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Subject: McNamara on Crow, ed., _Geography and Indentity_

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (February, 1998)

Dennis Crow, ed.  _Geography and Identity:  Living and Exploring
Geopolitics of Identity_.  Critical Studies in Community Development
and Architecture.  Washington, D.C.:  Maisonneuve Press, 1996.  iv +
378 pp. Tables, illustrations, notes.  $39.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-944-62423-5; $17.95 (paper), ISBN 0-944-62424-3.

Reviewed for H-Urban by Kevin R. McNamara
<[log in to unmask]>, University of Houston-Clear Lake

                Living on a Fault Line

Over the last decade and more, "the reassertion of space in critical
social theory"[1] has produced many insightful analyses of
particular spaces, the phenomenology of place, and the social
production of space. To this growing list we must now add _Geography
and Identity:  Living and Exploring Geopolitics of Identity_, the
second volume of essays edited by Dennis Crow for Maisonneuve
Press's Critical Studies in Community Development and Architecture.

What distinguishes this collection from others is the subtlety with
which the title's key terms are interrogated as they are employed.
"Geography" in this book encompasses several modes of analysis that
overlap but just as often fragment the identity of place, while
"identity" is itself subject to critical scrutiny that reveals its
constitutive displacements and _mis_identifications.  Rather than a
uniformity of approach or focus, _Geography and Identity_ takes full
advantage of the wealth of strategies for exploring the significance
of space and place in the formation of identity as authors apply
them to subjects that range from malls and their constituencies,
public housing and its inhabitants, Indian jute-mill workers, Native
Americans, and the political-theological identities of the State of
Israel.

This volume's sub-title signals that the fifteen essays, prefaced
with an introduction by the editor, will combine traditional modes
of scholarship with personal experience and reflection in order to
explore the construction of personal and place identity, to inquire
into the relation between individual or group identity and the
historical, geological, and architectonic specificities of place,
and to adumbrate the experience of space (p. 5).  Crow invites his
contributors to think carefully about how physical spaces and
identities are continually created and recreated by each other over
time.  The dialectic--indeed, the contest--is graphically portrayed
on the book's cover collage of details from J. Seward Johnson's
site-specific sculpture, "The Awakening," in which the head and
limbs of a giant who struggles to emerge from the ground of Hains
Point, in Washington, D.C., in turn reorganizes the landscape.

Given the announced focus of the volume, any attempt to distinguish
the essays as "theoretical" or "practical" would do unwonted
violence to the project.  Mindful of that, I want nevertheless to
make a distinction of emphasis among the essays in order to discuss
a group of essays that are more concerned with the significations of
the keywords that recur in all of the essays before moving to a
second group of essays of more immediate interest to urbanists.

Crow's own contribution to this volume, "From Derrida to Del Rio,"
is perhaps the most rigorous exemplar of the procedure for which he
calls.  It layers Walter Prescott Webb's and William Least
Heat-Moon's very different work on the geography and history of the
Nemaha Ridge in Kansas with a preoccupation with ears in several
essays by Jacques Derrida and Cormac McCarthy's _Blood Meridian_,
and Crow's own memories of listening to border radio while growing
up in Kansas.  It results in a complex, allusive, even elusive
imbrication of intellectual biography and mythologies of place and
personal identity that speaks of border crossings, conflicts, and
means of conquest and resistance that Crow maps onto the human
sensorium.  Through synecdoches of _eye_ and _ear_, Crow invokes the
technologies of survey and settlement that Webb associates with the
abstraction and domination in the conquest of the west (p. 285), and
the work of recovering and reanimating the "other voices" (p. 300)
whose stories of the land and its identities often are overlooked in
quantitative social science and magisterial histories.  The battle
of the eyes and ears that Crow finds in Webb marks an interest
shared by all contributors:  How does one give voice, or lend an
ear, to individual stories while advancing a critical analysis that
is by its nature a process of abstraction?

Furthering this mode of allusive theoretical speculation, Gayatri
Spivak's "Acting Bits/Identity Talk" is described by the author as
not an academic essay (an imposed, self-identical structure) but "a
collection of fragments" (p. 40).  The form is appropriate because
Spivak's guiding thread is the conviction that, "if you fix on
identity, it gives way" (p. 40).  Identity is never what we commonly
mistake it for, a statement of "thisness"--of unique and
self-consistent being.  Rather, identity is an iteration of a "that"
with which the subject affiliates himself or herself as being the
same as (Latin, "_idem_"; Sanskrit, "_idam_"), or a "that" with
which he or she is identified (p. 43-44).  Spivak is herself an
interesting instance of the problem of fixing identity:  She is a
"'daughter of Bengal'" (p. 42) who earned her Ph.D. in the United
States and first came to academic attention for her translation and
annotation of Jacques Derrida's _Of Grammatology_.  Presently Avalon
Foundation Professor of Humanities at Columbia, she has held a
succession of endowed chairs at prestigious American universities.
At once insider and outsider to a hegemonic metropolitan culture and
a subaltern, non-western culture, Spivak enacts and records these
shifts her positionality in conversations in Toronto, Lake Como,
Calcutta, and Dhaka, both as she articulates her affiliations and as
she is situated by her interlocutors.

One of the consequences of Spivak's attention to the interplay of
geography and identity destabilization of the identity of "center"
and "margin" that is the central trope of much critical social
theory including, at times, her own.  "Acting Bits" pursues this end
through its verbal form, as I have noted, but also by the way it
stages the emergence of identity through the author's encounters
with other artists:  the Algerian writer Assia Djebar and,
particularly, the Lebanese-Canadian Jamelie Hassan, whose
installation, "Midnight's Children," displaces to the partition of
Palestine Salman Rushdie's phrase to describe the constitution of
Indian and Pakistani nationalities.  Spivak's engagements of these
texts produces a shared an identity-in-difference across religious
and geographic partitions among what she calls
"feminist(s)-in-decolonization" (p. 41).

While advancing the exchange among geography and critical social
theory many of the essays thus also offer an implicit rebuke to one
of the less fortunate consequences of the reemergence of geography
in critical theory: a spatialized _rhetoric_, a tropological
discourse that forgets its own metaphoricity and deploys spatial
terminology as if it had some recognizable and stable content
instead of "being dependent on their objects of investigation"
(Spivak, quoted by Crow, p. 11).  In his introduction, Crow observes
that often in contemporary critical discourse "'place,' like
'margins,' 'borders,' 'space,' 'boundaries,' etc.
are...place-holders for more analysis in terms of political-economy,
culture, or biography" (p. 11).  Absent such substantive analysis,
these putative spaces in turn become the "site" of one or another
"practice" (or "spatial practice," a concept in contemporary
critical theory whose provenance is primarily de Certeau and
Foucault) by a group whose identity is in circular fashion validated
by occupying the "space" that their practices demarcate, as if
collective identities were not "inherently heterogeneous and
permeable" (Tajbakhsh, p. 155).  At its worst, such circular
validation produces the rationale for ethnic cleansing.  Yet not
even a recognition of the impurity of identity or the hybridity of
spaces is necessarily proof against such circularity:  There exists
a whole literature of cultural borderlands and Mestizo Spaces in
which the space demarcated frequently is an ideological position
rather than a geographical space or a conventional marker of
identity.[2]

Daphne Spain's contribution to this volume, "More Marginal Than
Thou: Feminist Identities in Academia," stands as both a criticism
and an example of this problem.  The author promises a critique of
"an effort among some feminists to differentiate themselves within
the feminist community by establishing the most radical (and thereby
most marginal) credentials" in order "to establish (their)
legitimacy" (p. 120).  She rightly observes that the appearance of
marginality is in many disciplines (ironically, most often
disciplines marginal to the academy's economic performativity)[3]
more than a strategy for establishing one's "legitimacy"; it is an
effective form of self-promotion.  She notes that at her university
the Women's Center and Women's Studies program are "protected" from
budgetary cutbacks by their "marginality" (p. 122).  The essay thus
begs for a rethinking of the social cartography of center and margin
to displace the model of a single center that makes the margins
surround it.  The solidity of "center" and "margin" may once have
been appropriate, but it no longer adequately describes cultural
production and dissemination; we need a more relativistic field of
center_s_ of cultural production that are themselves be marginal to
other centers in specific ways.  Instead, we are treated to the
possibility that higher education is "the emergent 'new space of
radical resistance'" and reassured that academic feminism will
"prevail," even as "a more differentiated marginality has replaced
common marginality" (p. 125), whatever coordinates those terms might
designate.

The problem with essentialized identities is taken up more
productively in Kian Tajbakhsh's inquiry into the grounds of
identity among jute-mill workers in India.  This critique of
class-based identity as a default mode of analysis even among
analysts who intend to articulate a more complex description of
group identity, stems from work with community-based and
tenant-rights groups in New York, where the author first noted a
dearth of attention to identities formed "not (around) production,
but consumption," and not around the workplace but where one lives
(p. 144).  In the case of the jute-mill workers and commentaries on
them, Tajbakhsh argues that, consistently, "The subjects of the
history are workers; thus any other identity is an impurity" (p.
150).  Actions undertaken by worker groups, for instance, no matter
how violent, are called "strikes," but actions whose agents are
religion- or caste-identified consistently are characterized as
"riots" (p. 149); the implication appears to be that they lack
political or historical significance.

Such analyses, which Tajbakhsh critiques, reproduce that same
circular reasoning with respect to the social "space" of class.  The
solution to this problem is not, Tajbakhsh notes, simply to prefer
"anti-essentialist"  accounts of individual or group experience to
historical narratives in which some socially constructed identity
founds all action and choice, while other affiliations are merely
additive.  That approach still proposes a core of identity, while
experience, at best a partial and mediated perception of the social
totality, is part of the material of identity (p. 154).  We are no
closer to an understanding of how one activates the identities that
in turn direct action.  He likewise proposes that we understand
identity not as the expression of an innate state but as the
performative iteration of one among a set of possible collective
identities whose meanings are not internal to them but "what
structural linguists since Saussure have termed negative values" (p.
155).  Identity is then seen as elective, not a product of
structural determination or inherent being.  It goes without saying,
however, that the choice of identity is always overdetermined by a
host of ideological factors, such that identity is a process of
constitutive _mis_recognition by all parties.

Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin add to this discussion a closely-argued
and wonderfully clear engagement of the histories of universalist
and particularist forms of cultural or racial identity derived from
Pauline and rabbinic sources.  It supplies the groundwork for their
brief in favor of "diasporized identity."  In "Shifting the Ground
of Jewish Identity" they explore "a Jewish political subject 'other'
than that of (nationalist) Zionism" (p. 79), which "transform(ed)
entirely the meanings of (Jewish) social practices" as these
practices became hegemonic in Israel.  Among other things, the
Boyarins' account is an exemplary demonstration of both the unstable
identities of "centers" and "margins" and the forms of violence that
arise from a refusal to account these changes in order to preserve a
claim to marginality.

The Boyarins develop a "diasporic Jewish identity" as a
transformation, or a translation, of space into time.  The physical
space of Israel is refigured as a "memory of shared space and...hope
for such shared space in an infinitely deferred future" (p. 93).
This deterritorialization is possible without a loss of
identity--indeed, they see it as a _gain_--because the diasporic
narrative recuperates an identity based on "family, history, memory
and practice" to replace an identity rooted in "a Divine Promise to
give this land which is the land of Others to His People Israel
(that) is a marker and sign of bad conscience" (pp. 98, 99).  Along
the way, the Boyarins assert the validity of a differential approach
to group or ethnic identity, contending that "For people who are
somehow part of a dominant group, any assertions of essence are ipso
facto products and reproducers of the system of domination.  For
subaltern groups, however, essentialism is resistance, the
insistence on the 'right' of the group actually to exist" (p. 90).
In so saying, they refute one extreme in the critique of identity,
which finds ample reason for moving entirely beyond communal or
cultural identity in the long history of violence perpetrated in the
name of identity.

II

Several of the essays that focus on specific locations are of direct
interest to urban historians.  Robert Mugerauer's account of an
emergent social group in Austin, Texas, the "Alternative Symbolic
Analysts" is the richest and, in my estimation, the most successful
combination of autobiography and "traditional" scholarship in this
volume.  His subject is a sub-class of the professionals who
"simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged,
juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and
then, eventually transformed back into reality," as former Secretary
of Labor Robert Reich (quoted by Mugerauer, p. 326)  describes his
category of symbolic analysts.  The alternative analysts, among whom
Mugerauer numbers himself, are economically dependent upon the
information sector lasso-ed for Austin by the State's old-boy
political network, but use their influence to resist and redirect
"_the high technology and mainstream establishments in range of ways
on behalf of groups that do not have the same privileges and access
that the symbolic analysts themselves do and on behalf of the
environment (especially in light of the historical bio-cultural
character of the place_" (p. 328; emphasis in the original).

But the particular triumph of "Plugging into the Information Flow in
Austin, Texas," is the grace with which Mugerauer performs the
operation of the symbolic analyst (abstraction, rearrangement,
transformation "back into reality") on the cultures and geography of
Austin.  The essay begins with personal reminiscences:  Mugerauer's
exploration of an alternative Austin while in school at the
University of Texas, and his mother's comment that the geography and
culture of Austin recall "the southwest corner of Wisconsin...where
you were born and spent most of your summers on your grandparents'
farm" (p. 309).  It moves to a lucid, "abstract"  discussion of the
physical surface of the Austin region, the modes of agricultural
life each bioregion supported, and how the confluence of settlement
patterns has defined the ethno-cultural map of Austin for over a
century.  This presentation is also noteworthy as the volume's only
sustained treatment of the impact of natural features on the
development of an urban landscape.  The essay returns to the
"reality" of autobiography as it follows the development of "the
five traditions" (African American, Mexican, German/Czech, Southern,
Cowboy) and their political and economic "fault lines" through the
recent development of Austin as a node in the high-tech and
information economy, whose growth prompted Mugerauer's return to the
city.

Mugerauer might have offered more information about how the symbolic
analysts' interventions have fared.  He supplies ample evidence of
the depredations of the developers, the boosters and their
interests, and of the rise of an "'alternative community' that
supports and is supported by 'alternative' businesses" (p. 334).
There is a good accounting of the alternative analysts' negotiation
of cultural borders--"enjoy(ing) the rituals and ceremonies, arts,
food, clothing and personal or home decorations that are part of the
(marginal Austin) groups identities" (p.  329), and of their
dependence on techno- capitalism.  But how and where the alternative
symbolic analysts have intervened with as well as "on behalf of
disadvantaged populations" (p. 328) is an undoubtedly interesting
story that is given short shrift.

Something similar happens in Robert Shields's otherwise informative
account of The Mall that Ate Edmonton.  As a case study of how malls
work, how the West Edmonton Mall reorganized the perception of
Edmonton's geography, and how the mall respatialized sociality in
Edmonton, "Social Spatialization and the Built Environment" works
wonderfully.  But a second major strand, in effect a clash of
theoretical a prioris, is less successful.  It pits those spatial
analysts (e.g.: Gottdiener, Jameson)  whose emphasis falls on the
disciplinary properties of built spaces against other theorists
(e.g.: de Certeau) whose interest is in the way spaces are used or
consumed.  After taking Gottdiener to task for neglecting "ironic
reversals and hijackings of intended perceptions" that "'ward off'
the spirits of the...Mall" (349-50, 346), Shields only asserts the
presence of a counter-practice of _flanerie_ that "subver[ts] 'mall
design' and the intended consumer experience" (350).  What is
needed, perhaps, is an approach that does not presume the existence
of a struggle between planners and users; there may be other, less
agonistic, forms of discipline at work in the anticipation,
satisfaction, and even the creation of desires for
consumption--visual as well as economic--that the mall satisfies.

Debbie Nathan's "Love in the Time of Cholera: Free Trade at the
Border Line," is rich with specific, material detail, as befits a
journalistic essay.  The El Paso-based Nathan reports on the living
conditions for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the _colonias_ on
both sides of the Texas border that make it vulnerable to the
cholera epidemic that has been predicted along the U.S. southern
border since 1975 (p. 376).  Beneath the gaze of the Border patrol,
Nathan gives an ear and a voice to the story of Perla and translates
geopolitical issues into lived experience.  "Love in the Time of
Cholera" is also autobiography, the story of Nathan's own crossing
and recrossing of borders:  between the Mexican community and the
world of university seminars on cholera and conferences on free
trade at the local Marriott, between the United States and Mexico
with Perla and her sisters-in-law to get the fruit that they sell
door-to-door.  (One of Nathan's neighbors did not recognize her in
old clothes, covered with the filth of the river and a sewer tunnel,
and gave her a charitable dollar.)

Among the more "traditional" scholarship of interest to observers of
urban culture and society are Peter Marcuse's "Walls in the City:
Is the Goal a Wall-less City?", Lawrence J. Vale's "Destigmatizing
Public Housing," and Marshall Berman's "Falling Towers:  Life after
Urbicide."  Marcuse offers a taxonomy of walls--physical and
experiential, fixed and fluid--and notes on their provenance and
their function.  Many of his observations are developed with
contrastive examples drawn from New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin,
but the essay is more a thought-provoking blueprint for further
studies than a finished work.

Vale's Boston case study of residents' perceptions of whether or not
their developments "look like public housing" concludes that "the
'look' of public housing involves far more than can be seen" (p.
240).  Indeed, while some differences between a "development" and a
"project" are matters of landscaping (grass, flowers, trees) and
groundskeeping, superblock plans, red brick, and buildings that all
look the same are not in themselves markers of public housing.  What
repeatedly emerges as a theme in residents comments about themselves
and their surroundings is the perception of others.  Whether the
structures would look like public housing to anyone driving by, or
whether other residents exhibit behaviors that have become
associated with public housing and serve to stigmatize it, are
common indices in the responses.  Not surprisingly, the level of
satisfaction among residents was higher when their involvement in
the process of redesign was solicited (p. 240).  How much of that
satisfaction is attributable to the design itself and how much it
reflects a community-building experience of empowerment is a
question Vale might have looked at more closely than he did.  Like
the process by which residents identify their living conditions
through the putative evaluations of others, it speaks directly to
the component of _mis_recognition in identity.

Finally, Marshall Berman's "Falling Towers:  City Life after
Urbicide" is an unabashedly humanist counterpoint to the volume's
theory-inflected themes.  A survey of "the literature of urbicide"
(p. 176) draws its lessons from the Old Testament and _The Trojan
Women_, Baudelaire's "The Eyes of the Poor," Mann's _Doktor Faustus_
(both discussed in _All that Is Solid Melts into Air_) and Kafka.
If Berman takes his title conceit, "Falling Towers," from T. S.
Eliot's _The Waste Land_, he looks elsewhere than the poet's
Tiresias, an impotent witness, for regeneration. Recalling the Book
of Nehemiah and its description of "the work of rebuilding, a task
of enormous difficulties, both material and spiritual"  (p. 180),
Berman offers "Notes for a New Nehemiah" (p. 185) who would recall
for us the cultural and social centrality of cities throughout
history, the strong linkage between the renewal of cities and the
renewal of culture.  If the argument is no more new than Eliot's
litany, "Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/Vienna London," and Berman's
addition of The Bronx, it nevertheless remains timely.

Two other essays of interest to urbanists are less rewarding.  Helen
Liggett and David Perry's reexamination of Robert Moses does offer
an interesting critique of how "casting Moses as the ruthless author
of the modernist city legitimates planning by giving it the moral
high ground, absolving it of its failures by not confronting them"
(p. 208).  Yet the essay's larger project, to read "the text" of
Robert Moses, is over-theorized and less convincing, in part because
the authors seem underprepared for the sort of rhetorical analysis
they would offer.  Contesting the Moses of Robert Caro and Marshall
Berman, who are accused of reifying him as a "great man," the
authors in fact leave the reader reassured that Moses was a
consummate bureaucrat and self-promoter who demanded and received
the complete loyalty of all who worked below him:  a "powerbroker"
indeed.  Writing of Moses's relation to his "muchachos" (his inner
circle, who were "hired (for) loyalty and trust over competence" and
paid him "complete fealty" [p. 204]), Liggett and Perry claim,
"Moses was literally fragmented:  The muchachos were an extension of
(him)" (p.  205).  Surely, they don't mean _literally_ fragmented,
but even taken figuratively the claim is unconvincing.  These
ambulatory extensions may make for a prosthetic Moses, but as
extensions of his agency they do not "fragment" him.  (I do not deny
that Moses's or anyone else's subjectivity is fragmented; my
argument is with the essay, not with poststructuralism.)

Kenneth Frampton's "Place, Form, and Identity," a stripped down
version of his essay, "Toward a Critical regionalism:  Six Points
for an Architecture of Resistance"[4] lacks the history of critical
regionalism and most of the Heideggerian nostalgia and the screed
against postmodernism, air-conditioning, and television.  In this
form, the essay more effectively advances Frampton's argument for an
architecture that would resist the imperatives of global
modernization, but the traces of Heidegger leave him with problems.
Employing Heidegger without also "demythologizing" him is ethically
suspect for reasons revisited in Michael Dear's essay for this
volume, "The Personal Politics of Postmodernity" (pp. 128-42), his
well-known willingness to place his philosophy of Being at the
service of Naziism, an unutterably deplorable conjunction of
geography and identity.  Far from demythologizing Heidegger,
Frampton endorses practice that is "grounded in the real _and/or
mythic_ history of a particular place" (p. 166, my emphasis).  One
of the best ways to expand this essay (first published in _Domus_)
would be to justify the appeal to "mythic history" in the face of
the suffering authorized by myths of blood and soil, a geopolitics
of identity that most of the contributions to this volume seek to
deconstruct.

The other failure of this book is editorial.  There are many
typographical errors and several points at which the copy editor
seems to have been napping:  occasionally a sentence is unreadable,
in a couple of essays footnotes do not match up, a couple more have
entries missing from their lists of works cited.  I would also have
welcomed an index, as a way of moving meaningfully between the
essays, and notes on the contributors and their work.

If _Geography and Identity_ reaches the circulation that it
deserves, there will be an opportunity to correct those glitches.
They are, at any rate, a small distraction from the volume's rich
and singular blend of topics and methodologies.  The diversity of
interest and approach make Crow's collection an ideal reader for
urban studies or cultural studies courses; the essays gathered
herein not only instruct, they open avenues for self-aware critical
practice.


                             Notes

[1].  Edward W. Soja, _Postmodern Geographies:  The Reassertion of
Space in Critical Social Theory_, London and New York:  Verso, 1989.

[2].  See Michel De Certeau, _The Practice of Everyday Life_, trans.
Stephen Rendell, Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1984,
especially pp. 91-130; and Michel Foucault, "Space/Knowledge/Power,"
trans. Christian Hubert, _Skyline_ March 1982, pp. 16-21.  Gloria
Anzaldua is deservedly a central figure in this discourse of
marginal identity and borders, but another gay Mexican-American
author who engages the many of same subjects, Richard Rodriguez, is
marginal to the discourse of marginality because his interpretations
are too "mainstream."  I find Rodriguez's account of the
complexities of identity--its elective and imposed affinities, and
its negotiation and realization in a social field--to be far more
interesting, especially to urbanists; see Kevin R. McNamara, "A
Finer Grain: Richard Rodriguez's _Days of Obligation_," _Arizona
Quarterly_ 53.1 (1997): 103-122.

[3].  With "performativity" I invoke Jean-Francois Lyotard's
critique of the function of the university as a source of workers
skilled in ways that best serve the information economy; see _The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge_, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi, Theory and the History of Literature
10, Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 47-53.

[4].  Frampton, "Toward a Critical Regionalism:  Six Points for an
Architecture of Resistance," in Hal Foster, ed., _The
Anti-Aesthetic:  Essays on Postmodern Culture_, Port Townsend,
Wash.:  Bay Press, 1983, pp.  16-30.

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