Tag: book review

I got this book because I saw Natchee Blu Barnd speak at the AAG in 2019 and was really interested in his work. I’m trying to read more about settler colonialism and geography, in part because of a course I’m teaching on U.S. regional geography, but also because I’m trying to read more by indigenous geographers. Given the full title–Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism–I thought it would be about strategies within the discipline of geography. Instead, it was about the geographic strategies that indigenous people use to resist, which was just as interesting.

I love geography studies that focus on the mundane, taken-for-granted aspects of life that nevertheless have a strong place/space component. In this case, that includes street signs, license plates, and hometown parades. Brand’s detailed analysis of the communities across the U.S. with Native American-themed street names, both in and outside of reservation spaces, does a nice job of showing the value of looking at something so quotidian with a fine parsing of meaning and implications. There’s also an interesting chapter on Satanta, KS, and the descendants of Set-Tainte, for whom the town is named, that gets at some of the complexities of a White town trying to honor Native Americans while the Kiowa people try to honor their ancestor.

Brand then switches to looking at indigenous artists who use maps and other geographical elements in their work, first in a chapter on prints and paintings, and then in a chapter in installation art. I was glad to see Edgar Heap of Birds discussed here, because he had an installation on my campus in Urbana-Champaign for a while that was incredibly thought-provoking (see below). One of the things I’m learning from reading more books influenced by Ethnic Studies (Genevieve Carpio’s Collision at the Crossroads, Eric Avila’s The Folklore of the Freeway) is the importance of considering artists’ work alongside what social scientists might consider as more traditional academic subject matter.

I really enjoyed this book. I would definitely consider using it in my undergrad class because it’s a perfect combination of how we can look at seemingly minor aspects of the landscape like street signs–something students can do no matter where they are–and then use those elements of the landscape to understand how settler colonialism is an ongoing process that can still be “unsettled” and resisted. At the same time, and most valuable from a theoretical perspective, Brand illustrates in a number of ways how White and Native spaces overlap each other on the same territory, and that this overlap itself is a different kind of spatiality: “Contemporary Native space continues to defy the spatial absoluteness, certainty, and singularity that colonization intends to generate. Native space maintains layered geographies, and provides for coexisting partialities” (p. 97). Getting students to understand these simultaneous ways of seeing space would be a worthy goal in and of itself.

So I bought Nina Sylvanus’s Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa because I’m a quilter and am interested in fabric. I know very little about West Africa and its position in global circuits of trade, or about the wax cloth representative of this region. But man, was this book interesting. It was so well put-together in terms of separate topics in separate chapters that all tie in to a main theme, and in attending to both global capital and local culture, nationalism and livelihoods, symbolic meaning and (literally) materiality, individual women’s stories and anthropological theory. I would definitely recommend it if you’re interested in gender and development, post-colonial Africa, and/or cultural economic geography.

Part of why this book is so rich is that it’s based on over thirty months of fieldwork spread out over a decade. That’s what enables Sylvanus to get at the multiple meanings of pagne, the wax-dyed cloth that is so important economically, socially, and culturally in Togo and other parts of West Africa. On the one hand, she’s taking a commodity and tracing it through its colonial origins in the Dutch East Indies, its postcolonial role in connecting female traders to Togo’s dictator, and the post-postcolonial neoliberal regime that creates new entrepreneurial subjects focused on making individual connections to Chinese factories. In the process, Sylvanus argues that West Africa has been “global” for centuries, and not only as a site of resource extraction: Dutch clothmakers had to learn to pay attention to the styles and preferences of African consumers in order to produce a successful product.

At the same time, this book is an anthropological study of the different patterns of pagne in terms of how the designs communicate meaning to others (see above). There’s also the matter of how women wear this cloth to public events in deliberately performative ways to evoke status, ambition, and identity. The pattern, how the clothing is shaped, and how it’s accessorized are all key. More recently, knockoff versions of traditional clothing create a whole new level of complexity, as bystanders evaluate not just the pattern, but how high quality an imitation it is. It’s not just a matter of sight: it’s also how the cloth feels on the skin and drapes on the body, something that has to be personally experienced.

The last chapter talks about China-in-Africa, contrasting the literature on neo-colonialism and paternalistic Western concerns about infrastructure investment with a ground-up view as to how Togolese women are themselves drawing Chinese investment into Africa. In particular, they are making regular journeys to Guangzhou and Yiwu to supervise their own textile production, as structural adjustment and currency devaluation have made Dutch fabrics too expensive, and WTO agreements have decimated African textile production. At the same time, the Togolese government is under pressure to develop the center of Lomé in a fashion more conducive to international investment than the traditional cloth market that has been a fundamental part of the country’s identity, threatening the livelihood of these women on another front.

Overall, Sylvanus does an excellent job of bringing together multiple scales and registers of analysis. I learned a lot about cloth as an aspect of West Africa that doesn’t get much attention in the literature–perhaps because it is economically and culturally dominated by women, and I would definitely recommend it.

I’ve been trying to start my new book project on the Kankakee-Des Plaines confluence, and when I was telling someone on campus about it, they asked if I’d read this book. My description of my project as being about the different layers of transportation and flow that have swept through this one particular Midwestern place made them think of Hoganson’s book on how the Midwest has always been global. Finally, I sat down to read it.

Kristin Hoganson is a history professor on our campus, and her main argument is that the “Heartland” myth of an interior, protected space within the North American continent that is isolated and unchanging belies that this has long been a lively, vibrant space intertwined with the wider world in many important ways. She notes that the “Heartland” moniker only came about during WWII, even though it relies on an understanding of this place as timeless and central to U.S. identity. She argues that it has actually been a dual borderland, both between east and west as the frontier of white settlement, and between north and south due to agricultural flows between Mexico, the U.S., and Canada.

I learned a lot about the place where I live from this book, because Hoganson bases her work on Champaign-Urbana. For example, I had no idea that this used to be a major center for raising cattle and hogs; we think of the corn-and-soybean landscape as having always been here, but in the late 1800s, cows and pigs were driven here from points further south and then fattened before final delivery to the stockyards, thanks to the Illinois Central. Beyond agriculture, the chapter on airspace discusses “flyover country,” wired and wireless communications, weather forecasting, early attempts to understand the ecology of birds, and early aviation and the development of Chanute Air Force Base.

I also had no idea that many of the Kickapoo people (some of the original inhabitants of this land) went to Mexico and their descendants remain there today. This was the best chapter of the book as far as I was concerned, arguing that “In affixing security to this particular place, the heartland myth has attached it to particular people, at the cost of detaching it from others.” The tension between the mobile lifestyle of the Kickapoo and the settled lifestyle of the settlers is well-known, especially in terms of its implication for the land, but Hoganson takes it farther by discussing the multiple times the Kickapoo were displaced, including across the Mexican border.

One reason for this specific choice of place, of course, is the ease of conducting research when you live near the archives you need. Hogan argues that since “no single place in the heartland could serve as a microcosm for such a vast and variegated whole,” “Champaign seems as good a starting point as any” (p. xxv). And the book is definitely based on this singular place, though it expands outwards as needed to incorporate Champaign County or east-central Illinois as a whole.

However…I’m not convinced. True, other cities in central Illinois are atypical in their own ways: Springfield as the state capital, Decatur as the headquarters (until recently) of ADM, Bloomington-Normal as the headquarters of State Farm Insurance, etc. But to use a city with a major research university to argue that it’s surprising how global this place actually is concerns me. And then, Hoganson undermines her entire argument about how the heartland isn’t that insular and isolated with the story of an international student who arrived on campus from India in 1906 and said, “The general outlook of the students…was extremely narrow and parochial in this Middle West University. There was nothing of the freedom of mind and spirit of adventure which is generally associated with Universities” (p. 186-7).

Now, Hoganson argues that this does not mean the heartland was isolated, since there was all of this international contact taking place. But it brings to mind life in 2020 in Champaign, where increasing numbers of international students moving to town mean we have more bubble tea shops and international grocery stores, but also suspicious locals complaining about foreign drivers and writing into the local paper about the need to test Chinese students for COVID-19. We are globally-connected here, but those very connections are seen as a threat by people who have a few generations’ history on this land. Hoganson addresses this to some extent when she discusses how hogs were prized for their origin if they were from Britain, but not if they were from Mexico. But I would argue that a place which comes into contact with distant places without really engaging with them, is, in fact, a place that is isolated and inward-looking.

At any rate, the book is very readable and provides an interesting model for the same kind of broad-ranging study on a specific place that I want to do myself, including the “archival traces” at the end of each chapter that highlight key quotations from the archives to illustrate points in the chapter. The writing style is straightforward and non-jargony (it’s from Penguin, after all), and there’s a ton of illustrations. I would get into more detail about the notion of “place” and the relationship to transportation and mobility, but then, I’m a geographer and not a historian!