'post-colonial' context. How Imperial power created, in Foucault's words, a 'boomerang effect' whereby the techniques developed to control and subjugate colonial subjects worked with such efficiency that they were imported back into Western societies to create new orders of control. How while new social movements such as the Zapatistas have remapped the rural and developed new ways to challenge and transform politics, Western societies have sought to reconstruct the world order through economic processes and military strategy. How the self-image of the West is shaped by its relationship with the 'Rest,' but also how the rest has found news ways of constructing identity that are now transforming the West as people, images, commodities, and meanings flow through the global economy. The cases considered cover every continent, contrast the West with the East as well as the global North with the global South, and prompt us to take history seriously in the construction of the present. Addressing the current buzzwords that have spread from geography across the social sciences and the humanities, this book will appeal to researchers and practitioners fascinated by the connections between cultural representation, power, spatiality, and how the ways we have been thinking about the world are open to question. 'In this collection, Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring together researchers in a transdisciplinary project to understand 'geographicity' as a distinctive approach to spatiality that integrates theory and practice. Linking the global to the local and the abstract to the concrete, the contributors tackle key concepts such as ideology as a site for rethinking spatiality - considering cartography as a practice for producing space and for visualising the connections between culture, politics and economics on a global scale and across centuries. Key ideas in the geographical turn in social inquiry such as sovereignty, state, nation and civilisation are reassessed using discourses that are concern with space, borders, marginalization and the construction of identities that are provisional attempts to fix meaning in particular times and places. This collection brings together insights from geography, cultural theory, history, phenomenological and post-structuralist philosophies to address questions which dominate our times.' Mark Smith, The Open University, Department of Politics and International Studies 'Is the term globalization merely an arbitrary assemblage of ideas, events and phenomena or is it an explanatory term that colligates evidence around theories that seek to explain how cultures around the world are changing in the modern age? Gary Backhaus and John Murungi have assembled and international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to answer this question. These scholars show how colonialization, a historical period, and globalization, a period we purportedly are already in, are parts of a historical meta-narrative bound together by space-time structurizations. Binding this book together is an overarching conviction that geographicity, the spatiality of all phenomena, is an essential and necessary component to any research. The lack of such a focus in Western society is indicative of its uprooted and mobile character. The geographical turn is an essential component of the International Association for the Study of Environment, Space and Place. Essays in this volume were specifically selected because they contribute to a larger geographical turn in research. This innovative collection engages the social-spatial dialectic of colonial and global processes.

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