A Place More Void takes its name from a scene in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, wherein an elderly soothsayer has a final chance to warn Caesar about the Ides of March. Worried that he won’t be able to deliver his message because of the crowded alleyways, the soothsayer devises a plan to find and intercept Caesar in “a place more void.” It is precisely such an elusive place that this volume makes space for by theorizing and empirically exploring the many yet widely neglected ways in which the void permeates geographical thinking.
This collection presents geography’s most in-depth and sustained engagements with the void to date, demonstrating the extent to which related themes such as gaps, cracks, lacks, and emptiness perforate geography’s fundamental concepts, practices, and passions. Arranged in four parts around the themes of Holes, Absences, Edges, and Voids, the contributions demonstrate the fecundity of the void for thinking across a wide range of phenomena: from archives to alien abductions, caves to cryptids, and vortexes to vanishing points.
A Place More Void gathers established and emerging scholars who engage a wide range of geographical issues and who express themselves not only through archival, literary, and socio-scientific investigations, but also through social and spatial theory, political manifesto, poetry, and performance art.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Into the Void
Paul Kingsbury and Anna J. Secor
Part 1. Holes
1. Urban Renewal and the Actuality of Absence: The “Hole” (Trou) of Paris, 1973
Ulf Strohmayer
2. The Crack in the Earth: Environmentalism after Speleology
Kai Bosworth
3. The Vortex and the Void: Meta/Geophysics in Sedona
Keith Woodward and John Paul Jones III
4. Six Voids
Flora Parrott and Harriet Hawkins
Part 2. Absences
5. Tracking Silence: Place, Embodiment, and Politics
Morgan Meyer
6. The Void and Its Summons: Subjectivity, Signs, and the Enigmatic
Mitch Rose
7. Derwent’s Ghost: The Haunting Silences of Geography at Harvard
Alison Mountz and Kira Williams
8. It Watches You Vanish: On Landscape and W. G. Sebald
John Wylie
Part 3. Edges
9. enfolding: An Experimental geographical imagination system (gis)
Nick Lally and Luke Bergmann
10. Beyond the Feminine Void: Rethinking Sexuation through an Ettingerial Lens
Carmen Antreasian
11. Politics for the Impasse
Jess Linz and Anna J. Secor
12. Raising Sasquatch to the Place of the Cryptozoological Thing
Oliver Keane and Paul Kingsbury
Part 4. Voids
13. O(void): Excerpts from “Lot,” a Long Ethnopoetics Project about the Colonial Geographies of Haida Gwaii
Sarah de Leeuw
14. Playing with Plenitude and Finitude: Attuning to a Mysterious Void of Being
Mikko Joronen
15. In the Void of Formalization: The Homology between Surplus Value and Surplus Jouissance
Ceren Özselçuk and Yahya M. Madra
16. Localizing the Void: From Material to Immaterial Materialism
Lucas Pohl
Coda: A Void More Placed
Paul Kingsbury and Anna J. Secor
Contributors
Index
