Remittance-scapes: The contested geographies of remittance management

The management of remittances represents a multi-billion industry that is concerned with how these flows can be tapped into by a wide range of institutional, state and private sector actors. This article advances the concept of remittance-scapes to signal the extensive work that is implicated in constructing remittances as development finance across four relational spaces of remittance management, namely, remittance preproduction-, production-, circulation- and reception-scapes. While human geographers have played a key role in unpacking many of the geographies of remittance management, I argue that thinking of remittances through the -scape provides new theoretical and empirical avenues to researching remittances.

Introduction: Tools for Unravelling Heritage

Collins’s theory of symbolic interactionism is here introduced to the study of landscape heritage. His method for unravelling symbols in society can be profitably used to identify a signature of prestige indicating centres of attraction or civilizational poles charged with strong magnetism. The activation of that signature occurs through three levels of social circulation that culminate in the inclusion of symbols in the internal conversation of individuals. In the case of the Dolomites, the complex cluster of symbolic ingredients emerging in their heritage formation oscillates between competing zones of civilizational prestige – Venice and its Romantic aura, Switzerland and its Alpine sensationalism, Austria and its Germanic folklore, London and its cosmopolitan modernity – coexisting today in a multi-layered heritage, re-enacted, at various levels, through the interplay between different imaginative and contested geographies.

Bezerra, Kátia da Costa. Postcards from Rio; Favelas and the Contested Geographies of Citizenship. Fordham UP, 2017.

By analyzing mostly visual contemporary cultural production (such as photographs or videos) from Rio’s favelas, Bezerra points to ways in which favela residents themselves provide rich material that challenges the portrayal of their communities in the mainstream media, where they are often criminalized and marginalized. Written with the backdrop of the city’s preparations for hosting the FIFA World Cup, Olympic and Paralympic games, Postcards from Rio is also a testimony to the detrimental effects of the commodification of space that occurs when the state prioritizes a city’s brand image over its citizens.