The Dictionary of Human Geography (7 page)

America(s) (idea of)
The landmass in the Western Hemisphere consisting of the contin ents of North and South America (sometimes Central America and the Caribbean are iden tified as separate sub regions). The plural form is relatively recent, providing an alterna tive to a singular that typically refers to either the entire landmass or the United States of America on its own. The earliest use of the name America for the continents of the Americas is on a globe and map created by the cartographer Martin Waldseemiiller in 1507. The most popular story about the naming draws from a book that accompanied the map in which the name is derived from the Latin version of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci?s name, Americus Vespucius, in its feminine form, America, as all of the contin ents were given Latin feminine names by their European namers. From this viewpoint, Vespucci (directly or indirectly) ?invented' America (O?Gorman, 1961). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Most of the inhabitants of the Americas call themselves Americans, but in the English speaking world use of the word is often restricted to residents of the USA, a product both of the difficulty of making ?the United States' into an adjective and the political economic weight of the USA. The majority of the population of the Americas lives in Latin AMERica (542 out of 851 million), named as such because the south and central regions were colonized mainly by Spain and Portugal, in distinction from North America colonized initially by the British and French. As the largest and most developed economy, the USA has long dominated economically and frequently manipulated politically the states and peoples in the rest of the landmass. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The discovery of America by Europeans is usually put down to Christopher Columbus in 1492, though the existence of lands to the west of Europe was mooted in medieval Europe. Effectively, however, in terms of political, eco nomic and intellectual consequences, it is the European encounter after 1492 that is most significant, even though it was not until the late eighteenth century that the shape of the landmass as a whole was finally established. The appearance of America in the mental universe of fifteenth century Europeans repre sented a crucial early moment in the creation of the sense of a geopolitical world (see gEopoLlTics) that was increasingly to match the physical Earth. The ?discovery? was more than just the discovery of a new race of non Europeans. More particularly, it was the discovery of a previously unknown landmass and with it the recognition that ancient Greek cosmology, which had divided the Earth into three parts, had been mistaken (Kupperman, 1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Initially, at least, as John Elliott (1972) has argued, the discovery of America encouraged European intellectuals and officials to enlarge their concept of humanity. Eventually, though, the new variety of patterns of human behaviour made for some difficulty in retain ing the natural law belief in an essential and universal human nature. The increasing sense of absolute cultural difference from the natives and the impulse to exploit the new found lands of America combined, however, to create propitious circumstances for the ex pansion of settlement by Europeans. To the English philosopher John Locke, writing in 1689 and providing an early example of the backward modern conception of the stages of human social development, the Roman law known as res nullius applied to the ?empty lands' not put to active agricultural use by the native inhabitants and thus justified their takeover: ?America?, he wrote, ?is still a pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe, whilst the Inhabitants were too few for the Country, and want of People and Money gave Men no temptation to enlarge their Possessions of Land, or contest for wider extent of Grounds' (Locke, 1960 [1689], pp. 357 8; see also teRRA nullius). (NEW PARAGRAPH) America was europe?s first ?new world?. As such, it was regarded as a tabula rasa for Euro pean efforts at bringing the whole world into the European world economy (Armitage, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . In this respect, North and South America parted company over how this was done. If from 1492 to 1776 the North was increasingly dominated by an empire in as cendancy, the British, the South was subject to two empires, those of Spain and Portugal, in long term decay. By the late eighteenth century, local settler elites in both parts were in revolt against distant rule. As a result of their relative success, they were able by the early nineteenth century to imagine an America autonomous of Europe in which their ?political independence was accompan ied by a symbolic independence in the geopol itical imagination' (Mignolo, 2000, p. 135). If on the US side this led to the Monroe Doc trine of ?America for the Americans?, on the southern side it led to a developing sense of a ?Latin America' increasingly dominated by its northern neighbour, particularly as the USA emerged as a global power towards the cen tury's end. The struggle to expropriate or qualify the labels ?America? and ?American?, therefore, cannot be separated from the wider political conflict over the geopolitical consequences for the whole world of the dis covery and subsequent rising significance of the ?Americas?. ja (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Agnew (2003); Burke (1995); Pagden (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
American empire
As an informal form of imperial rule mediated by market mechanisms as much as by military might, American em pire has traditionally proved to be an elusive object of analysis and critique (but see Williams, 1980). In the context of the Iraq war this elusiveness has declined, afflicted by the spectacle of US dominance and the pro tests ranged against it (RETORT, 2005). In the media, liberal apologists joined conserva tives in promoting the Iraq adventure expli citly as a way of expanding American empire (e.g. Boot, 2003; Ignatieff, 2003), and, in the streets, amongst the millions marching against the war in 2003, many held placards that just as explicitly decried the violence and hubris of empire. However, as the playwright Harold Pinter reminded audiences when he received his Nobel Prize in 2005, the norm has more generally been silence on the topic. ?The crimes of the United States have been system atic, constant, vicious, remorseless,' he com plained, ?but very few people have actually talked about them? (Pinter, 2005). One ex planation for this silence is that in political discourse two kinds of ?exceptionalism' con tinually conspire to make talk of American empire somehow seem inappropriate. On the one hand, there is the exceptionalism of im perial denial that developed out of the anti imperial origins of American capitaLism and the Jeffersonian idea of the USA as an ?empire of liberty'. Having started with the national origin stories about independence from imper ial rule, this is the popular discourse that ex tends today to arguments that American dominance in the middLe east is exceptional in its emphasis on freedom, free enterprise and liberal rights. On the other hand, there is the illiberal connotation that makes exceptions in the name of American ?leadership? or ?sover eignty': a discourse that argues that unique global circumstances require the USA to make exceptions and break global rules (such as the Geneva Conventions) in order to main tain global order. There is a wealth of scholar ship addressing how the contradiction between these two discourses exposes the ex clusions and obscured authoritarian underpin nings of liberal universalism (Cooper, 2004; Lott, 2006; Singh, 2006). By also mapping the geographies of dominance that are at once concealed and enabled by the appeals to exceptionalism, criticaL Human geograpHy has simultaneously sought to make American empire itself less obscure (see ElFisgon, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Challenging the liberal capitalist dissem bling of empire, Neil Smith has underlined (NEW PARAGRAPH) how the exceptionalist rhetorics of imperial denial have also been predicated on a form of flat world disavowal of geography (Smith, 2003c, 2005b; see also Sparke, 2005). By pro moting the US model of liberal democratic capitalism in the terms of an ?American Cen tury? (as Henry Luce, the publisher of Time magazine, did in 1941) and by recently attempting to renew and expand this world historical dominance with a ?Project for a New American Century? (as neo conservative advocates of a pax americana have done in the past decade), Smith argues that a focus on making global history has helped to hide the global geography of American empire. Ad vanced today with a geographical appeals to globalization, Smith suggests that American dominance abroad is also ironically vulnerable to nationalist reaction at home (cf. Pieterse, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Focusing further on the capitalist con tradictions in the global system on which these vulnerabilities turn, other geographers have emphasized that American global hegemony has been centrally related to the country?s role as the incubator, exporter and regulator of free market neo LiberaLism on the world stage (Harvey, 2004b, 2005; Agnew, 2005a). Such work suggests that just as this hegemony was underpinned by America?s centrality to twentieth century capitalism, so too will it be undermined by the changing economic organ ization of the world, including the USA?s in creasing indebtedness in the twenty first century. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While the political economic geography of globalization exposes forms of American dominance that lie beneath the flat appeals of liberal exceptionalism, cultural political geographies of American empire have in turn showed how the illiberal exceptionalism illus trated by America?s contravention of laws pro tecting liberty has also created spaces of exception (see exception, space of) on the ground. Derek Gregory?s account of the ?colo nial present? thus explores how imaginative geographies tied to orientaLism have helped to legitimize the US led re colonization of the Middle East, turning the local inhabitants into outcasts and depriving them of human rights in the name of spreading freedom (Gregory, 2004b; see also Mitchell, 2002; Vitalis, 2002). Similarly, recent work by the American intel lectual historian Amy Kaplan has provided a scrupulous legal geography of the Guanta namo military base as another space of excep tion that is at once inside and outside the empire of American liberty (Kaplan, 2005; see also Gregory, 2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Pinter the playwright argued that the double standards represented by such spaces are nor mally hidden backstage: ?you have to hand it to America,? he concluded. ?It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power world wide while masquerading as a force for univer sal good. It?s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.? But what comes after the wit and hypnosis when the whole world can see the torture and abuse that go on backstage? One answer is simply the end of empire, or, as the RETORT group put it, ?real strategic failure? (RETORT, 2005, p. 5). But before this happens another development, indicated by the work of Gregory, Kaplan and a host of other scholars examining American geopoLitics, is an almost religious re mapping of American grand strategy as a Manichean double vision: a world in which core capitalist countries are seen as deserving of universal rights while a supposedly dysfunctional set of exceptional spaces are seen as sites where freedom must be suspended and people dis possessed in the name of spreading freedom (see Roberts, Secor and Sparke, 2003; Sparke, 2005; Dalby, 2006; Smith, 2006b). Following this neo liberal geopolitical script which has a precedent in imperial British liberalism (Mehta, 1999) American empire can con tinue the hypnotic ?god trick? of universalism in the spaces of the core by masquerading as an overarching force for good. ms (NEW PARAGRAPH)
analogue
The world is too complex to rep resent in its entirety. Analogue maps or other devices produce scaled down modeLs of the world using lines and areas to represent selected features. This is different from digital models (cf. digital cartography), which can be edited and transformed using GIS and other computer programs. In analogue maps or diagrams, for instance, information is fixed. The data cannot be viewed through a different map projection, nor can the scaLe be changed. Analogue maps literally use analo gies (lines for roads, blocks for houses, circles for towns, etc.) to represent the Earth. By contrast, digital maps display information on the screen but the properties, such as scale and projection, are not fixed and can be displayed in different formats. ns (NEW PARAGRAPH)
analytical Marxism
Scholarship using the logic and language of mathematics to interro gate Karl Marx?s theory of capitaLism (and other modes of production) for theoretical and/or empirical analysis (see marxism). In the three volumes of Capital, Marx drew at times extensively on mathematical examples to explicate his theory of value, as well as on quantitative information about poverty and capital labour relations in nineteenth century Britain. Marx has been criticized by main stream economists for mathematical in competence, particularly for errors in his ?transformation problem', which sought some what unsuccessfully to show that prices of production (long run market prices) are determined by labour values. Sraffa (1960) demonstrated, however, that neo classical macroeconomics had the same mathematical limitations, being only logically correct if production technologies are identical in every sector of the economy. Morishima showed that Marx's theory of exploitation can be deduced mathematically from his theory of capitalism: capitalists can only make positive monetary profits if labour is exploited in labour value terms. This triggered scholarship in analytical Marxism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In economics and sociology, analytical Marxism stressed developing deductive theor ies consistent with Marx's theorization of cap italism. Much of this work, pioneered by John Roemer, John Elster, George Cohen and Erik Olin Wright, is grounded in rational choicE thEory the belief that macro features of society are the consequence of the self inter ested actions of informed, rational economic actors. Taking the same starting point as neo classical economics, remarkably they show that under Marxian assumptions a very differ ent view of capitalism emerges. Exploitation occurs, the opposed economic interests of workers and capitalists generate class struggle over the economic surplus, capitalism is un stable, and individuals choose to join exploit ing and exploited classes because of initial wealth and endowment differences. These scholars have rejected Marx's labour theory of value. Empirically, however, observed long term market prices are indeed closely correlated with labour values, suggesting that such rejection is premature. These rational choice Marxists are criticized for their ground ing in rational choice behaviour, and insist ence on deductive reasoning, which are seen as inconsistent with Marx's dialectical logic (see dialectic: see also Roemer, 1982, 1986b; Carver and Thomas, 1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographers have applied mathematical reasoning to a Marxian analysis of the capital ist space economy, without grounding this in individual rational choice. Like Harvey's dialectical analysis, Sheppard and Barnes (NEW PARAGRAPH) demonstrate that the incorporation of (NEW PARAGRAPH) space complicates some of Marx?s theoretical propositions. Space further destabilizes the capitalist dynamics of uneven development, increases the likelihood that the interests of individual capitalists are in conflict with class interests and catalyses conflict between places that can undermine class dynamics. Equilibrium analysis is thus of little value, as equilibria are most unlikely and always unstable. Unlike Harvey, it is deduced that space undermines labour value as the founda tion of Marxian analysis. Empirically, Webber and Rigby (1996) show that fordism was not the golden age of postwar capitalism, contra regulation theory. Recent advances in com plexity thEory suggest that mathematical analysis of complex systems such as capitalism approximates many aspects of dialectical reasoning, suggesting that Marx's own resort to mathematics was not in tension with his philosophical approach. es (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Roemer (1986); Sheppard and Barnes (1990). (NEW PARAGRAPH)