neglecting the experiential context in which political consciousness is formed. A similar critique is made of Offe's analysis of the political contradictions of the welfare state. It is suggested that public professionals resolve their contradictory experiences of welfare capitalis…
Constructions of Anti-racist Education in Britain and Canada
The aim of this paper is to compare constructions of anti-racist education in Canada and Britain. Particular attention is given to developments in the province of Ontario and in England and Wales. It is argued that the ideological characteristics of anti-racism in each country have been shaped by particular national and local discourses of 'racial', national and political identity. We show that while the impact of anti-racism on educational polic…
The New Primitives
This paper explores the beliefs and practices of the mythopoetic men's movement. More specifically, it focuses on the movement's adherents' representations of “racial” identity and wilderness. After introducing the movement, I argue that, a) the mythopoetic men's movement creatively reworks colonialist fantasies of non‐Western societies and landscapes, and b) that this process acts to naturalize the movement's adherents' contradictory experiences…
Anti-racism and the critique of 'white' identities
This article addresses the construction of ‘whiteness’ within anti‐racist discourse. It shows that anti‐racists have failed to understand ‘whiteness’ as a temporally and spatially contingent and fluid category. The article argues that this failure has led anti‐racists to view ‘white’ identity as a fixed entity, something beyond change or challenge. The final section of the article looks at the emerging body of literature on the historical geograp…
White Studies
Constructions of 'race', place and discipline
Drawing on key student texts this article examines the development of 'racial' studies within geography. Three contemporary approaches are delineated: empiricism, the geography of 'race' relations, and social constructionism. Each of these paradigms is seen to constitute different objects and methods of geographical 'racial' inquiry. After noting the critiques made of the empiricist and 'race' relations perspectives, the essay focuses in more det…
The Other Canadian 'Mosaic'-'race' equity education in Ontario and British Columbia
While the influence of multicultural and anti-racist education has declined significantly in England and Wales since the late 1980s (as a result of the continuing impact of New Right thinking on education policy), this has not occurred in other countries. For example, in Canada successive federal administrations-irrespective of political hue-have remained firmly committed to Pierre Trudeau's (1971) pluralistic notion of the Canadian 'mosaic' and …
Geography, 'race' and Whiteness
Who was white? The disappearance of non-European white identities and the formation of European racial whiteness
This article provides a critical history of the conflation of European and white identities. It commences with an overview of pre-modern white identities in China and the Middle East. The production of a racialized European white identity is then examined. The obsessional, exclusionary character of European racial whiteness is related to the gradual marginalization of non-European white identities. Drawing primarily on late nineteenth-century and…
How the British Working Class Became White
This article offers an explanation of how and why the British working class, from being marginal to white identity in the nineteenth century, came to adopt and adapt this identity in the twentieth century. The changing position of whiteness within the symbolic constitution of capitalism is discussed. More specifically, the transition from whiteness as bourgeois identity within Victorian, relatively laissez-faire, capitalism to whiteness as a popu…
Situationist strategies and mutant technologies
1999). Situationist strategies and mutant technologies. Angelaki: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 25-32
The Recruitment of New Teachers from Minority Ethnic Groups
This article reports on part of a larger, ongoing two-year investigation supported by the Teacher Training Agency into the recruitment of new teachers from minority ethnic backgrounds via Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) courses in England. The authors focus here on interviews with admissions tutors, course directors and other senior staff at teacher training institutions. The interviews revealed differences between institutions in th…
Recruitment of New Teachers from Minority Ethnic Groups
This article reports on part of a larger, ongoing two-year investigation supported by the Teacher Training Agency into the recruitment of new teachers from minority ethnic backgrounds via Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) courses in England.The authors focus here on interviews with admissions tutors, course directors and other senior staff at teacher training institutions.The interviews revealed differences between institutions in the …
Fitting into Categories or Falling Between Them? Rethinking ethnic classification
The collection of ethnic and racial statistics has become common in a growing number of institutional settings. Yet contemporary approaches to race and ethnicity suggest that the very process of compelling people to assign themselves to one of a small number of racial or ethnic 'boxes' is, at best, essentialist and, at worst, racist. This article will explore this problematic terrain, and venture a pathway through it, with the aid of findings fro…
Adjusting to Equity
This article traces the development of race equity initiatives in Peru in the context of economic “liberalisation” and Western cultural hegemony. Drawing on interviews with Peruvian antiracist educators, we argue that the development of race equity programmes is being shaped by contradictory sociopolitical pressures. On the one hand, these initiatives reflect the forces of neoliberal intervention and reorganisation. On the other, they are the pro…
The metropolis and white modernity
Drawing largely on Latin and North American and British examples, the three sections of this article each provide a different illustration of the relationship between whiteness, modernity and the urban. The article, first, offers a critique of the lack of engagement with the issue of racialization apparent within some recent studies of urban westernization. This section proceeds to illustrate the association between whiteness, modernity and the u…
Communists like us
This article offers a portrait of communism in the USSR as an ethnicized form of modernity; a form defined in relation to the idea of `the West'. First, I introduce the `racialized modernity' thesis and suggest that notions of race and racialization are neither adequate nor appropriate categories to apply to the reification of modernity in the USSR. I then turn to western views of Russia, emphasizing the role accorded to Russians of the `not quit…
Democracy and the Foreigner
Geography as the world discipline
This article addresses and connects two areas of controversy within contemporary geography: the parochialism of contemporary human geography and the gulf between university and non‐university geography. It is argued that we can find the cause of the latter phenomenon in the origin of the former, namely in academic geography's unwillingness to re‐imagine the ‘global claim’ that it has inherited from its imperial past. This difficulty has created t…
Response to Stannard
From White to Western
Drawing on British works of imperial and social commentary, this article shows how a literature of white crisis emerged between 1890-1930. It was a literature that, whilst claiming to defend and affirm white identity, in fact exposed the limits of whiteness as a form of social solidarity. It is shown how these studies drew together a variety of challenges deemed to be facing the white race and, more specifically, how they exhibited a contradictor…
Sociology (47 obras) · Political science (38 obras) · Law (25 obras) · Politics (25 obras) · Gender Studies (22 obras) · Aesthetics (21 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras) · Epistemology (17 obras) · Gender Studies (17 obras)