Landscape, politics and the historical geography of southern Africa

McGregor, JoAnn

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2004.12.021

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 26 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Several papers in a recent special issue of Journal of Historical Geography continue with the theme of contested African landscapes (McGregor, 2005, provides an introduction to the issue). Wolmer ( 2005) argues that the Zimbabwean lowveld's 'wilderness' status was a legacy of colonial encounter, and that its physical modification to maintain this image has often been to the detriment of its inhabitants.…”

Section: Environmental Conflicts and Landscape Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical geography: natures, landscapes, environments

Naylor

2006

Progress in Human Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Environmental Conflicts and Landscape Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical geography: natures, landscapes, environments

Naylor

2006

Progress in Human Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…In many former colonies, environmental discourses that were crucial in the project of colonial conquest, and that have also informed much of current environmental policies, were explicitly conservative, as well as racialized (Beinart, 2000;Kepe, 2009). Travel writers, who paid more attention to animals and other nature than to people, implanted the idea of empty space and wild nature in many of the colonies (McGregor, 2005). This helped colonists to justify the appropriation and protection of nature for the benefit of settler societies, while at the same time disenfranchizing local people in terms of their land, and access to and control over natural resources needed for their livelihoods (Beinart, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Globalization, Science, and the Making of an Environmental Discourse on the Wild Coast, South Africa

Kepe

2014

Environ Plan A

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper uses the case of the proposed Pondoland National Park in South Africa, which is in the center of policy debates about biodiversity conservation, development, and resource rights in the Wild Coast area of South Africa. It explores whether the making of the case for the conservation of the Wild Coast, which relies on global environmental discourses, has ideologically and practically clarified local poor people's resource rights. It does this by tracing the genealogy of the Pondoland National Park discourse, which originates from scientific research and individual and group lobbying, to help explain the disjuncture between post-apartheid environmental policy discourses and what takes place in practice. The paper concludes that the reliance on global environmental discourses in research done in support for the Pondoland National Park complicates the role of the nation-state in terms of environmental governance, and that this can negatively affect the poor and powerless residents of the area in question.

show abstract

“…7 7 For recent critical work in historical geography on themes of ‘natures, landscapes and environments’, see Naylor (2006). For southern African work on this theme, see the Journal of Historical Geography 31 (2), special issue on landscape and politics, introduced by McGregor (2005). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating a Commodified Wilderness: Tourism, Private Game Farming, and ‘Third Nature’ Landscapes in Kwazulu‐natal

Brooks¹,

Spierenburg²,

Brakel

et al. 2011

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores contemporary cultural geographies and underlying histories of change on private land in post‐apartheid South Africa. Its focus is the expansion of wildlife‐based tourism and related forms of commodified wilderness consumption in KwaZulu‐Natal province. The article explores the social and economic processes occurring on game farms in a region known as the Midlands. Here nature is being culturally (re)constructed on former farmlands to create new landscapes shaped by the demands of wildlife‐based tourism. In pursuit of these ‘third nature’ dreams, spaces often need to be physically changed as well as discursively repositioned through marketing. Yet this is not an unchallenged process: the presence of ‘farm dwellers’ living on privately owned land disrupts smooth progress to a refashioned wilderness landscape. The article identifies various strategies employed by landowners in order to minimise the presence of farm dwellers on their land. In the current context, the involvement of the state on private land adds a further layer of complexity. Land reform policies and programmes serve as a mesh through which these contestations are filtered. While their effects are often ambiguous, land claims in particular serve to challenge the ‘third nature’ dream of landowners.

show abstract

Landscape, politics and the historical geography of southern Africa

Cited by 7 publications

References 26 publications

Historical geography: natures, landscapes, environments

Historical geography: natures, landscapes, environments

Globalization, Science, and the Making of an Environmental Discourse on the Wild Coast, South Africa

Creating a Commodified Wilderness: Tourism, Private Game Farming, and ‘Third Nature’ Landscapes in Kwazulu‐natal

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About