Euan Hague

Race, Nation, and Nature: The Cultural Politics of “Celtic” Identification in the American West

Abstract Claims regarding a unitary, coherent “Celtic” culture and its westward spread over centuries have proliferated rapidly over the past 10 to 15 years. We examine both this general phenomenon, and one specific instance of it in detail: the claims of Celtic identity by Wise Use activists in New Mexico in the 1990s. Our primary concern is to examine their significance and utility in contemporary cultural politics. We argue that they have provided a powerful way for many white people in Western Europe and the United States to claim for themselves an ethnic identity strongly associated with oppression and resistance to the state, a position that affords them symbolic resources in negotiating the challenges of both multiculturalism and neoliberalism.

Whiteness, multiculturalism and nationalist appropriation of Celtic culture: the case of the League of the South and the Lega Nord

The League of the South (USA) and Lega Nord (Italy), formed in 1994 and 1991 respectively, are nationalist organizations that have utilized claims to Celtic ethnicity to further their appeal. In this article we explore these claims, made in relation to the southern United States and northern Italy, and argue that they are used by these organizations to justify exclusionary politics. By claiming a privileged status for Celtic culture, heritage and genealogy, the League of the South and Lega Nord envision their putative nation-states as accommodating other ethnic groups in subordinate roles. We argue that claiming Celtic ethnicity is an implicit appeal to white privilege. In the proposed nation-states of the Confederate States of America and Padania, white authority would be sustained. Further, the way these groups use Celticness allows them to make links to specific historical and material geographies. Claiming Celtic origins enables northern Italians to distinguish themselves from southern Italians, and to make an associated historical-geographical connection between themselves and northern Europe, enabling disassociation from the Mediterranean. The League of the South claim to ‘Anglo-Celtic’ ethnicity enables their membership to distinguish themselves from other residents of the United States, be these non-white residents of the southern states or other white people within the USA. Finally, we suggest that some dominant political commitments to multiculturalism facilitate precisely such claims to Celtic origins, however tenuous, to be made in the name of recognizing and protecting cultural difference.

‘The Right to Enter Every Other State’ – The Supreme Court and African American Mobility in the United States

Abstract In 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated in the Dred Scott case that if one African American was free to move unhindered throughout the United States, then all African Americans, enslaved or otherwise, would have ‘the right to enter every other State’. Such a situation, he argued, was untenable. The Supreme Court thus suggested that if U.S. citizenship included a de facto right to mobility, then African Americans could not be considered citizens. Although not formally written into the U.S. Constitution, numerous Supreme Court rulings since 1857 have underpinned the right to mobility in the United States. Yet the ability to be mobile in the United States has been fundamentally intertwined with the construction of racial identities. It was the white settlers that were free to move westward, the mobile nomadic lifestyles of the peoples they encountered being understood as primitive and inferior. Native peoples subsequently became immobilized on reservations. Similarly, African Americans in the era of slavery were immobilized on plantations and movement away from plantation space was illicit, codified as illegal, and required the hidden networks of the Underground Railroad. An African American moving through white American spaces faced often deadly consequences. African Americans should, in the parlance of the times, ‘know their place’ and not have the ambition, or the right, to move freely around the USA. To explore these contentions, I draw on four landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that elaborate on the mobility, or curtailment thereof, of African Americans in the United States.

The Jefferson Davis Highway: Contesting the Confederacy in the Pacific Northwest

The Jefferson Davis Highway (JDH) is a controversial Confederate memorial. Since 1913 the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) have placed markers along roadsides across America to commemorate the Confederate President. The womens organization claims that the JDH stretches over four thousand miles from Alexandria, Virginia to the Pacific coast and the Canadian border. In 2002, conflict ensued in the Pacific northwestern state of Washington when a local politician initiated a campaign to remove a granite JDH marker from a state park where it had been erected by the UDC sixty years previously. This led to dispute over whether Jefferson Davis should, or should not, be honoured by a commemorative marker on Washingtons border with Canada. Drawing on contemporary secondary sources to interrogate these contests over the meaning of Jefferson Davis and the Confederate legacy, we argue that behind the veneer of heritage and genealogical celebration forwarded by groups such as the UDC there is a neo-Confederate nationalism that works to maintain white supremacy as a dominant interpretation of US history.

Mobility in Daily Life: Between Freedom and Unfreedom

Balancing a theoretical examination of mobility with an empirical study based in Denmark, Freudendal-Pedersen presents an assessment of how everyday mobility decisions are made and how these decisions are reshaping and reorganizing life and community. The book is overwhelming focused on urban mobility in contemporary Western Europe, and centres on attitudes towards use of public transportation (primarily trains) and cars. Drawing on sociological theories articulated by John Urry, Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Sennett, Anthony Giddens, Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Erich Fromm, Freudendal-Pedersen sets out to explore the “taken-for-granted mobility of everyday life” (p. 9) in “late modernity” (p. 7). At the centre of the qualitative assessment is the “structural story” (Chapter 3). This interpretative tool, developed by Freudendal-Pedersen over the past decade, utilizes techniques of discourse analysis to draw out commonly held axioms from interview data. “A structural story”, explains Freudendal-Pedersen (pp. 34–35) “is a specific way of arguing the reasons for everyday life choices and actions . . . [a] rationale [that] . . . functions as a guide for specific actions . . . the starting point for how we, as individuals, understand specific problems and possible solutions”. Freudendal-Pedersen identifies three central narratives (structural stories) recounted by individuals which have become unquestioned commonsense reasons for their mobility decisions: (1) “When one has children, one needs a car”; (2) “The train is always late”; (3) “The car offers some possibilities no other transport mode can give” (p. 43). Although individuals may not recount these phrases exactly, Freudendal-Pedersen maintains that one of these three rationales can usually be inferred from comments made about mobility decisions. In some instances, Freudendal-Pedersen explains, “counter-stories” (p. 56) do develop to challenge the taken for granted rationales of the structural stories. Greater exploration of these by Freudendal-Pedersen would have furthered the empirical assessment and helped to make the “structural stories” concept more dynamic. The qualitative material is drawn from conversations with residents of the Copenhagen area, aged between 25 and 35, “white, middle-class, and with a high level of education” (p. 113), some of whom knew each other prior to their participation in the study. The homogeneity of this group, Freudendal-Pedersen comments, means that their outlooks are similar and thus the “structural stories” raised in interviews and focus groups appear as “universal truths” (p. 8) indicative of wider societal rationales for mobility choices. One minor difference emerges between those with and without young children; the European Planning Studies Vol. 18, No. 2, February 2010

Globalization's Contradictions: Geographies of Discipline, Destruction and Transformation by Dennis Conway and Nik Heynen, eds

examine the geographic, political, cultural, and economic forces that are working both for and against further integration. The authors extend the discussion on economic integration around theme five with recommendations on how best to navigate the potential barriers working against building more regional cooperation between the WPD and Hong Kong (p. 117). These recommendations serve as a blueprint to maximize the potential cross boundary development between the two regions. The Western Pearl Delta advances the place of geographers within academic research on globalization and local economic development. Successfully integrating a variety of research methods and disciplines, the authors construct rich narratives that capture the development pulse of the WPD region. The Western Pearl Delta contribution to the geography literature is related to earlier work of geographers connecting how local systems can tie capital to places through local dependence. The local dependence literature provides evidence suggesting that ‘‘places’’ and ‘‘localities’’ with their unique cultures and politics still matter in the era of globalization (Markusen 1996). These observations help define China’s new competitive politics of economic development (see Cox and Mair 1988, 1991). Communities or regions try to promote cooperation and develop a sense of identity in attempting to position the community to compete for local investment, which benefits all in the locality. These local growth coalitions connect to two themes associated with the local dependence literature: (1) local cooperation and (2) competition regionally, nationally, and globally (Cox 1995, 1997; Cox and Mair 1988; Swyngedouw 1997). This book examines how these local systems develop and evolve in high-growth regions like the WPD and nearby established global players, such as Hong Kong. In this sense, the book introduces a new complexity and a non-Western contribution to the literature on the politics of economic development. From this reader’s perspective, the book would benefit from a fuller engagement with the existing literature on the politics of economic development and growth coalitions. The Western Pearl Delta represents a body of work that geographers, regional planners, and other social scientists can learn from. It introduces and diagrams the power of globalization and its impact on localities. As China’s economy grows faster in relation to other regions, it is even more critical for geographers to understand its linkages to other places and growth strategies.

Measuring Community and University Impacts of Critical Civic Geography: Insights from Chicago

Geographers have increasingly adopted community-based learning and research into their teaching and scholarly activities since Bunge and Harvey called for an applied public geography that is both useful and challenges societal inequalities. With few exceptions, however, there has been little discussion of methods for measuring this work. Many published assessments focus on the impacts of projects on students but overlook the impacts on community partners. Impacts on faculty and the larger university community are also often ignored. This article discusses literature on the evaluation of community–university research and service learning from a critical perspective. A discussion of service learning and community-based research (CBR) projects at two Chicago universities, DePaul and Chicago State, is presented. In both cases challenges were encountered to achieve full evaluation of projects, yet both included an evaluation of university and community partners that allowed for assessment of the projects’ value to all partners.