Traveling Through and Traveling Within: Cinematic Constructions of Imaginative Geography of Croatia in the Films of the 2000s

This article explores how urban settler-colonial landscapes are produced in the neoliberal era. Adopting an anti-colonial approach, the article addresses practices of landscape production through the history of Wadi Al-Salib in Haifa after the driving out of its inhabitants in 1948. A micro geographical study of three Palestinian refugees’ houses, sold by the state to private real estate companies during the last two decades, constitutes the empirical mainstay of the article. Located in Wadi Al-Salib where rapid neoliberal urban renewal schemes hope to raise property values and enact demographic change, these houses are often marketed to upper-class Israeli Jews as “authentic”. Such branding indicates that the privatization of the Palestinian refugees' houses may also signify privatization of the colonial imagination, and a broader shift of the landscape into a collage of marketable images, echoing an ‘aesthetic violence’ that evokes past colonial landscapes. Such references create several hyper-realities in the same place, thus canonizing colonial landscapes’ imaginaries.

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Imaginative geography, neoliberal globalization, and colonial distinctions: docile and dangerous bodies in medical transcription ‘outsourcing’

Cultural Geographies ◽

10.1177/1474474012445734 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 19 (3) ◽

pp. 349-364 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Amit Prasad ◽

Srirupa Prasad

Keyword(s):

The United States ◽

It Outsourcing ◽

Neoliberal Globalization ◽

Global Citizens ◽

The World ◽

Imaginative Geography ◽

Transnational Space ◽

Transnational Activities ◽

Discursive Constructions ◽

Different Parts

Information Technology (IT) ‘outsourcing,’ of which medical transcription in India is a part, has received relatively little attention from geographers. Most often, it has been bracketed more broadly within IT and its role in transforming transnational space-time configurations has been analyzed. IT outsourcing, more specifically, medical transcription outsourcing, which is the focus of this article, is not only marked by tensions, hierarchies, and ambivalences, it also reflects an emergent ‘imaginative geography’ of neoliberal globalization. This imaginative geography, as we argue in this article, is deceptively ambiguous because of its ambivalent articulation. Medical transcription outsourcing, for example, seems to operate on two contradictory registers, particularly in the United States and some European nations from where outsourcing to countries such as India is taking place. There is an acknowledgement and even celebration of the ‘flattening’ and inter-connectedness of different parts of the world, even while there is widespread criticism and fear of these transnational activities, as well as that of the non-western people engaged in them. The criticism and fear are often articulated in relation to instances of data theft. Nevertheless, a closer look shows that there is something more going on. We argue that such discursive constructions exemplify an imaginative geography that is rooted in an ambivalent desire for a reformed and recognizable ‘other’ who could be ‘best global citizens.’ This ambivalence undergirds a forked biopolitical strategy, which seeks to make the neoliberal worker docile and yet continually marks him/her as dangerous. We call this biopolitical strategy colonial governmentality to signify its forked operation as an art of government that seeks to define agenda/non-agenda (and not population or people), but continually draws upon colonial distinctions and practices.

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