The nation-state has for a long time appeared to have eluded the attempts of
scholars to encapsulate its essence in theory. Rather than propose another
attempt at encapsulation, this dissertation represents a form of geographical
supplementation to these efforts. As a work of geography it focuses on the
negotiation of nation-states, and, in doing so, traces a double displacement of
encapsulation. Primarily, the four major studies comprising the dissertation
represent geographical research which, using a wide range of archival and
contemporary media material, makes manifest the irreducible complexity of
the negotiations in, over and between nation-states at the end of the
twentieth century. Focused on Canada and the USA, these studies trace how
a diversity of cultural as well as political-economic processes come together in
the inherently geographical negotiations of First Nations struggles, Canadian
constitutional politics, continental free trade developments, and American
patriotism. These are negotiations where no one process fully encapsulates
an explanation of the events and where their collective but contested
territorialization calls out for an open-ended and anti-essentialist analysis.
Secondarily, while the dissertation's first and more central work of
displacement is enabled by poststructuralist critiques of essentialist
explanation, its other displacing effect comes in the form of a geographical
deconstruction of so-called poststructuralist theory itself. This represents an
attempt to turn the elusive nature of the nation-state vis-a-vis theory into a
living and politicized site for investigating the limits of poststructuralist
theorizing. Overall, the geographical investigations of the dissertation
illustrate the value of anti-essentialist arguments for furthering geographical
research into the nation-state while simultaneously calling these
epistemological innovations into geographical question. Using such
questioning to critique the limited geographical representation of the nationstate,
it is concluded that geographers cannot not persistently examine such
limits.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6193 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Sparke, Matthew |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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