Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction

Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (2000)
By Don Mitchell

Synopsis: This book seeks to explore the "culture wars" and the way culture, power, and place are constructed and intertwined. Provides a strong overview of the evolution of cultural geography as a discipline while also discussing the rise of cultural studies. This book itself focuses on the materialist, cultural side of things, that material existence is what determines consciousness (Marxism). Says that culture is a site of struggle, and cultural hegemony is the way the dominant group tries to make their own way seem "natural." Culture is also basically the way people make sense of what they're doing. Also discusses the cultural and spatial turn of the 1980s, the realization that culture is spatial. Bottom line: Cultural geography is cultural politics.

Interesting Specifics:

"...the 'work of culture' is to advance social reproduction (or societal integration) through the making and unmaking of differences" (88).

"Through the landscape, politics is fully aestheticized" (139).

Landscapes are "places where discourse and material practices meet - where acts of representation...and the material acts of living...inevitably intersect" (143).

The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart and "flourished under the direction of Stuart Hall in the 1970s" (49).