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Chapter Five draws together threads presented in previous chapters (e.g., the technological and symbolic facets of large dams and river basin planning approaches, the tensions between technical expertise and geopolitical aims) and examines them using the case of the Mekong Project, the Bureau’s most intensive and longest engagement in international development. The Lower Mekong Basin, shared by the mainland Southeast Asia states of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam, became the focus of intense development interest beginning in the 1950s. The period from the creation of the Mekong Committee in 1957 until the United States’ disengagement from Mekong development planning in 1975 was characterized by a combination of geopolitical imaginings and technological optimism that drove the proliferation of large dams and the idea of river basin development in mainland Southeast Asia. A key element in this story is the Pa Mong dam project, the focus of over a decade of study by Bureau engineers and experts and millions of dollars of U.S. economic assistance that was never actually built. Pa Mong became the lynchpin for development of the entire Mekong basin, and in effect helped generate an imagined geography of the Mekong region that resonates with current water development efforts.

This essay argues that the plantation emerges a key site in Faulkner’s imagined geography of Yoknapatawpha County. For Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! and Flem Snopes in the Snopes trilogy, the plantation offers the promise of a secure, coherent position with a social order. Such fantasies collapse, however, as space proves irreducible to intention and design. Attempting to manipulate the signs of the plantation order, Sutpen and Snopes find that the plantation is never quite inhabitable, and their respective attempts to enter into and command a social order end in disarray. Through an analysis of these two major characters, this essay argues that their careers are symptomatic of fantasies of stable geographies and coherent fictions of space that operate throughout Faulkner’s fiction.

This chapter begins a discussion of post-Soviet Russian identity and its self-definition through imagined geographies by introducing the neo-Eurasianist ideas espoused by Aleksandr Dugin. Stung by Russia's post-Soviet regression into the background of world events, Dugin has vociferously asserted outrageous ideas about Russian identity, using neo-imperial metaphors of Eurasian geography and territory. His chief concern is the revival of Russian identity based on an all-powerful Russian state and its reconstructed Eurasian empire. In addition, the chapter elaborates on Dugin's neo-Eurasianist movement, which was founded in 2001 on an idea of Russianness that combines a strange mix of Slavophile values, Eurasianist thought from the 1920s, neo-fascism, and, finally, a wildly different orientation toward what he calls postmodernism.

This concluding chapter continues the discussion on imagined geographies and the separation of the center from its western and southern peripheries, pointing toward more recent developments in constructing a Russian identity. Since 2000 this identity debate appears to have been increasingly co-opted by various ultraconservative dreams, among them Dugin's dream of an authoritarian state ruled by the White Tsar and the secret police. Hence, the chapter looks at various recent satires of Eurasianist thinking, as well as the positive impacts generated by Eurasianism. More recent developments occur in Putin's regime as the government likewise participates in the game of imagined geographies that has framed the post-Soviet identity debate. Such efforts show how the southern and western peripheries are by far the most challenging for the center, and that these peripheries have functioned imaginatively as the sites of vital debate of issues surrounding Russian identity and cultural difference.

Explores the emergence of mass tourism to Spain during the late Victorian and Edwardian period, and its intersection with British quasi-colonial infrastructure-building in the country. Considers the transformation in tourist guidebooks in the wake of the first Baedeker guide to Spain in 1898, and the emergence of an discourse of ‘anti-tourism’. Explores the proactive role of Spanish regional tourism associations in expanding British imagined geographies of Spain.

This chapter focuses on an eclectic selection of site-specific projects from the past two decades that feature adaptations of “The Great Wave” whose realization is inextricably entwined with collective local histories and traditions. It highlights the multi-vocal and metaphorical thematics that help to account for the wave’s appeal not only across geographies, but across age, gender, and class. It particularly seeks to draw attention to the production of place as one of the modes through which the forces of homogenization are resisted, but one that is nonetheless dependent on the availability of global communication technology.