Reculturing and particularizing climate discourses: weather, identity, and the work of Gordon Manley

During the last three decades, popular discourses of climate have been replaced by a global and scientific metanarrative focusing on climate change and global warming. Recent climate scholarship has thus highlighted the need for a reexamination of the idea of climate and its culturally and spatially variable dimensions, though anxieties over the reemergence of climatic determinism in a number of high-profile publications have compounded a reluctance to engage in scholarship exploring the influence of climate on society. This article focuses on the work of British meteorologist and geographer Gordon Manley, whose publications, particularly those produced for popular audiences in the second half of the twentieth century, focus on the relationships between climate, place, and identity in postwar Britain. I argue that his approach may have renewed significance given recent efforts to reparticularize and reculture climate change discourses.