Foote, K.E. (2003) Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Chapter 1: A Landscape of Violence and Tragedy, pp. 1-35.
Kenneth E. Foote’s first chapter ‘A landscape of Violence and Tragedy’ in Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (2003), is a thorough and delightful introduction to the politics of memory, place, and tragedy. Foote is a professor of Geography and has worked at several universities across the United States of America, and also directed the Centre for Geographic Education there. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, was published in 1997, with revisions in 2003, and Foote was also a co-author of Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet(2016). He has an interest in GIS and spatial science, and combines this with theoretical reflections on the making of landscapes in relation to memories of sites of violence and tragedy. I am focusing on the first chapter of this book, as it outlines why geographical perceptions of place and space in relation to tragedy and memory can expose markers that explain how social groups deal with or interpret events in history, and how it impacts the landscape physically. I think that the fundamental concepts outlined in this chapter are increasingly relevant to contemporary debates surrounding monuments and historical education – as well as being personally transformational in my own understanding of the relationship between memory, history and landscape.
Calling upon critical scholars in the field of heritage studies, such as David Lowenthal, and historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Foote set out to conceptualise the relationship between memory, politics and place. He outlined a set of categories of continuum of attitudes and constructions of sites of violence or tragedy that are: Sanctification, Designation, Rectification and Obliteration. He refers to a great number of events of violence and tragedy (within the United States of America), to describe these continuums and the nuances of each and outline the rest of the book to follow. Firstly, he did identify that although there are a number of rich case studies globally, of events of violence or tragedy that have marked (or not marked) the landscape, focusing on the United States of America would be easier than a comparison of such a wide variety of sites. Although I agree with the sentiment that a more attentive case study would be beneficial for the research and writing of a book (and seems to be a knowledgeable subject area for the American professor), it became very apparent throughout the chapter that this is clearly a Western view of sites of violence and tragedy and I believe that in keeping with the sentiments of culture that Foote wanted to portray, a global and more worldly view of historic events should be developed in this field. Despite this, Foote writes a detailed and cohesive discussion regarding attitudes to sites of violence and tragedy. After delving into this chapter, I found that there were three main areas of discussion points:
- Foreground into space, debate, and interpretation.
- The continuum themselves (with complimentary and contradictory case studies)
- Historical pasts and the link between spatio-temporal elements of politics of memory.
Foote leads the chapter with the foreground into space, debate, and interpretation. He argues that place spurs debate, debate spurs interpretation, and interpretation reshapes place. In the context of sites of violence and tragedy, debate can arise when questions of what to do with a site of violence or tragedy start to be discussed, and with interpretation stemming from any physical evidence that may be left behind from the event(s). One issue with this conceptualisation of space and memory, is that is intrinsically assumes that each site of violence and tragedy is subject to debate on its fate, when ultimately this is not the case. Not all sites of violence and tragedy have become subjects of debate, and as Foote goes on to explain in the later parts of the chapter, historical significance is usually socially fabricated for past events, with contemporary opinions or values being the catalyst for these debates. He states that “time must pass before the protagonists, participants, historians and the general public look back and assess the significance of events and struggle with their meaning” (Foote 2003, 28). Foote is ultimately trying to convey that there can be no commemoration of historical events, until there is an event worth commemorating, and often the gravity of a violent or tragic event is not realised (or at least translated) into the landscape until a significant amount of time has passed. He uses the example of battlefields, sites involved in civil rights movements, and massacres of minority groups in these examples. Speaking of ‘translation’, Foote refers to landscape as a “sort of communicational resource” that is “capable of extending the temporal and spatial range of communication” (Foote 2003, 33) due to the visible modification of landscape being so effective for symbolising and sustaining collective values over long periods of time. Whilst I agree with Foote’s philosophy regarding landscape being a communicator to (and of) social and political views, this relationship, or comparison, identifies a core aspect of the phenomenon which Foote failed to mention within this chapter. At the core of interpretation, translation, and communication is, unfortunately, human subjectivity, and although he loosely mentions movements and contestation to erections of monuments (for example), little to no acknowledgement of predisposition or subjective interpretation of landscape is mentioned.
Following the cultural turn in geography, and a strong emergence of non-representational theory within the discipline, landscape has become more than a physical element to study within geography. H. C. Darby said that “an understanding of the landscape” formed an indisputable part of geographical study and moreover, historical geography (such as Foote has engaged in throughout this book), “constituted the foundations of geographical study” (Williams 1989, 1). Non-representational theory is slightly more abstract than that of historical geographies, but equally as important when looking at the study of landscape. Kenneth Olwig argued that as geography emerged out of the early modern period as a ‘modern science’, it erected a dichotomy between society and nature (Olwig 2008). This is a theoretical problem for the discipline, as this dichotomisation obscures the ways in which nature, which is seen as other, is actually us (Olwig 2008, 1843). Whilst the bulk of non-representational theory and discussion within the field of geography took place following the publishing of Foote’s book, I think the two areas of subject knowledge would complement each other greatly and provide a rich discussion on the politics of memory and place. Jones identifies memory as being “fundamental to becoming” (Jones 2011, 875) and he states that the discussion of memory is wholly under considered within the field of non-representational theories, particularly within Thrift’s non-representational theory. Jin (2013) suggests that landscape theories in new cultural geographies should be composed of various theoretical elements rather than internally homogenous, fixed, and a closed system of knowledge (Jin 2013, 557).
Overall, Foote’s work on sites of violence and tragedy provides an excellent framework for the examination of attitudes towards sites and events of violence and tragedy, historically and in the contemporary world. Not only does this chapter outline the conceptual ideas surrounding the relationship between politics of memory, place and space, but also is a very detailed account of the various sites of violence and tragedy that you can encounter in the American landscape. Despite more advances in the debates surrounding landscape, memory and non-representational theory within human geography, Foote’s book is a fundamental and enjoyable piece of work, that foregrounds the basic ideas in understanding these relationships. Too often it seems so obvious that rich meaning can be deducted from the physical landscape around us (or our relationship to it), so much so, that these reflections can often be overlooked, yet Foote describes these interpretations and ideas clearly. As a young geographer, I was able to understand the conceptual debates he put forward, as well as understand how these fundamental ideas have influenced other areas of geography – or may benefit new ones.
Bibliography:
Foote, K.E. (2003) Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Chapter 1: A Landscape of Violence and Tragedy, pp. 1-35.
Jin, J. (2013) Landscape as representation or practice: Focused on the examination of the theory of landscape as ‘a way of seeing’. Journal of the Korean Geographical Society, 48(4):557-574.
Jones, O. (2011) Geography, Memory and Non-Representational Geographies. Geography Compass, 5(12):875-885
Olwig, K. (2008) Has ‘Geography’ Always Been Modern?: Choros, (Non)Representation, Performance, and the Landscape. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 40(8):1843-1861
Williams, M. (1989) Historical geography and the concept of landscape. Journal of Historical Geography, 15(1):92-104
Kitty Taylor 
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