Course with new focus on China: Culture and Place

This course is an advanced-level introduction to cultural geography, and focuses on human-environment relations in the broadest sense, including how people perceive and transform places, from rural villages to dynamic cities, and how such transformations reflect people’s ideas, values and ideologies. The organization of the course revolves around three key geographic concepts— place, space, and landscape—and interpretations of these concepts from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Specific topics to be covered include the history of cultural geography, the ‘new’ cultural geography, variations in theoretical interpretations of place, the political economy of landscape formation, and postcolonial perspectives on place, including comparative contexts of place formation and perception in Asia and the West. This year the regional focus of the course is China, with particular emphasis on South China, which is historically the most internationalized area of the country.

Consequently, we will also examine several significant aspects of place dynamics and transnational cultural economy, including the place-based origins of China’s contemporary reform economy, the geography of the Chinese diaspora, debates over postcolonial urban development and heritage conservation, the place contexts of consumer and pop culture, the production of art in the city, including regional film, and transnational identity formation.

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11-12:20 pm
158 Kaprielian Hall
For more information, please contact Prof. Cartier at 213-740-0063; cartier@usc.edu