Representation, Politics of

H. V. Scott, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK

& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

GlossaryNew Cultural Geography A strand of cultural

geography that emerged in the 1980s, drawing above all

on British cultural studies and on post-structuralist

theory.

Representation A complex term which embraces

several distinct but interconnected meanings,

representation has become one of the most debated

concepts in human geography. It is possible, however,

to identify two principal ways in which the term is used

and understood. First, representation refers to a

portrayal, or equally to the act of portrayal of certain

ideas, objects, places, or people. It may therefore be

understood as an act or material object that stands for

something else. Representations may take the form of a

material product, such as a painting or a written text, but

are also produced by intangible means of

communication such as the spoken word. Second, the

term refers to the active inclusion and consideration of

the interests, needs, knowledges, and identities that

define particular individuals or groups. While this can

mean inclusion in a formal political system (for instance,

through the granting and exercising of electoral rights), it

also refers more broadly to inclusion in diverse social,

cultural, intellectual, and economic spheres of human

life, as well as in ‘real’ geographical spaces.

The Politics of Representation A phrase that

attained common usage in human geography by the

1990s, the politics of representation conveys the notion

that all forms of representation are biased and selective,

favoring the interests and ideas of certain groups while

marginalizing or excluding others, and hence are open

to contestation. It also refers to social struggles that are

played out over and through representation, in both

senses of the term.

Introduction

Until the latter half of the twentieth century, work inhuman geography was founded upon a deep-seated faithin the researcher’s ability to produce unbiased andtransparent representations of the world by means ofrigorous and objective investigation. The emergenceof positivist approaches in the 1950s signalled, on theone hand, a radical break with existing practices ofrepresentation in human geography, for the empiricist

traditions of detailed written description were rejected infavor of abstracted visions of the world based on math-ematical models. On the other hand, however, thesenew theory-driven impulses, which were inspired by the‘hard’ sciences, perpetuated what had gone before interms of their inbuilt assumptions about the possibilityof producing and conveying knowledge in a manneruntainted by factors such as personal experience, socialbackground, or cultural identity.

In the 1970s, a humanistic backlash against the ab-stractions of quantitative geography fostered scholarlyrecognition of the role of subjectivity, and hence of theresearcher’s presence, in the production of geographicalknowledge. Yet, despite the efforts of humanistic geog-raphers to bring human experience and subjectivity tothe center of geographical inquiry, the politics that arenow deemed to be ever-present in representations of theworld (whether produced by academics or other groups)and in the circumstances of their production remainedlargely unchallenged. Only with the embrace of post-structuralist thought in the late 1980s did the politics ofrepresentation begin to achieve real prominence as afocus of analysis and debate.

Geography and the Politics ofRepresentation: An Overview

The late twentieth-century diffusion of post-structuralismresulted in the profound destabilizing of old certaintiesthat had once underpinned academic thought and prac-tice across the humanities and social sciences. In humangeography, as in other academic arenas, the emergence ofdoubts about the existence of a world filled with naturallygiven and enduring meanings that could be unlocked, aswell as of new understandings of knowledge as inescap-ably partial and power-laden, produced what is referredto as a ‘crisis of representation’. Despite the negativeconnotations of this expression, the emergence ofgeographical anxieties about representation provided astimulus for intellectual creativity that encouraged thedevelopment of new theoretical, methodological, andthematic directions in social and cultural geography.These new directions were guided by the argument thatrepresentations are never mirror-images of reality, butinstead are always the product of diverse and ever-shiftingcontexts, and hence are never innocent, unbiased, or di-vorced from the realm of power and politics. Such con-cerns have been shared by academics in a range of otherdisciplines that include art history, literary criticism,

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cultural studies, and anthropology, and human geog-raphers have both drawn on and contributed to work inthese other disciplines. Despite the absence of clearlydefined disciplinary boundaries, geographical approachesare nevertheless distinguished by a particularly pro-nounced interest in exploring the politics of represen-tation through the prism of geographical concepts such asspace, place, and landscape.

Since the late 1980s, critical geographical engagementwith the politics of representation has involved, first, thedeconstruction or ‘reading’ of diverse representationsboth textual and material, ranging from written texts andvisual images (such as travel accounts, maps, and paint-ings) to physical landscapes. Focused above all on rep-resentations that are produced by powerful groups orindividuals, critical analyzes show how representationswork to promote particular ways of knowing and im-agining the world and particular constellations of powerand privilege within it. Demonstrations of the ways inwhich representational practices can have tangible effectsin the world, including the marginalization of certainknowledges and peoples or social groups, have thereforebeen central to geographical interest in the politics ofrepresentation.

Crucially, however, cultural and social geographershave been concerned to show that representations arealways open to multiple readings and interpretationsand, consequently, to challenge and contestation. Whilescholarly energies initially dwelled on uncovering thepolitics embedded within particular representations, theemphasis increasingly shifted toward exploring the dis-cursive, spatial, and embodied ways in which dominantrepresentational practices may be challenged or sub-verted by the marginalized or oppressed. In attending tothe ways in which representations are contested, socialand cultural geographers have placed at the center oftheir inquiries a broad spectrum of groups and identitieswhich, both within academia and in the wider world,have experienced varied forms of exclusion or margin-alization on the grounds of categories such as race, class,or sexuality.

Inspiration for such projects has undoubtedly beendrawn directly from the work of key post-structuralisttheorists such as Foucault and Derrida. However, currentsof thought in feminism, postcolonialism, and culturalstudies (all of which engage closely with post-structur-alism) have played a prominent role in developinggeographers’ concerns, not only for analyzing represen-tations and their effects in the world, but also for ad-dressing the profoundly political issue of whose voices,views, and ways of knowing are represented in discip-linary geography, either as subjects of intellectual inquiryor as examples of valid geographical knowledge.

The analysis of representations has necessarily beenaccompanied by self-reflexive engagements with issues

surrounding the politics of representation in contem-porary academic geography. No longer a taken-for-granted aspect of ‘doing geography’, the production ofrepresentations is now understood as an undertakingthat brings with it serious moral responsibilities for theresearcher, precisely because representations advancesituated, partial understandings of the world that canpromote certain worldviews and practices beyond theacademy and therefore have real effects on people’s lives.The difficult questions surrounding contemporary prac-tices of representation in geography are illustrated bypast debates about whether contemporary researcherswho seek to undermine discriminatory representations(such as those produced by agents of colonialism) bymaking them the object of critical analysis run the risk ofinadvertently reinforcing the very ideas and ideologiesthat these representations convey. Since the 1990s, theimpact of such concerns in social and cultural geographyhas become increasingly apparent in the careful con-textualization of contentious representations that arereproduced as objects of critical study in research articlesand books, as well as in a heightened awareness of au-thorial use of language and style.

At the same time, however, anxieties have emergedover the legitimacy with which geographers may claim torepresent the views and experiences of other groups orindividuals or, to put it another way, to provide them witha ‘voice’, especially when researchers and research sub-jects are separated by profound cultural, social, or edu-cational differences. The very complexity of recentdebates over representation in geography is reflected,therefore, in ongoing tensions between the desire toachieve greater inclusiveness in terms of who is repre-sented in contemporary geographical research, and therecognition that any academic claims to speak with au-thority on behalf of others are severely circumscribed.

Landscape

Since the emergence of the new cultural geography inthe late 1980s, landscape has constituted one of the mostprominent arenas of inquiry in which the politics ofrepresentation have been explored by both cultural andsocial geographers. Within this context, an ongoingconcern among academics is to contest the apparent in-nocence and taken-for-granted existence of landscapes bydemonstrating that the interests and influence of par-ticular groups in society are reflected in representationsthat are made of certain landscapes as well as in thematerial form that those landscapes take. While somelandscapes are self-evidently a focus of struggle (for in-stance, those marked by overt military and politicalconflict, such as the highly contested barrier separatingIsrael and the West Bank), others, such as affluent

352 Representation, Politics of

suburban landscapes of contemporary North Americancities or rural European scenes captured in eighteenth-century paintings, partially conceal their politics beneatha mundane or estheticized exterior. Departing from thepremise that all landscapes may be imbued with multiplemeanings that reflect distinct and often competinginterests, identities, and beliefs, a great deal of researchhas examined the conflicts and negotiations over land-scape that are played out by means of representationalpractices, whether in the context of ‘exceptional’ land-scapes or those that appear to be everyday and mundane.

Work on landscape in social and cultural geography istoo disparate and diverse to allow one to trace a clearprogression in terms of how it has engaged with issues ofrepresentation in recent decades. Nevertheless, since thelate 1980s, the focus has largely shifted away from thecritical analysis of representations of landscape such aspaintings and maps and toward an exploration of theprocesses by which landscapes are continually (re)shapedand struggled over by both material and representationalmeans. However, whether their work is predominantlyconcerned with the analysis of individual representationsor with tracing how landscape unfolds as a process, cul-tural geographers have displayed an ongoing interest inexamining which groups possess the power to shape andinhabit particular landscapes in ways that reflect andreinforce their own interests and beliefs, and which aremarginalized within or excluded from them.

Politics in the Cartographic Landscape

One form of representation that attracted considerableattention from cultural geographers in the 1990s wascartography. Although the critical study of landscapepaintings by scholars such as Cosgrove and Danielsprovides a more frequently cited example, the seminalwork that exposed the biases and exclusions embeddedwithin cartographic representations has been equallyinfluential, not only within human geography but alsobeyond. Initiated above all by J. B. Harley, who drewparticular inspiration from Foucault’s writings on powerand knowledge, these critical explorations of cartographyhave presented a dramatic challenge to the notion that‘scientific’ maps – that is, those produced within amodern, Western mapmaking tradition that emphasizesmathematical accuracy – are innocent, objective, anduniversally valid. Some maps, of course, are overtlypolitical, such as world maps that were made to show theterritorial extent of the former British Empire. High-lighting in red Britain’s colonies and protectorates, theywere intended to convey unequivocal messages to Britishand colonial subjects alike about the global reach andmagnitude of the Empire. However, even if the overtlypolitical content is stripped away from such cartographic

representations, leaving only bare territorial outlines,they are still neither innocent nor objective.

As Harley’s work demonstrates, the historical rise todominance of a Europe-centered world map, accepted bymost inhabitants of the contemporary West as an objectivereflection of geographical reality, is inextricably con-nected to power and politics, for it involved the im-position of a culturally specific way of imagining theworld that accompanied and propelled European imperialexpansion. Critical studies of cartography, however, arenot only concerned with what such representations con-vey, but equally with what they leave out. By revealinghow (to cite one of many possible examples) colonialmaps of the Americas mask Amerindian ways of per-ceiving and representing the continent’s landscapes andgeographies, the work of Harley and other scholarsdemonstrates that such taken-for-granted representationsare in fact historically implicated in the marginalization ofnon-Western knowledges and worldviews.

The Material Landscape as a Contested Site ofRepresentation

Just as certain knowledges are omitted from cartographicrepresentations, so too particular groups in society areexcluded from or rendered marginal (whether in aphysical, cultural, or political sense) in ‘real’ or materiallandscapes. Material landscapes may be regarded as sitesof representation that favor the interests of select groupsin society by giving their ideas and values tangible form.Although a variety of research themes could be men-tioned, the processes of gentrification that transformedmany urban landscapes of the industrialized Westthroughout the 1990s, and the conflicts and struggles thataccompanied these processes, generated numerousstudies by social and cultural geographers. A prevailingobjective of this work was to reveal the conflicts that arefrequently concealed beneath the estheticized and glossyexterior of revitalized city centers and urban neighbor-hoods in cities such as Glasgow, Dublin, and New York.

As geographers have shown, the transformation ofthese landscapes is inseparable from a politics of repre-sentation that revolves around exclusions that are bothphysical and symbolic in nature. While the visible fea-tures of the gentrified landscape (such as luxury housingand boutiques) function as representations which com-municate and reinforce the values of the privilegedgroups who create and use them, other populations, suchas homeless people or those on low incomes, may bephysically removed or displaced. In examining the phe-nomenon of gentrification, then, social and culturalgeographers such as Lees have asked questions about whopossesses the power to shape the urban landscape andhence be represented through it, and how these inter-ventions affect and are experienced by less powerful

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social actors. No less importantly, they have shown howphysical and symbolic exclusions are contested, whetherin the form of resistance to physical displacement,through the modification or use of the gentrified land-scape in officially sanctioned ways, or by means of or-ganized political protest that involves the production ofcontestatory representations.

This subsection and the preceding one identify twocommonly encountered approaches to the politics ofrepresentation in landscape research, one involving theanalysis of landscape representations such as paintingsand maps and the other focusing on the material land-scape as a contested site of representation. By no means,however, are these approaches mutually exclusive. Thestruggle to be represented – that is, to possess a recog-nized place in a particular landscape and a stake inshaping it – is shown by social and cultural geographersto be intimately connected to the production of textualrepresentations. Indeed, a significant concern of manyrecent studies has been, precisely, to explore the con-nections between representations and material land-scapes – to show how each is influenced by the other inan ongoing process of interaction that changes (or per-petuates) how landscapes are portrayed in diverse mediaand whose interests and worldviews are represented in, orexcluded from, the material landscape.

Feminism

When feminist interventions began to make a tentativemark on human geography in the 1970s, representationwas yet to attain prominence as a source of widespreadintellectual anxiety and as a focus of critical analysis.Without doubt, these early interventions played a crucialrole in the development of broader geographical concernfor issues of representation and influenced the theore-tical and methodological directions that critical studiesof representation have taken. At a time when calls for afeminist agenda in human geography were being made,women were conspicuous in geography largely by theirabsence, whether as subjects of geographical inquiry oras academics. Initially, therefore, feminist geographerswere principally engaged in a practical politics thatstrove simultaneously for the representation of womenin geographical research and within the academy.

In order to challenge women’s invisibility as subjectsof inquiry, early feminist research in geography strove tobring their lives and experiences to the fore. In doing so,they not only demonstrated that women’s mobility, theireveryday use of space and experiences of place can differmarkedly from those of men, they also drew attention tothe injustices and inequalities that these differencesrepresented. So, for example, it was shown that femalemobility in the industrialized West was severely

restricted in comparison to that of men, due to factorsthat included their spatial isolation as suburban house-wives, women’s lower economic status, and their avoid-ance of certain public spaces due to fear of crime orharassment. Whereas many male geographers con-ceptualized the home as a place of refuge and security,the emerging feminist scholarship argued that such as-sumptions sidelined the experiences of many women forwhom the home is instead experienced as a space ofviolence, fear, and confinement.

Feminism and Representation since the Late1980s

Reflecting broader trends in human geography, feministgeographers increasingly turned their attention to theanalysis of visual and textual representations from thelate 1980s onward, drawing on psychoanalysis as well ason post-structuralist theory. In particular, their work haspaid critical attention to the politics of representationthat surround depictions of the female body in Westernsocieties, whether in art, journalism, or advertising, andhas highlighted the ubiquity with which women’s bodiesare represented as sexualized objects of heterosexualmale desire and as sites of moral danger and irrationalitythat are in need of constant regulation and control.Feminist scholars have examined, for instance, the in-timate connections between representations of femalebodies and the imposition of discriminatory social ex-pectations regarding women’s bodily practices and theirbehavior in a variety of public and private spaces such asthe workplace, the street, and the home. Research hasalso focused, however, on the body as a contestatory siteof representation, and on how those female identitieswhich present a challenge to gender-based social ex-pectations and norms are expressed by means of women’sembodied performances.

Feminist engagements with the politics of represen-tation have also involved a critique of the repre-sentational analyzes and practices employed by (pre-dominantly) male academics. Cultural geographers’ ex-plorations of the European tradition of landscapepainting and gardening became a particular target ofcriticism in the 1990s. Associated above all with thework of Gillian Rose, feminist discussions of landscaperesearch argued that cultural geographers had not onlyignored a crucial political dimension by sidelining thegendered nature of landscape portrayals, but inadvert-ently reproduced unequal gender relations by takingpleasure in the visual mastery of landscape and in thenotion of landscape as ‘a way of seeing’. Not only havewomen been historically subject to an exploitative malegaze that identifies them with and as part of a passivenatural landscape, Rose argues in a frequently cited

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essay, that male gaze is in fact perpetuated in thelandscape research of cultural geography.

Early feminist work in Anglo-American geographytended to overlook the fact that the experiences ofwomen in the industrialized West do not necessarilyrepresent those of women in other parts of the world.However, the reception of feminist critiques from beyondthe West, along with the embrace of postcolonial theory,brought about the development of increasingly cautiousand self-reflexive representational practices that recog-nize the cultural, educational, and socioeconomic dif-ferences that divide women as a group, and acknowledgethe limitations inherent in any attempt by Westernfeminists to speak on behalf of other women. To a greatextent, this ‘crisis of representation’ encouraged a pro-nounced focus in Anglo-American research on Westernwomen’s experiences – a trend that is in fact widely re-flected in post-1980s social and cultural geography.However, these anxieties have also ensured that feministstudies of representations produced by women havelargely been critical and nuanced, rather than merelyaffirmative.

To give a brief example, feminists working withincultural geography have insistently challenged mascu-linist accounts of geography’s history by highlightingthe largely unacknowledged contributions that womenhave made to the construction of Western geographicalknowledges since the nineteenth century, whether astravel writers, missionaries, or as the companions andassistants of male geographers. However, recent work onVictorian women’s representations of colonial worldsbeyond Europe not only emphasizes their distinctivegeographical insights and spatial experiences, but alsodemonstrates how their diaries and descriptions revealcomplicities with the Empire and the articulation ofperceived race- and class-based differences that dividedwomen as a group. Such studies provide a powerful re-minder that representations are never innocent, evenwhen produced by relatively disenfranchised individuals(in this case, nineteenth-century European women), anddemonstrate that they are always complex products ofmultiple, intersecting identities.

Since its emergence in social and cultural geography,feminist research has actively engaged with a politicsof representation that endeavors to provide a place forwomen as academic contributors to geography or assubjects of geographical research, as well as for membersof other groups who experience exclusion on thegrounds of categories such as sexuality, race, or dis-ability, whether female or male. Just as significantly, ithas played a leading role in imbuing human geographerswith a sensitivity toward the inescapably partial andsituated nature of their own practices of representationand with a consequent awareness of the need for self-reflexivity.

A New Crisis for Representation?

Recent years have brought growing discontent amongsocial and cultural geographers with regard to the studyof representation and increasing interest in the ‘non-representational’ or the ‘more than representational’. AsCastree and Macmillan explain in a detailed analysis ofthese trends, many human geographers feel that there isno longer any need to provide further examples of howrepresentations are power-laden and partial, or of howcertain spaces, places, and landscapes favor or exclude abewildering spectrum of cultural groups and identities.Indeed, as the example of landscape studies illustrates,recent work in social and cultural geography has pro-gressively moved away from the critical scrutiny of rep-resentations toward a concern for exploring embodied,precognitive practices and experiences. Although schol-arly enthusiasm for the analysis of representations isclearly on the wane, a broader concern for representationin human geography is unlikely to disappear. Recentlively debates about the extent to which the voices andknowledges of non-Anglophone scholars are marginal-ized in Anglophone human geography provides just oneof many clear indications that the politics of represen-tation will continue to be a prominent focus of discussionand inquiry.

See also: Cultural Geography; Feminism/Feminist

Geography; Gentrification; Humanism/Humanistic

Geography; Landscape; Non-Representational Theory/

Non-Representational Geographies; Positivism/Positivist

Geography; Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist

Geographies.

Further Reading

Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds.) (1988). The Iconography ofLandscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barnes, T. and Duncan, J. S. (eds.) (1992). Writing Worlds: Discourse,Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London:Routledge.

Barnett, C. (1997). ‘Sing along with the common people’: Politics,postcolonialism, and other figures. Environment and Planning D:Society and Space 15, 137--154.

Castree, N. and Macmillan, T. (2004). Old news: Representation andacademic novelty. Environment and Planning A 36, 469--480.

Desbiens, C. and Ruddick, S. (2006). Speaking of geography:Language, power, and the spaces of Anglo-Saxon ‘hegemony’.Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, 1--8.

Duncan, J. S. and Duncan, N. G. (2004). Landscapes of Privilege: ThePolitics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb. New York:Routledge.

Harley, J. B. (2001). The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History ofCartography. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Lees, L., Slater, T. and Wyly, E. (2007). Gentrification. New York:Routledge.

Livingstone, D. (1998). Reproduction, representation and authenticity:A rereading. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23,13--19.

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McDowell, L. and Court, G. (1994). Performing work: Bodilyrepresentations in merchant banks. Environment and Planning D:Society and Space 12, 727--750.

McDowell, L. and Sharp, J. P. (eds.) (1997). Space, Gender,Knowledge: Feminist Readings. London: Arnold.

Nash, C. (1996). Reclaiming vision: Looking at landscape and the body.Gender, Place and Culture 3, 149--169.

Nash, C. (2000). Performativity in practice: Some recent work in culturalgeography. Progress in Human Geography 24, 653--664.

Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of GeographicalKnowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Soderstrom, O. (2005). Representation. In Atkinson, D., Jackson, P.,Sibley, D. & Washbourne, N. (eds.) Cultural Geography: A Critical

Dictionary of Key Concepts (1st edn.), pp 11--15. London: I. B.Taurus.

Relevant Websites

http://www.sagepub.co.ukCultural Geographies (journal), Sage.

http://www.tandf.co.ukGender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography; Socialand Cultural Geography (journal), Taylor and Francis.

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