Landscapes That Speak

Introduction

This book invites readers to see landscapes differently. It reconceptualises landscape as an active cultural force: something that remembers, resists, and transforms alongside the humans and non-humans that move through it. Across film, television, myth, and lived environments, landscapes emerge as sites where imagination, extraction, belief, and survival collide.

Framework

Organised around four interwoven lenses—liminal landscapes, landscapes as wonderland, mythical terrains, and toxic and extractive environments—the book moves fluidly across disciplines, drawing on film and television studies, cultural geography, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and critical theory. Each chapter pairs conceptual clarity with richly textured case studies, ranging from ancient sacred groves and Indigenous conceptualisations of Country to digitally augmented worlds, industrial ruins, and post-extraction wastelands. These examples do more than illustrate ideas: they demonstrate how landscapes actively produce meaning, affect, and power, with tangible social and political consequences.

Debates and Theoretical Foundations

Grounded in contemporary debates in posthumanism, multispecies thinking, and critical ecological theory, the book offers a new vocabulary for understanding landscape as aesthetic form, ecological assemblage, and contested political terrain. It unsettles inherited binaries—nature and culture, human and non-human, sacred and profane—revealing instead dense networks of relation, care, violence, and memory. In doing so, it speaks directly to urgent questions about climate crisis, environmental justice, and the cultural work of screen media.

Significance

Bold, accessible, and theoretically ambitious, it makes a compelling case for why landscapes matter—not only as places we inhabit or represent, but as forces that shape how we imagine the past, negotiate the present, and confront the futures we are making.