Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility : The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World

What role does 'place' have in a world marked by increased mobility on a global scale? What strategies are there for representing 'place' in the age of globalization? What is the relationship between 'place' and the varied mobilities of migrancy, tourism, travel and nomadism? These are some of the questions that run through the ten essays in this collection. The combined effect of these essays is to participate in the contemporary project of subjecting the links between place, mobility, identity, representation and practice to critical interdisciplinary scrutiny. Such notions are not the property of particular disciplines. In the era of globalization, transnationalism and readily acknowledged cultural hybridity these links are more important than ever. They are important because of the taken-for-grantedness of: the universal impact of globalization; the receding importance of place and the centrality of mobile identities. This taken-for-grantedness masks the ways place continues to be important and ways in which mobility is differentiated by race, gender, ethnicity, nationality and many other social markers. This book is a concerted attempt to stop taking for granted these themes of the age. Material discussed in the essays include the creation of cultural routes in Europe, the video's of Fiona Tan, artistic and literary representations of the North African desert, the production of indigenous videos in Mexico, mobile forms of ethnography, the film Existenz, Jamaica Kincaid's writing on gardens, the video representation of sex tourism and ways of imagining the global. Authors include: Tim Cresswell, Ginette Verstraete, Ernst van Alphen, Ursula Biemann, Laurel C. Smith, Nick Couldry, Isabel Hoving, Renee van de Vall, Inge E. Boer and Kevin Hetherington.