This paper presents a critical assessment of the concept of transnationalism and its place within the current refiguration of cultural geography. Identifying three specific concerns with current theorizations of transnationalism (regarding the concept's scope, specificity and politics), the paper discusses the widely perceived need to ‘ground’ the study of transnationalism in specific empirical research. It argues that this discussion has been unhelpfully dominated by an overemphasis on identifying transnational migrant and diasporic communities. The paper highlights the authors' research with a range of food and fashion firms working between Britain and the Indian subcontinent to argue that an analysis of commodity culture provides an alternative way of advancing our understanding of contemporary transnationality. This approach suggests that transnational space can be recognized as both multidimensional and multiply inhabited. The paper concludes by outlining the alternative ways in which attention to commodity culture helps ‘ground’ the concept of transnationalism.
Increasingly attention is being paid to the ways in which consumption is a geographically constituted process. In this paper the notion of ‘displacement’ is used to reflect on these constitutive geographies, and in particular as a way of understanding contemporary consumption neither as a homogenising nor a locally bounded social activity. Two aspects of the geographies of displacement within consuming worlds are highlighted: the representations of origins, travels, and destinations—or geographical knowledges—that surround and in part comprise commodities; and the juxtapositional character of the arenas in which consumption takes and makes place. These geographies are illustrated and critically analysed through examples of commodities that deploy representations of the ‘global’, the ‘ethnic’, and the ‘hospitable’.
The geographies of one particular restaurant workplace in the southeast of England are considered. It is argued that such workplace geographies—broadly of surveillance, display, and location—help to constitute the character of an employment. Here, this is demonstrated through an examination of the performative geographies of display in waiting work in Smoky Joe's restaurant. This examination is then used in two ways: both to draw out some implications of the interpersonal nature of this particular job; and to establish some broader analytical dimensions—sociospatial relations of consumption—to aid the understanding of how and why other jobs may be similar or different.
This article uses claims about the local globalization of culinary culture to stage an argument about the character of material cultural geographies and their spaces of identity practice. It approaches these geographies in two ways. First, it views foods not only as placed cultural artefacts, but also as dis-placed materials and practices, inhabiting many times and spaces which, far from being neatly bounded, bleed into and mutually constitute each other. Second, it considers the geographical knowledges, or understandings, of foods' geo graphies, mobilized within circuits of culinary culture, outlining their pro duction through processes of commodity fetishism, and arguing for forms of critical intervention that work with the fetish rather than attempt to reach behind it.
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