Cultural Geographies of Love and Catastrophe

Abstract

Cultural Geographies of Love and Catastrophe offers a new cultural geographical theorisation of love - Suggests new ways to think about love in relation to world-ending catastrophes of various kinds (from the personal to the ecological) - Showcases an exciting range of theoretical and creative approaches to cultural geographies of love and catastrophe Across thirteen chapters, this collection examines how love takes place. Ranging from the classical to the contemporary, the artistic to the political, the human to the ecological, the contributors consider how love makes, unmakes, and remakes selves, communities and worlds. Resisting the urge to purify love, alive to love’s turbulence, they address the strange new attachments and alliances love makes possible and those it blights and prohibits. To love, to be loved, to speak of love, is a threat as much as it is a promise: the promise and threat of being undone by love. Love and catastrophe are not opposed but entwined. At the heart of the collection is a surprising thesis: that love is always an experiment with distances, with intervals, with spacing. An education in love, an education by love, is a geography lesson.