Sorin Antohi

Symbolic Geographies

Over the last two decades or so, old and new visions and representations of the world(s) we live in have come (back) to haunt us. While Marxist prophecies about the ’withering away’ of the state have not, like most other prophecies, been fulfilled, the Cold War organization of the world (both cognitive and geopolitical) did eventually wither away. Globalization, as well as new local and regional dynamics, have radicalized the questioning, critique, and contestation of traditional Weltanschauungen. Recovering at long last after their association with the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, fields such as geopolitics, cultural geography, cultural morphology, and the like have been reshaped and have generated a huge new corpus, as well as lively scholarly and public debates.

At the center of these debates, late modern or postmodern critiques of what we call discourses or discursive practices since Foucault, have devastated most hegemonic representations of the world, and of its various fragments. Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (1878) is probably the single most influential such work; in the 1980s and 1990s, similar works have analyzed, extended to other parts of the world, or tried to recuperate and politicize the notion of Orientalism. Combining Foucault’s and Said’s inspirations with painstaking research in the archives and libraries of other parts of the world, scholars such as Larry Wolff and Maria Todorova have produced an impressive and influential series of works on Eastern Europe, Venice and Dalmatia, and the Balkans, respectively.

All in all, the discussion on globalization in the early third millennium seems ready to tackle such issues in a transdisciplinary, intercultural way; we witness a renewed interest, on the part of geographers, in the traditions of cultural/ mental/ philosophical geography (from Carl Ritter to Vidal de la Blache and beyond); the coming back of geopolitics in the field of international relations (from List to Mackinder); the ‘revelation’ of culture in American political science (Huntington), which relaunched the conservative idea of a ‘clash of civilizations’ (embraced by many after September 11, 2001); the insistence on space, (dis)location, locality, and territoriality, in the study of individual and collective identities; the challenges facing the paradigms and even the very existence of nation states (old and emergent); the emphasis on space in most humanities and social sciences, from literary theory to cultural theory and subaltern studies; the ‘revelation’ of the symbolic sphere among major economists; and so on.

Thus, symbolic geography and its related fields have become a pivotal intellectual and academic approach to the world(s) we live in, both real and ‘invented’ or ‘imagined’.