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Hawai'ian performance cartography is an interactive presentation of place as ‘experienced space’ that situates mapping in the environment, and encodes spatial knowledge into bodily memory via repetitive recitations and other habitual practices.
 
An important symbolic element in Hawai'ian cartography is the storied place name, which reflects Hawai'ian spatial knowledge of the environment. Many Hawai'ian place names performed in daily rituals were a conscious act of locating genealogical connections, recreating cultural landscapes, and regenerating cultural mores. They constitute a critically important body of Hawai'ian cultural knowledge. When Hawai'ian place names were incorporated into Western cartographic maps they were transformed epistemologically. They went from representing place as a repository of cultural knowledge to representing place as an object on the landscape. Hawai'ian spatial knowledge presentation is interactive, multi-sensual, and multi‐ dimensional.
 
Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography interweaves methodology with personal narrative and performance presentation in a playbill format. Three of the seven chapters are presented as “Acts” in a play. The remaining four chapters serve as intermissions or interludes together with a prologue and an epilogue for setting the stage and providing closure. To help make the topic more accessible, complex terms have been minimized, making academic theory easier for the educated reader to understand. The book will fill an important gap in Indigenous and Native Studies and will be welcomed by anyone interested in traditional Hawai’ian performance cartography.
 

Today it is taken as a given that the United States has undergone a nationwide process of homogenization—that a country once rich in geographic and cultural diversity has subsided into a placeless sameness. The American population, after all, spends much of its time shopping or eating in look-alike chain or franchise operations, driving along featureless highways built to government specifications, sitting in anonymous airports, and sleeping in forgettable motels.

In this book, cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky challenges that nearly universal view and reaches a paradoxical conclusion: that American land and society are becoming more uniform and more diverse at the same time. After recounting the many ways in which modern technologies, an advanced capitalist market system, and a potent central political establishment have standardized the built landscape of the country's vast territory and its burgeoning population over the past two hundred and fifty years, he also considers the vigor of countervailing forces. In a carefully balanced assessment, he documents steady increases in the role of the unpredictable, in the number and variety of arbitrarily located places and activities, and the persistence of basic cultural diversities. Contrary to popular perceptions, place-to-place differences in spoken language, religion, and political behavior have not diminished or disappeared. In fact, Zelinsky shows, novel cultural regions and specialized cities have been emerging even as a latter-day version of regionalism and examples of neo-localism are taking root in many parts of the United States.

Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house’s physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination.

Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house’s spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house’s landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the “Old” world to the “New.” One of the book’s most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls’ schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera’s spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions. 
 

Places in the Making maps a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century American poets who have used language to evoke the world at various scales. Distinct from related traditions including landscape poetry, nature poetry, and pastoral poetry—which tend toward more idealized and transcendent lyric registers—this study traces a poetics centered upon more particular and situated engagements with actual places and spaces. Close generic predecessors of this mode, such as topographical poetry and loco-descriptive poetry, folded themselves into the various regionalist traditions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but place making in modern and contemporary American poetics has extended beyond its immediate environs, unfolding at the juncture of the proximate and the remote, and establishing transnational, planetary, and cosmic formations in the process. Turning to geography as an interdisciplinary point of departure, Places in the Making distinguishes itself by taking a comparative and multiethnic approach, considering the relationship between identity and emplacement among a more representative demographic cross-section of Americans, and extending its inquiry beyond national borders.

Positing place as a pivotal axis of identification and heralding emplacement as a crucial model for cultural, intellectual, and political activity in a period marked and imperiled by a tendency toward dislocation, the critical vocabulary of this project centers upon the work of place-making. It attends to a poetics that extends beyond epic and lyric modes while relying simultaneously on auditory and visual effects and proceeding in the interests of environmental advocacy and social justice, often in contrast to the more orthodox concerns of literary modernism, global capitalism, and print culture. Focusing on poets of international reputation, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams, Places in the Making also considers work by more recent figures, including Kamau Brathwaite, Joy Harjo, Myung Mi Kim, and Craig Santos Perez. In its larger comparative, multiethnic, and transnational emphases, this book addresses questions of particular moment in American literary and cultural studies and aspires to serve as a catalyst for further interdisciplinary work connecting geography and the humanities. 

A bold new approach to racial difference conceived through rave tourism
 

The village of Anjuna, located in the coastal Indian state of Goa, has been one of the premier destinations on the global rave scene for nearly two decades. The birthplace of Goa trance, the most psychedelic variety of electronic dance music, Anjuna first attracted adventurous Westerners in the 1970s who were drawn there by its tropical beaches, tolerant locals, and readily available drugs. Today, rave tourists travel to Goa to take part in round-the-clock dance parties and lose themselves in the crowds, the music, and the drugs. But do they really escape where they come from and who they are?

 

A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Psychedelic White explains how race plays out in Goa’s white counterculture and grapples with how to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there. Goa is a site of particularly revealing forms of interracial collision, and contrary to author Arun Saldanha’s expectations that the nature of rave would create an inclusive atmosphere, he repeatedly witnessed stark segregation between white and Indian tourists. He came to understand race in its creative dimension as a shifting and fuzzy assemblage of practices, environments, sounds, and substances—dance skills, sunlight, conversation, cannabis, and tea. In doing so, his work shows how the rave scene in Goa harbors conflicting tendencies regarding race. The complicated intersection of cultures and phenotypes, Saldanha asserts, helps to consolidate whiteness. Race emerges not through rigid boundaries but rather through what he terms viscosity, the degree to which bodies gather together for pleasure and self-transformation.

 

Challenging the prevailing conception of racial difference as a purely social construction and offering building on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Psychedelic White presents nothing less than a new materialist approach to race.

 

In Refrains for Moving Bodies, Derek P. McCormack explores the kinds of experiments with experience that can take place in the affective spaces generated when bodies move. Drawing out new connections between thinkers including Henri Lefebvre, William James, John Dewey, Gregory Bateson, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, McCormack argues for a critically affirmative experimentalism responsive to the opportunities such spaces provide for rethinking and remaking maps of experience. Foregrounding the rhythmic and atmospheric qualities of these spaces, he demonstrates the particular value of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "refrain" for thinking and diagramming affect, bodies, and space-times together in creative ways, putting this concept to work to animate empirical encounters with practices and technologies as varied as dance therapy, choreography, radio sports commentary, and music video. What emerges are geographies of experimental participation that perform and disclose inventive ways of thinking within the myriad spaces where the affective capacities of bodies are modulated through moving.

The Authorship of Place is the first monograph dedicated to the study of the politics, history, aesthetics, and practices of location shooting for Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and coproduced art cinemas shot in rural communities since the late 1970s. Dennis Lo argues that rural location shooting, beyond serving aesthetic and technical needs, constitutes practices of cultural survival in a region beset with disruptive and disorienting social changes, including rapid urbanization, geopolitical shifts, and ecological crises. In response to these social changes, auteurs like Hou Xiaoxian, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, and Li Xing engaged in location shooting to transform sites of film production into symbolically meaningful places of collective memories and aspirations. These production practices ultimately enabled auteurs to experiment with imagining Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and cross-strait communities in novel and contentious ways. Deftly guiding readers on a cross-strait tour of prominent shooting locations for the New Chinese Cinemas, this book shows how auteurs sought out their disappearing cultural heritage by reenacting lived experiences of nation building, homecoming, and cultural salvage while shooting on-location. This was an especially daunting task when auteurs encountered the shooting locations as spaces of unresolved historical, social, and geopolitical contestations, tensions which were only intensified by the impact of filmmaking on rural communities. This book demonstrates how these complex circumstances surrounding location shooting were pivotal in shaping both representations of the rural on-screen, as well as the production communities, institutions, and industries off-screen. Informed by cutting-edge perspectives in cultural geography and media anthropology, The Authorship of Place both revises Chinese-language film history and theorizes groundbreaking approaches for investigating the cultural politics of film authorship and production.