-Space and Polity

`I never expected to call a handbook compulsive reading, but this wonderful volume changed all my preconceptions of what cultural geographers can do. Absorbing and thought-provoking, this is collaborative intellectual work at its imaginative best; it situates, explains and questions cultural geography as a "style of thought" and in the process imparts such vitality and joy from thinking in that style that this reader wants to join in. This Handbook can inform and inspire anyone concerned in any way with cultural research today' - Meaghan Morris, Chair Professor of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

`The Handbook of Cultural Geography lives up to its name. It is a book about where things are, how people live, what life means and why events happen. It should be carried at all times by anyone who is curious about the world. Crammed within its covers is a wealth of detail about the power to make history and shape geography. This is a catalogue of the disagreements and alliances that shape the world, and of the politics (and costs) of engaging with that world.The book is comprehensive yet has depth, accessible as well as experimental, and challenging without being too daunting. Each page contains something that seems highly familiar yet curiously strange. The message of course is that what we normally take for granted is so strange. The achievement is that after reading the Handbook, the world will never seem "normal" again' - Susan J Smith, Ogilvie Professor of Geography, The University of Edinburgh

`A richly plural and impassioned re-presentation of cultural geography that eschews everything in the way of boundary drawing and fixity. A re-visioning of the field as "a set of engagements with the world," it contains a vibrant atlas of ever shifting possibilities. Throbbing with commitment, and un-disciplined in the most positive sense of that term, it is exactly what a handbook ought to be' - Professor Allan Pred, Department of Geography, University of California at Berkeley

`A handbook with attitude and purpose, bristling with vitality, openness, and novelty. Dispelling with fixtures, canons, and retrofits, an imaginative cast in the hands of four of the most exciting contemporary cultural geographers opens up the cultural plural - culture as distribution of things, as a way of life, as meaning, as doing, as power - to a new spatial sensibility concerned with the fluid and mobile, the broadest ecology of spatial surfaces, the everyday lived, and the impetus of experimental forcings. A wonderful display of the confident maturity and originality that contemporary geography brings to cultural studies' - Professor Ash Amin, Department of Geography, University of Durham

The Handbook of Cultural Geography presents a state of the art assessment of the key questions informing cultural geography. Emphasizing the intellectual diversity of the discipline, the Handbook presents a comprehensive statement of the relationship between the cultural imagination and the geographical imagination while also looking at resonances between cultural geography and other disciplines.

The work is cross-referenced throughout and presents a completely integrated overview of cultural geography. This will be an essential reference for any inquiry into how culture is spatially constituted and, equally, how geography is culturally constructed.

The idea that humankind constituted a unity, albeit at different stages of ''development'', was in the 19th century challenged with a new way of thinking. The ''savagery'' of certain races was no longer regarded as a stage in their progress towards ''civilisation'', but as their permanent state. What caused this shift?

In Kay Anderson''s provocative new account, she argues that British colonial encounters in Australia from the late 1700s with the apparently unimproved condition of the Australian Aborigine, viewed against an understanding of ''humanity'' of the time (that is, as characterised by separation from nature), precipitated a crisis in existing ideas of what it meant to be human.

This lucid, intelligent and persuasive argument will be necessary reading for all scholars and upper-level students interested in the history and theories of ''race'', critical human geography, anthropology, and Australian and environmental studies.

The idea that humankind constituted a unity, albeit at different stages of ''development'', was in the 19th century challenged with a new way of thinking. The ''savagery'' of certain races was no longer regarded as a stage in their progress towards ''civilisation'', but as their permanent state. What caused this shift?

In Kay Anderson''s provocative new account, she argues that British colonial encounters in Australia from the late 1700s with the apparently unimproved condition of the Australian Aborigine, viewed against an understanding of ''humanity'' of the time (that is, as characterised by separation from nature), precipitated a crisis in existing ideas of what it meant to be human.

This lucid, intelligent and persuasive argument will be necessary reading for all scholars and upper-level students interested in the history and theories of ''race'', critical human geography, anthropology, and Australian and environmental studies.

-Space and Polity

`I never expected to call a handbook compulsive reading, but this wonderful volume changed all my preconceptions of what cultural geographers can do. Absorbing and thought-provoking, this is collaborative intellectual work at its imaginative best; it situates, explains and questions cultural geography as a "style of thought" and in the process imparts such vitality and joy from thinking in that style that this reader wants to join in. This Handbook can inform and inspire anyone concerned in any way with cultural research today' - Meaghan Morris, Chair Professor of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

`The Handbook of Cultural Geography lives up to its name. It is a book about where things are, how people live, what life means and why events happen. It should be carried at all times by anyone who is curious about the world. Crammed within its covers is a wealth of detail about the power to make history and shape geography. This is a catalogue of the disagreements and alliances that shape the world, and of the politics (and costs) of engaging with that world.The book is comprehensive yet has depth, accessible as well as experimental, and challenging without being too daunting. Each page contains something that seems highly familiar yet curiously strange. The message of course is that what we normally take for granted is so strange. The achievement is that after reading the Handbook, the world will never seem "normal" again' - Susan J Smith, Ogilvie Professor of Geography, The University of Edinburgh

`A richly plural and impassioned re-presentation of cultural geography that eschews everything in the way of boundary drawing and fixity. A re-visioning of the field as "a set of engagements with the world," it contains a vibrant atlas of ever shifting possibilities. Throbbing with commitment, and un-disciplined in the most positive sense of that term, it is exactly what a handbook ought to be' - Professor Allan Pred, Department of Geography, University of California at Berkeley

`A handbook with attitude and purpose, bristling with vitality, openness, and novelty. Dispelling with fixtures, canons, and retrofits, an imaginative cast in the hands of four of the most exciting contemporary cultural geographers opens up the cultural plural - culture as distribution of things, as a way of life, as meaning, as doing, as power - to a new spatial sensibility concerned with the fluid and mobile, the broadest ecology of spatial surfaces, the everyday lived, and the impetus of experimental forcings. A wonderful display of the confident maturity and originality that contemporary geography brings to cultural studies' - Professor Ash Amin, Department of Geography, University of Durham

The Handbook of Cultural Geography presents a state of the art assessment of the key questions informing cultural geography. Emphasizing the intellectual diversity of the discipline, the Handbook presents a comprehensive statement of the relationship between the cultural imagination and the geographical imagination while also looking at resonances between cultural geography and other disciplines.

The work is cross-referenced throughout and presents a completely integrated overview of cultural geography. This will be an essential reference for any inquiry into how culture is spatially constituted and, equally, how geography is culturally constructed.

The idea that humankind constituted a unity, albeit at different stages of ''development'', was in the 19th century challenged with a new way of thinking. The ''savagery'' of certain races was no longer regarded as a stage in their progress towards ''civilisation'', but as their permanent state. What caused this shift?

In Kay Anderson''s provocative new account, she argues that British colonial encounters in Australia from the late 1700s with the apparently unimproved condition of the Australian Aborigine, viewed against an understanding of ''humanity'' of the time (that is, as characterised by separation from nature), precipitated a crisis in existing ideas of what it meant to be human.

This lucid, intelligent and persuasive argument will be necessary reading for all scholars and upper-level students interested in the history and theories of ''race'', critical human geography, anthropology, and Australian and environmental studies.

The idea that humankind constituted a unity, albeit at different stages of ''development'', was in the 19th century challenged with a new way of thinking. The ''savagery'' of certain races was no longer regarded as a stage in their progress towards ''civilisation'', but as their permanent state. What caused this shift?

In Kay Anderson''s provocative new account, she argues that British colonial encounters in Australia from the late 1700s with the apparently unimproved condition of the Australian Aborigine, viewed against an understanding of ''humanity'' of the time (that is, as characterised by separation from nature), precipitated a crisis in existing ideas of what it meant to be human.

This lucid, intelligent and persuasive argument will be necessary reading for all scholars and upper-level students interested in the history and theories of ''race'', critical human geography, anthropology, and Australian and environmental studies.