Divya P Tolia-Kelly

Mobility/stability: British Asian cultures of ‘landscape and Englishness’

This paper examines the way in which the (British) Asian diaspora creates a territory of belonging and a cultural nationalism within the British landscape. New, British Asian cultures of Englishness are figured through the experience of mobility from ‘other’ landscapes to England. The expression of new hybrids of cultural nationalism based on cultures of Englishness and landscape are presented in the tangible forms of Asian womens drawings of ‘landscapes of belonging’ and their material cultures at home. The Englishness that is expressed through these cultures is examined as a mobile culture that has shifted in meaning and form through the various migrations of the diaspora from sites of colonial governance. The acknowledgement of mobility reveals how new cultural nationalisms rely on souvenirs and sacred objects, contributing to a new moral aesthetics of home and thus creating an inclusive culture of Englishness. The home incorporates a new space where the Englishness of Victoriana and textures of Indianess or Africaness are sites of memorial to mobility itself. The British Asian diaspora creates spatially transferable, mobile cultures of nationalism, expressed through material registers of English landscape aesthetics. The English landscape itself is examined as refractive of lived landscapes abroad and explored through the diasporic lens. Englishness in this paper is based on a ‘territory of culture’, unfixed from any singular national identity, land, or discrete national culture, but located in the cultures of desire of belonging to England.

Fear in Paradise: The Affective Registers of the English Lake District Landscape Re-visited

ABSTRACT During the summer of 2004, the artist Graham Lowe and I undertook a research project entitled Nurturing Ecologies within the Lake District National Park (LDNP) at Windermere. This landscape, considered as an icon of “Englishness,” is revisited through the embodied and sensory experiences of post-migration residents of Lancashire and Cumbria in an attempt to unravel multiple relationships embedded in visitor engagements with this landscape and thus disrupt the moral geography of the landscape as embodying a singular English sensibility, normally exclusionary of British multi-ethnic, translocal and mobile landscape values and sensibilities. The research led to the production of a series of drawings and descriptions made in visual workshops by participants, and a set of forty paintings produced by the artist. These paintings are examined in this paper as representing the values, sensory meanings and embodied relationships that exist for migrant communities with this landscape. These groups include the Asian community from the Lancashire town of Burnley and a “mixed” art group living in Lancashire. The initial drawings and subsequent paintings produced operate as a testimony to the Lake District landscape as a site for engendering feelings of terror, fear as well as representing a paradisiacal landscape.

Archaeologies of Landscape Excavating the Materialities of Hadrian’s Wall

This article interrogates the materiality of Hadrian’s Wall beyond its widespread perception as a monument of/to Ancient Rome. Encounters with this monument have generated multitudinous materialities: hegemonic, conflicting and ambiguous. These trajectories have their own material circulations in both solid and narrative forms. Here, we consider materiality through the cultures inspired by/of the Wall. Through the formulation of an interdisciplinary methodology and praxis, we contribute to landscape studies generally and Romano—British frontier studies in particular. Firstly, we consider the genealogies of thought through which the Wall has been created, including its definition as a contested border and its use to inform discourses of nation and empire. Secondly, the material landscapes of the Wall are considered through phenomenon and encounter informed by contemporary debates in anthropology, archaeology and cultural geography. As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Tales of the Frontier project (http:// www.dur.ac.uk/roman.centre/ hadrianswall/), the authors aim to provide an enriched account of the materialities of the Wall beyond traditional narratives generated by fieldwork and ancient historical texts.

The geographies of cultural geography II: Visual culture

Geography is a visual discipline and as such holds a complex relationship with visual culture. In the last two decades the collaborations between geographers and artists has grown exponentially. In an era where public impact and engagement are politically encouraged, there is a risk of collapsing the differences between visual culture as a discipline and the visual as an accessible mode of research communication. This paper reviews the ways in which collaborations between geographers and visual artists have taken shape, and argues for a careful and respectful engagement between them.

Motion/Emotion: Picturing Translocal Landscapes in the Nurturing Ecologies Research Project

In the Nurturing Ecologies research project the aim is to consider the emotional value of the Lake District landscape to mobile, translocal communities living in Lancashire and Cumbria. The research attempts to capture in the visual form of a set of paintings, the sensory responses to the English Lake District that these translocal communities have. The Lake District is a site where historically a singular narrative of English sensibility has been forged. This paper disrupts singular notions of ‘love’, ‘hate’ and ‘fear’, through the process of exploring issues of motion and emotion, power difference and identifications with cultures of landscape. Here, the translocal English participate in a visual methodology which makes tangible emotions figured through post‐colonial mobility, secured in a landscape of national sensibility.

Landscape, race and memory: biographical mapping of the routes of British Asian landscape values

In this paper the migration routes of British Asian women living in London are examined. It is shown that British Asians connect with a myriad of landscapes abroad, including East Africa, India and Pakistan. These connections to past landscapes are mapped and considered here as valued environments of British Asian women in Britain. Through the mapping of their biographies, it is apparent that memories of other landscapes are embedded in environmental practices in Britain, therefore contributing to making the landscape in Britain inclusive and meaningful in the context of the South Asian migration. The maps of migration show the heterogeneity of landscapes experienced by the British Asian women. Memories of other lands manifest themselves in the UK. The effect of these memories on the South Asian home itself in the process of shaping diasporic geographies of belonging and being within the UK is illustrated.

The geographies of cultural geography III : material geographies, vibrant matters and risking surface geographies.

The doing of material geographies within the subdiscipline of cultural geography has been inspired by Jane Bennett’s (2010) account of Vibrant Matter. This review follows the various trajectories in recently published research in the field of material geographies and argues that scholars should aim to embrace the call of matter to think politically and beyond the surface. The review argues that there is a risk of doing ‘surface geographies’ where research reflects matters at play rather than evaluate the interconnectivity and co-constitution of materialities and their geographies.

The geographies of cultural geography I: identities, bodies and race

This report proposes that if cultural geography seeks to continue to be ‘world-class’ and ‘international’ in its outlook and in praxis it then needs to shift the interface between the academy and the ‘other’ both within it and without. There is, in particular, a need to make academic aspirations more international and to make practice within the academy more inclusive and politically orientated towards valuing scholarship and scholars at the edges and margins of, and ‘other’ to, the usual moral geographies of the discipline.

Hadrian’s Wall Embodied archaeologies of the linear monument

The aim of this article is to consider the value of an embodied account of Hadrian’s Wall. This heritage site has often been understood in predominantly imperial and military terms. While this is a crucial aspect of the historical meanings of the monument, there has been little focus on factors such as changing social role, socialities produced through its presence, and perceptions of the Wall evident in historical accounts. Drawing on theoretical approaches in archaeology, geography and anthropology, this article investigates the potential for enriching archaeological knowledge through these approaches. We focus on accounts of some early visitors to the Wall to consider movement on, and encounter with, the Wall through an embodied account. This account seeks to enrich our archaeological history by being attentive to the power of the material landscape on the senses of being and feeling of those that encounter it. The experience of the Wall is made intelligible through a body-centred account.

Feeling and being at the (postcolonial) museum : presencing the affective politics of ‘race’ and culture.

This article posits the value in considering the affective politics in the everyday space of the British Museum with a postcolonial lens. Based on research collaborations with artist Rosanna Raymond the article argues that the gallery space becomes a theatre of pain. The museum acts as a site of materialising the pain of epistemic violence, the rupture of genocide and the deadening of artefacts. The article examines the embodied experience of encountering these galleries as for Māori visitors, the art museum becomes a mausoleum for the European eye, but which petrifies living cultures. In particular the article considers the petrification as it operates along racial lines. The museum space from critical postcolonial perspectives is presenced through Māori bodies looking at ‘self’, as ‘other’. This approach seeks to disturb the ways in which museums are read as texts, disembodied and removed from communities which are represented therein. The article argues for heritage sites as being forged through affective politics, and that race and postcolonial sensibilities resonate within their affective atmospheres.