Introduction by James D. Sidaway and Shaun Lin, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
As we craft this introduction, and the COVID-19 pandemic rages, The Guardian newspaper ran an editorial critical of the UK government’s handling of the crisis there. The editorial began by citing Thomas Kuhn’s account of paradigms, noting how in:
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn developed the notion of the “paradigm” as a way of understanding how a community of researchers makes its judgments. A shared paradigm, observed Kuhn, is a mode of seeing a problem that makes certain presumptions and privileges particular perspectives. It sees things. But it also misses things. (“Editorial: The Guardian View” Citation2020)
We return to paradigms in a moment. Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond indicates the diverse people and sites that engaged with the making and evolution of radical geography. Appearing as the thirty-second volume in the Antipode book series, its fourteen chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion by the editors) offer a broad map (see ) of how radical geography changed intellectual landscapes. The collection that Barnes and Sheppard and the other twenty-one authors within it have gifted us, will, as, the blurb endorsements by Noel Castree and Laura Pulido claim, “inspire” those who seek further disciplinary transformations and help us better “understand the present.”
Table 1. Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond, table of contents
At the same time, the book reflects what has been a long revolution in writing richer histories of geography. Neil Smith (2003) once mischievously claimed that “Geographers themselves have been very bad at writing their own history” (xxii). This is no longer true. There are now many textbook treatments of geography’s history, plus a series of groundbreaking monographs on different moments, protagonists, and vantage points. Along the way, there was an earlier edited collection on a prior phase of paradigmatic transformation (Billinge, Gregory, and Martin Citation1984). When the term radical geography emerged, many of its protagonists also saw it as a new paradigm. The London-based David Smith (Citation1971), for example, returned from an American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting and reported that radical geography was rising as a new paradigmatic revolution. The language of paradigms, with due reference to Kuhn, had been deployed just a few years earlier, by advocates of a quantitative theoretical geography, most visibly Chorley and Haggett (Citation1967). So, when a radical, increasingly Marxist alternative was explored, the language of paradigm shifts was again mobilized. As one of us has traced elsewhere, in an essay written with one of the commentators here, reference to paradigm shifts was therefore much more than an interpretation of disciplinary change. It became a manifesto for change (Van Meeteren and Sidaway Citation2020), and for radical geography, something more. As the historian of geographic thought Livingstone (Citation1992) noted, “this revolution was not just of the conceptual variety; it appealed for revolutionary action. … Geography was thus to be conceived of as itself a social practice needing transformation” (330). Livingstone (Citation1992) also noted that “in keeping with this perspective were the investigations of geography’s past ideological captivities” (p. 330), citing Hudson (Citation1977) and Peet (Citation1985) as examples.
A key statement of—and something of a manifesto for—radical geography was Harvey’s (Citation1973) Social Justice and the City (listed nine times in the index to Spatial Histories of Radical Geography and in one of the commentaries and the editors’ response here), where Harvey argued that “our paradigm is not coping well,” discerning in “Marxist thought,” “the most fruitful strategy … in which certain aspects of positivism, materialism and phenomenology overlap to provide adequate interpretations of the social reality in which we find ourselves” (p. 129). David Smith (Citation1977) himself went on to structure a variant of radical geography around human welfare, as “an integrating focus for a more ‘relevant’ human geography” (ix). The trajectory of this strand, which articulates with debates about geography and public policy and relevance are at the margins of Spatial Histories of Radical Geography. They would further complicate the story (Boyle et al. Citation2020).
In subsequent years, as Anglophone geography was influenced by feminism and poststructuralism, the language of paradigms faded. It was deemed neither sufficient, nor necessary to refer to Kuhn to chart new directions or critique existing frameworks. The disciplinary landscape soon confounded linear narratives. Spatial Histories of Radical Geography begins with recognition that, from the outset, and more visibly as the years passed, radical geography has complex histories, antecedents, connections, and consequences. The commentaries that follow here engage with these and explore the achievements and limits of the volume. From the outset, Barnes and Sheppard note that the book “is not just a history but also a geography of radical geographical knowledge” (p. 5). They therefore emphasize place, connectivity, and scale, with an opening disclaimer: “Presenting its history will require many volumes, many editors and many contributors” (p. 3).
In their introduction to the book, Barnes and Sheppard note that “Opposition to the Vietnam War was likely the most important of the four movements [the others they list are Civil Rights, feminism and environmentalism] in setting U.S radical geography in motion” (p. 11). They point out that late 1960s protests were not only about opposition to the Vietnam War. In their introduction, they mention the uprising in Paris in 1968 (p. 31, note 12), although not the one across the Iron Curtain in Prague the same year, nor the African American revolts against police repression in Detroit and Newark in 1967 and those in Baltimore and many other U.S. cities in April 1968, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (The revolt in Baltimore is mentioned in Sheppard and Barnes’s excellent chapter, “Baltimore as a Truth Spot: David Harvey, Johns Hopkins and Urban Activism,” where memories of a Cambridge professor wearing a Mao suit also crop up.) The antiwar demonstrations and the African American uprisings link the backdrop to radical geography with global history of revolution and decolonization, which in turn articulate “race” and geopolitics. They invite broader spatial histories. Geographies of development and underdevelopment and Third Worldism became domains for these radical, tricontinental connections (see Power and Sidaway Citation2004; Clayton Citation2013), touched on later in the commentaries by Miles Kenney-Lazar and Ben Wisner. Anarchism is another significant subplot that further complicates the story, as Barnes and Sheppard further acknowledge in their response here. Anarchism connects Anglophone radical geography with Francophone, Russian, Lusophone, and Hispanophone movements and writing, as Federico Ferretti signals in his commentary, as rereading another review forum published in this journal indicates (Sidaway et al. Citation2017). The chapters in the book on Britain, France, Quebec, Japan, Mexico, and South Africa point to a series of other contingencies and connections as well as relative autonomies. Yet all the contexts and subplots present in Spatial Histories of Radical Geography demand more-than-national histories. What would a global history of radical geography look like? It would surely need to be integrated into a wider canvas of comparisons and connections (O’Brien Citation2006) and places (Adelman Citation2017). One starting point might be found in Lovell’s (Citation2019) recent history of global Maoism. She pointed to the world-historical significance of China’s revolution:
The perception of Maoism as a system of ideas and practices relevant only to China has kept it on the edges of Global History. General histories of the Cold War have often underestimated the importance of Maoist China offering a genuine alternative to Soviet communism, providing intellectual and practical support to rebels throughout the world. (p. 13)
Neither China nor Mao figure in the index to Spatial Histories of Radical Geography. Paradoxically, in China itself, geography has tended to remain a branch of statecraft (Sun et al. Citation2020), translating, applying, and developing foreign technical work rather than engaging radical geography and is successors. This was evident in Soviet geography too (see, e.g., Ishmuratov Citation1990). China and the Soviet Union and the revolutionary movements they inspired and backed, however, were present at the advent of radical geography—as conditions of possibility. Later, as radical geography seeped into subdisciplines such as economic geography, other backdrops, also tied to Cold War geopolitics and geo-economics (e.g., the rise of Silicon Valley, financialization, and post-Fordism) connected with trans-Atlantic circulation of debates and people. Jamie Peck and Trevor Barnes’s chapter, “Berkeley In-Between: Radicalizing Economic Geography,” richly traces this moment and its coming together. They note: “Berkeley between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s was a crucial intersection point, a site of local multiplier effects, and an intellectual forcing home for a radical realignment in the theory and practice of radical economic geography” (Peck and Barnes 2019, 212). By then however, radical geography was mutating into the broader terrains of critical geography, soon richly supplemented by feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial work. Especially in the United Kingdom, much new cultural geography grew distant from some of its materialist roots. By 2007, Castree discerned that:
Academic human geography, like so many other disciplines in the Anglophone world, is today decidedly post- or non-Marxist in complexion. The various “posts” that were ascendant through the 1990s and the “cultural turn” displaced political economic research in geography, Marxist or otherwise. (110)
It is too soon, though, to write an obituary for radical geography. In today’s black geographies, for example, it is possible to see echoes of the energy, commitment, and transformative potential that animated radical geography. More work will be needed to bring radical geography’s conjunctures, connections, preconditions, and realignments further out of the shadows and forge connections. As the commentaries that follow also testify, Spatial Histories of Radical Geography will encourage those who dare to do so.
Commentary by Vera Chouinard, School of Geography & Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
This is a timely and important collection, on the early years of radical geography in and outside North America. In fact, as someone trained as a radical geographer in the 1980s, reading this book is rather like being the proverbial “kid in the candy store” sampling diverse “nuggets” of knowledge about the intellectual and political work that continues to transform our discipline.
Perhaps inevitably given my positionality, this is also a book that triggers my own memories of and thoughts about what being a radical geographer has meant and does mean. At one of my first American Association of Geographers (AAG) meetings as a graduate student I recall sitting at the back of the room where award ceremonies were taking place with David Harvey. We were commenting irreverently, over a beer or two, on the pomp of academic award ceremonies. It was an encounter that felt deliciously transgressive. I also recall, as a graduate student and later a faculty member in Geography at McMaster University, how hard faculty and students fought to make space for a new radical geography despite what was then a general lack of knowledge about and respect for this direction. Aspects of the latter are also captured in this collection, for instance, with respect to all the graduate student labor invested in the production and distribution of early issues of Antipode at Clark University and more and less successful efforts to deny tenure to radical geographers such as Bill Bunge and Richard Walker, respectively.
The first part of this collection offers different windows into the development of radical geography in North America. In Chapter 1, Kobayashi discusses struggles to make issues of race visible in geography. She focuses in part on the work of Thelma Glass, a woman of color teaching at Alabama State University from 1947 until the 1970s. Glass was first and foremost a civil rights activist. She also acquaints readers with Harold Rose, a professor and black man whose radicalism included a strong antiracist element. Yet she muses over why his work seemed to have relatively little impact in the discipline. She argues that although there were important antiracists among early radical geographers, racial issues receded in visibility as processes of class formation commanded greater attention. Chapter 2, written by Warren, Katz, and Heynen, revisits the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI) to challenge some of the myths about its history. Gwendolyn Warren, a community organizer and codirector of DGEI, is one of the authors, and this permits her to offer a detailed “Her Story” that challenges in some depth traditional masculinist accounts of the DGEI with Bill Bunge as its central figure. One of the things I especially like about this chapter is that it does not shy away from addressing difficult issues such as the sexism with which women in radical geography had to contend. Similarly, Chapter 3 by Huber, Knudson, and Tapp helps to bring to life the making of Antipode at Clark University. Among the insights they offer is how much of the unpaid labor of typing, collating, and mailing was done by women. Unfortunately, the names of the women involved were not recorded and are thus likely lost to history. This chapter and others in the collection remind us that as radical as radical geography purported to be, it was also a creature of its time shaped by antiwar and civil rights activism, but also masculine dominance in and outside the academy.
In Chapter 4, Blomley and McCann provide an account of what they term a “radical moment” in geography at Simon Fraser University from 1973 through 1976. Although this was brief, the authors argue that it was influential, as participants developed a sense of “us” (radical geography faculty and students) versus “them” (e.g., establishment thinkers such as Hartshorne). As was true elsewhere, however, there were tensions between radical white male geographers and their female and feminist counterparts. The authors relate, for example, how poorly attended an early feminist geography panel at the Canadian Association of Geographers conference was—something participants attributed to their being female and feminist scholars and thus not being “taken seriously.” As I have recounted elsewhere (Chouinard Citation1995–1996, Citation2010), for me this was a basis of harassment when I joined the Department of Geography at McMaster University in 1986 as the only radical and female professor. Students were told not to work with me because I did not do “real research” and they would be disadvantaged in terms of finding a job. I also experienced direct harassment from the chair. Although sexist oppression might be somewhat less blatant today, it continues to shape our discipline. One concrete example of exclusion in my academic unit is that, in its many years of existence, there has never been a female department chair or school director, or for that matter a female associate director.
Chapter 5, by Linda Peake, traces the rise and fall of the Union of Socialist Geographers (USG) and its eventual replacement by the Socialist Geography Specialty Group of the AAG. One facet of the development of radical geography that her account illuminates is how early commitments to radical social change outside the academy gave way to at least a degree of “professionalization” and eventually to what Barnes and Sheppard refer to as vulnerability to the neoliberalization of academia. Other contributions to Part 1 include Chapter 6, in which Sheppard and Barnes discuss John Hopkins University as an important node of teaching and study, and of course home to David Harvey’s radical, Marxist teaching and activism. The authors note that Harvey’s transition to Marxist geography was a gradual one and was reflected not just in more radical teachings, but also his immersion in urban life and social issues in Baltimore. It was with the publication of Social Justice and the City that Harvey’s (1973) radical thoughts crystallized, or in his words, “all came together.” Chapter 7, by Peck and Barnes, explores the emergence of radical economic geography at Berkeley. Characterizing Berkeley as a place in-between radical and other perspectives, they point to the importance of active mentoring and protection of radical geography staff and students notably by Alan Pred. Many more stories of this sort can and hopefully will be shared. For example, I and other radical geography graduate students at McMaster University, who struggled with a largely unsupportive environment, would not have survived the 1980s without the support of Michael Dear, Ruth Fincher, and Michael Webber.
Lauria, Higgins, Bouman, Mathewson, Barnes, and Sheppard, in Chapter 8, explore the development of radical geography in the U.S. Midwest. As other chapters also try to do, the authors situate developments in this region with the political-economic turmoil of times and places. They note how struggles such as the antiwar and civil rights movements provided an important impetus to more radical thinking and action. They also note important nodes for the development of radical geography such as the University of Minnesota and its local USG. The people who founded this local were diverse and included military personnel, those with working-class backgrounds, and environmentalists. This illustrates the reach of the radical geography movement during the 1970s.
In the final chapter of Part 1, Chapter 9, Klein offers insights into the development of Francophone radical geography. He notes that Marxist radical geography emerging in the 1960s was not widely supported in Francophone universities in Canada. Where support did emerge, it was on the part of individual scholars and not seen as a collective project. One exception to this was a research group established in the mid-1970s. This group focused on space, dependence, and inequality (based at the University of Laval in Quebec City). Traditional Francophone geography was descriptive in nature—something that reflected a French tradition oriented to the needs of geography teachers. This approach was supplanted by efforts to develop a “more active” geography that provided training to professionals that would enable them to carry out urban and regional planning policies and to address social and economic problems. Importantly, however, Klein notes that this new emphasis temporarily sidelined issues of theory. This started to change from 1976 to 1980 as the Laval research group and USG began to collaborate on conference sessions and publications.
Part 2 considers radical geography beyond North America, offering a welcome addition to the literature. Chapter 10, by Mizuoka, provides an account of radical geography in Japan, which has a longer history than I (and I expect many others) was aware of. Chapter 11 on radical geography in South Africa, by Maharaj, concludes by noting that radical geography here started by exposing the forces structuring apartheid social space but that there was “a deafening silence as class cleavages and socio-spatial inequalities were reproduced in the democratic era” (pp. 323–24). In Chapter 12, Crossa seeks to understand why radical geography remained relatively limited in Mexico. She describes how, as a graduate student, she could not find support for studying critical geography in her home country. Factors such as opening new geography departments in Mexico slowed the development of what she terms “critical geography” because priority was placed on demonstrating that geography was a legitimate spatial science. Chapter 13 by Norcup discusses how the reception of radical geography became part of what informed efforts to promote more radical forms of education in the United Kingdom. The next chapter, by Calberac, considers factors limiting the development of radical geography in France. Despite the long history of radical thought in France and in French geography, the influence of Anglophone radical geography was slowed by the considerable waits for translations of germinal works (particularly those of Harvey).
In the final chapter of the book, Sheppard and Barnes draw together various threads of the contributions. There is one extremely important one that I want to zero in on, and that is the dangers associated with being drawn into the ethos, procedures, and practices of the increasingly neoliberal academy. One such danger is concentrating on satisfying institutional norms of success (e.g., publications) and turning away from community activism and using radical knowledge for social and spatial change. According to Sheppard and Barnes:
Radical geographers should reflect long and hard on the implications of playing the neoliberal game. It leads to trend-following rather than trend-setting scholarship, because the latter is slower to generate citations and publications, and discourages imaginative and out-of-the-box thinking. Playing the neoliberal game means opting for quick publications rather than ambitious and careful scholarship; aligning with the agendas and priorities of publishers that pursue higher profit-producing companions, dictionaries, and encyclopedias rather than original scholarly monographs; valuing influence, productivity, and salaries over autonomy, slow scholarship, and the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake; pursuing quantity over quality, and big-grant team projects over smaller grant money [for] individual projects. (p. 380)
As a female scholar who has been disabled in various ways throughout her career, these words resonate with me. If we live the academy in this neoliberal way then we also, perhaps inadvertently, help to fuel the exclusion of disadvantaged groups from the academy. As someone unable to play the neoliberal game in able ways, I have experienced salary discrimination throughout my career and, in earlier days, efforts to make me leave the academy altogether. Only years of legal action and determination in the face of tremendous stress prevented my departure. With the rise of precarious work in the academy, such aspects of exclusion are likely to worsen in practice. In short, Sheppard and Barnes’s statement is a wakeup call not only for radical geographers, but geographers more generally. Let’s hope we heed it in time.
Another of the important messages of this book is that there are pressing needs to document the development and influence of radical geography. One is the pragmatic fact that we have lost and will continue to lose the voices of radical geographers who can help to bring developments in this tradition to “life.” The authors in this collection make admirable attempts, for instance through drawing on interviews and e-mail exchanges, to draw attention to how radical geography was lived and contested and what it felt like to be engaged in this process.
Also, as the authors and editors recognize, there is a need to critically assess the development of radical geography in more recent decades. I share their hope that this will be done sooner rather than later so that the lived history of radical geography is captured for future generations without reducing those histories to “dry” facts, such as who was hired where and so on. Details need to be recorded, but we also need to capture the passion and fundamental hope that fuels radical and critical geographers.
Inevitably, this rich collection also encourages critical reflection on what is missing in our understanding of radical and critical geography and in the research, teaching, and activism that sustains it. For myself, as a radical, feminist, and disability scholar, one is the relative invisibility of the oppression of disabled people. As Chouinard and Grant (Citation1995) emphasized a quarter of a century ago, despite disabled people and especially disabled women being among the most marginalized in the world, their lives have generally been outside the radical geography lens. Austerity has worsened and shortened the lives of many disabled people since. It seems to me that radical and critical geographers should have this front and center on their agendas for research and action. Despite recognizing that disability work in the discipline was relatively scarce in the 1970s, I was still disappointed that disability was only mentioned once in Spatial Histories of Radical Geography and that was to quote Castree in 2000 saying that disability was part of the radical and critical geography agenda (final chapter). Although the number of geographers working on disability issues has increased since then, disability has yet to be consistently recognized as central to what radical geographers do. By this I mean as part and parcel of the processes of ableist neoliberal oppression shaping who wins and who loses in our global capitalist order. Having said that, there are reasons for hope given an upsurge in research on geographies of disability over the past two decades (Wilton and Horton Citation2019). Sadly, however, despite this work, we are seeing the lives of disabled people dramatically worsen, and some disability issues remain relatively invisible in practice, such as the exclusion of disabled people from the academy. We need to ensure that, as radical geographers, we bring such issues into as sharp a focus as humanly possible.
Commentary by Federico Ferretti, School of Geography, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
This book is undoubtedly a milestone in the ongoing process of writing the histories of the great period that saw the rising of critical and radical approaches in geography from the 1960s and 1970s onward. Although these histories are characterized by a plurality of methodological approaches (biographical, transnational, place-based, and spatial-sensitive), there is increasing evidence that this rising was international, albeit one of its most famous manifestations took place in North America, as narrated by most of the invaluable chapters included in this book. Although one should acknowledge the praiseworthy task declared by the editors for deconstructing “the Clark University-centered history of Anglophone North American radical geography that is commonly narrated” (p. xix), the focus of this work remains overwhelmingly dedicated to the area that could be defined as “North America plus the Anglophone world.” Conversely, the announced “selected places outside that core” (p. 4) addressed in this work look like a rather limited sample, calling urgently for new contributions completing this panorama. For this reason, rather than celebrating the excellent materials presented in this book and the great work on primary sources that has been done by its authors and editors, I instead focus on two absences, to provide some claims and provocations that I hope will be useful for fostering further investigation.
The first is the absence of a strong body of empirical or archival research outside both North America and the Anglophone world that can be comparable to what has been done for the “core.” It is worth noting that, among the five “selected places” (United Kingdom, South Africa, France, Mexico, and Japan), only the last three can be actually considered as lying outside North America and outside the linguistic Anglosphere at the same time. The second is the (almost complete) absence of anarchism, with the exception of some remarks by Kent Mathewson on the “Elisée Reclus Geography Club” (Lauria et al., p. 261) and a quick note just to say that anarchism, together with several other critical approaches, was overtaken by a “breakthrough to Marxism” (p. 22), in Richard Peet’s words.
As for the first, what is intriguing is not only the absence of chapters investigating outstanding cases in non-Northern or non-Anglophone radical scholarship, such as (just to quote some of the most straightforward) the impressive range of Brazilian and South American critical and radical tendencies that are now rediscovered (Melgaço Citation2017; Davies Citation2019), the Spanish experience of Geocrítica (Capel Citation1976), the Italian experiences of Hérodote/Italia and Geografia Democratica (Farinelli Citation2006), and so on. So far, this could be considered a result of the need for keeping a work to a manageable size. Yet, it is even more puzzling that some of the chapters “outside the core” seem to rather lament “the lack of a critical perspective” (Crossa, p. 329) in the respective countries, or their distance from the Anglo-American models (Calbérac), than to develop comparable cases. In the case of Mexico, recent contributions on the presence of critical transnational scholars in Mexican universities such as Graciela Uribe (Mendoza Vargas Citation2018) and on the international connections of Angel Bassols Batalla with socialist and critical circuits (Delgadillo Citation2015) suggest that there might be room for advancing this investigation through archival work. Conversely, in the case of France, Yann Calbérac declares that the deliberate exclusion from his work in the circuits of Yves Lacoste and Hérodote is due to the “significant difference” (Calbérac, p. 358) existing between French and Anglophone radical geographies. Although this is a legitimate choice of the author, who focuses on the discovery of “Anglo” radical geographies by French scholars in more recent times, this excludes from international comparisons an important circuit of French-speaking geographers who did not display labels such as “critical’ or “radical” geography, but worked as strongly engaged leftist and anticolonialist scholars in the second half of the twentieth century. It is the case with Jean Dresch, André Prenant, Raymond Guglielmo, and several others, as noted by Bataillon (Citation2006). This should lead to a wider methodological reflection on how we can proceed in making the history of critical and radical geographies.
What I suggest is that we give up the idea that, for doing this work, one should seek correspondences with a dominant “radical” model, that is the North American “Antipode-an” one, and that we look to the different contributions that can come under different forms in different languages and cultures. To understand these “absences,” it is worth considering what Calbérac acutely notes about the term radical, which in France, has a completely different meaning than the Anglo-American idea of political radicalism, given that the Radical Party in France belongs rather to liberal-democrat traditions than to leftist ones. Therefore, French definitions generally include the term critique, and “radical geography appears diluted in its French language version” (Calbérac, p. 363). This occurs in all Latin languages, in which left-wing people rarely claim to be “Radicals”; although it would be too long to do a survey of all linguistic families here, I suspect that we would find many of these translation issues. Thus, one would spend an entire life in seeking what cannot be found; that is, an exact equivalent of “radical geography” in other languages and cultures in the same years in which this was developed in North America. Yet, this does not mean that tendencies that were (even radically) critical of the social and economic organization did not exist in geography.
These translation issues are not just mere details, and they should be taken very seriously. I suspect that not all the Anglo scholars are aware of certain linguistic matters, at least from what I gather from the anonymous peer-review reports of my papers each time that I dare to use terms such as republican or libertarian without adding a paragraph of fully spelled-out explanations: Yet, in political traditions other than the North American, these definitions do not have anything to do with Donald Trump or with the Libertarian Party! This suggests that, in doing global histories of critical and radical geographies (and it should be clear now why I generally use both adjectives), we should go beyond the mere attempt to linguistically, terminologically, and even conceptually match North American or Anglocentric models of radical geography. An interesting example is the chapter of Fujio Mizuoka, who tries to enlarge the focus to “East Asian Regional Conferences in Alternative Geography” (p. 310). Despite claiming direct connections with the North American experience, these conferences constitute an example of the possible spelling of critical tendencies under a plurality of labels, like the “New Geography” conferences held in Argentina and Uruguay in the 1970s (Ferretti Citation2018). Thus, it is definitively time that the field of critical and radical geographies starts to do something more for challenging monolingualism and cultural provincialism, to foster cosmopolitanism and open-mindedness.
This also points to the importance of the archive to discover what official narrations might have hidden or undermined. New archives are being opened with materials from geographers of that generation and many witnesses are still available to be interviewed. Yet, most of the efforts for digging in these invaluable sources still take place in the countries of the “core.” This is arguably due to difficulties such as the very nature of the archive, which is often biased by the intention of keeping an “official” memory, hence the necessity for researchers to deconstruct and sometimes “reinvent” their archives. Furthermore, archives outside the core might speak languages other than that of the core, hence again the need for multilingualism and transnational sensitivity.
This also connects with the second absence, that of anarchism. This is not intended to be an ideological polemic, but I think that presenting the field of radical geography as Marxist is problematic. In the entire book, one cannot find the slightest mention of Dunbar’s works on Reclus, and yet Dunbar was based in the United States and produced eminent output. Likewise, the works of Breitbart and the 1978–1979 Antipode special issue on anarchism are only mentioned cursorily, although it should be remembered that also Peet, despite his claims for Marxism highlighted in the book, expressed interest in the figure of Kropotkin, alongside Breitbart, in a 1975 Antipode issue (Peet Citation1975). To remain in North America, very famous anarchist scholars outside geography such as Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky, whose works are not so far from ecological and geopolitical concerns of many radical geographers, are only cursorily mentioned. I understand one can never quote everyone and everything that is relevant to the field, but my note calls for paying more attention to the plurality of radical approaches recently claimed by the current Antipode editors (Antipode Editorial Collective Citation2020), rather than trying to establish any ideological monopoly over the field.
Spatial Histories of Radical Geography is a welcome contribution. It encourages us to push efforts further to make deeper and broader spatial international histories of critical and radical geography. If I have criticized what is not included in the book, it is also because I really enjoyed all that is there.
Commentary by Katherine Gibson, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia
What does it mean to write a spatial history? According to Hilary Mantel’s historical novel on Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to King Henry VIII of England, “history holds up an imperfect mirror to the past, illuminated by shifting lights” (Tranter Citation2020). We could modify this observation to say that geography holds up multiple mirrors to the past, each reflecting light onto the subject from a specific locale. This book does just that and the end product is a wonderfully multifaceted illumination of a movement and an era. I found it a compelling, entertaining, and sometimes disconcerting read. As one who has her own mirror on this past, it had me remembering incidents and reexamining events. The disconcerting part was seeing one’s life as “history.”
My entrée into the spatial history of radical geography was made as a fresh-faced tutor at the University of Sydney in the mid-1970s working with Ron Horvath, the newly arrived ex-Detroit Expeditioner and ex-Simon Fraser University professor. In the Marxist geography reading groups we began, my previous attractions to participant observation and talking to actual people took a bashing. Once introduced to the explanatory power of the structural forces of capitalism, I disowned my penchant for phenomenology and kept the topic of my “humanistic geography” honors thesis under wraps. For all the intellectual excitement that Marxism offered, I recall it came with a fair dose of disciplining critical judgment.
Just before leaving Sydney to start graduate study at Clark University in 1977, Ron took me for a walk along King Street, Newtown, and attempted to give me a sense of what the radical geography milieu was like in the United States. I remember him trying, in as subtle a way as his Los Angeles working-class origins afforded, to warn me of the extreme, “out there,” behavior of the group I was about to encounter.
Perhaps somewhat to his surprise, I took to the unconventional and exploratory scene like a duck to water. Of course, I was very lucky to bump into Julie Graham, who had turned up at the Graduate School of Geography having driven over to Worcester, Massachusetts, from the Connecticut Valley in her VW Beetle with its “Eat the Rich” bumper sticker. Julie brought a decade of experience with the women’s movement to her involvement with Marxist geography at Clark.
What was so exciting about our graduate education was the sense of freedom we had to shape what we were learning and researching. As many of the chapters of Spatial Histories point out, radical pedagogy played a key role in upturning academic hierarchies of status and knowledge. In the second semester of graduate school, Julie and I persuaded Dick Peet to accept a jointly researched and written paper on New England’s deindustrialization. Thus began our destabilization of the singular authorial voice.
Our growing interest in theorizing economic restructuring led to organization of a remarkable weeklong workshop on regional restructuring in 1980 at the Institute Pedagogique in Walferdange, Luxembourg. We were still graduate students, but with the support of certain faculty members we brought U.S. scholar-activists (Bennet Harrison, Bob Ross, Paul Susman, Phil O’Keefe, Don Shakow, Julie, and myself) together with UK and European scholar-activists (Doreen Massey, John Carney, Dianne Perrons, Mick Dunford, Gareth Rees, Gustavo Fahrenkrog, Jos Leyten, and others I can’t remember) to discuss new theoretical directions for Marxian political economy (O’Keefe Citation1984).
I remember driving with Phil and John from Newcastle-on-Tyne to Luxembourg in a right-hand drive car, alarmed by the speedy European motorways. This hair-raising trip had been preceded by attending a mass meeting of Consett steelworkers who were protesting the closure of their plant at the freezing cold local football ground. This was at the beginning of Thatcher’s assault on the old heartlands of Britain’s industrial revolution. It’s no wonder to me now that films such as Brassed Off and The Full Monty resonated some sixteen years later and became productive inputs into Gibson-Graham’s (Citation2006) rethinking of political action.
“Sometimes it is years before we can see who are the heroes in an affair and who are the victims” says Mantel’s fictional Thomas Cromwell (quoted in Tranter Citation2020). There is something of this revisionist clarity offered in selected chapters of Spatial Histories. Certainly, the lasting influences of those who were less prominent in the movement are now surfacing, and those who were heroes at the time are presented in a more critical light. This is as it should be. When mirrors to the past are held up, we see much that was missed in the telling at the time.
From my spatial location here in the “Global North” of the South, my mirror on the past of radical geography illuminates a few ghostly figures. I see dimly reflected those slightly earlier twentieth-century geographers who were attuned to global inequalities and not enamored by postwar geography’s turn to abstraction and scientism and whose somewhat muted politics might have prepared the ground for radical geography. The two “area studies” geographers to whom I have recently turned my gaze, Joe Spencer and Oskar Spate, were radicals in the way that they rejected orthodoxy, listened to the voices of poor farmers and workers in Asia, and challenged the way modernity was rewriting histories and obliterating geographies (Gibson-Graham Citation2020). One (Spate) was schooled in Marxism, and the other (Spencer) trained those who later became Marxists (e.g., Ron Horvath and Clark Akatiff). My mirror sheds light on a possible prehistory and alter-spatiality to the radical geography movement.
The other figure is by no means absent from Spatial Histories but she is, for me, with the benefit of hindsight, the hero of the story. Women and feminists were very present in all the frames we see reflected back to us in this book. For the most part, at the time, however, they were not the prominent frontline figures. To my admittedly biased mind, however, it is generative feminist thinking that has radically transformed geography and kept alive the exploratory pedagogy that was a key revolutionary component of the radical geography movement.
Geographers owe a debt of gratitude to Barnes and Sheppard and all the contributors to this book for the work they have put in to document a remarkable era that shook up our discipline. Today geographic research sets new agendas and geographers are read across the humanities, social sciences, and earth sciences. This is in no small part because of the way radical geography honed the discipline’s intellectual contributions, multiplied its theoretical agendas, and brought real-world relevance and political engagement to the fore.
Commentary by Miles Kenney-Lazar, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore
I read the bulk of Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond during a ten-day field research visit to southern Burma (Myanmar). shows the book traveling with me on an auto rickshaw ride in the seaside town of Myeik in Tanintharyi Region, in the far south of Burma. I read during the downtime between focus group discussions and field surveys in villages living within oil palm plantations, estates that were established over the past two decades by the former military junta and crony companies in a bid to turn the region into the edible “oil bowl” of the country. Reading a history of radical geography while witnessing the social and environmental abuses that the plantations had wrought upon Karen, Shan, and Bamar villagers was a harrowingly insightful juxtaposition. It raised important questions about not only where radical geography is written, but also where it is read, especially when such places lie far beyond North America, as many sites relevant to radical geography do.
Figure 1. Radical geography far beyond North America. Source: Photo by Miles Kenney-Lazar.
Reading from elsewhere, a site in Southeast Asia that lies far off the map of radical geography, could make this history look somewhat provincial. It might seem an arcane account of a marginal discipline, relatively disconnected from the political ecological transformations of southern Burma: military-state territorialization, crony capital expansion, and violent dispossession. Yet, the retold history of geography’s transformation from a discipline of regional description and quantitative spatial modeling toward radical scholarship, education, politics, and praxis is as relevant to rural Southeast Asia now as it was to geography departments across North America and other connected sites in the 1970s. This book thus infused the field with the spirit of radical geography, keeping present my ongoing engagements with it, first as an undergraduate at the University of Miami (working with Mazen Labban) and later as a graduate student at Clark University (advised by and engaging with Jody Emel, James McCarthy, Dianne Rocheleau, Dick Peet, and Mark Davidson). This is a spirit that can be challenging to keep alive, as I had since moved to work at institutions with their own politics—first the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University and now the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore—but not those of radical geography.
What struck me immediately on reading Part I was the conversation that emerged across the chapters concerning the two key elements that comprise the praxis of radical geography: deep field engagement and broad theorization. Both were driven by a politics associated with the burning social issues of the era—civil rights and antiracism, feminism, the environmental movement, and opposition to the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism. This was well documented in the emergence of radical geography across disparate but connected centers—Worcester, Detroit, Baltimore, Berkeley, Vancouver, and more. Here, Bill Bunge’s Detroit Geographical Expeditions and their counterparts in Vancouver and Toronto were shown to be as important in the early emergence of radical geography as David Harvey’s theorization of the relationships between capitalism, urban formation, and social marginalization (which itself was built on extensive empirical experience in Baltimore). The productive tensions between these two approaches reflect earlier debates in geography between idiographic regionalism and nomothetic quantitative spatial science (Johnston and Sidaway Citation2016), in that one was based on in-depth description of urban blight (the geographical expeditions), whereas the other sought to develop general principles of the urban condition under capitalism (most notably by David Harvey) and the wider conceptual development of Marxist geography in Antipode in the early 1970s. Additionally, these debates continue to play out productively in critical geography, particularly concerning a focus on theory versus field work, activism, or both. There is clearly a need for all of the above, such as when facing the environmental and social crises of land dispossession and landlessness present in the Burmese countryside, as in so many other sites across Southeast Asia.
Regardless of emphasis on theory or field work, Spatial Histories of Radical Geography demonstrates how politics were integral to radical geography in ways that are reassuring in a current era of neoliberal academic professionalism. Then, as it should be now, research and scholarship were a means of engaging in politics, activism, and social change rather than a project of achieving scholarly impact, prestige, and career advancement. Marx’s famous adage that the “point is to change it,” which can ring somewhat hollow today, appears deeply meaningful in early radical geography recounted in Part 1 of Spatial Histories of Radical Geography. The opening sentence of the mandate of the Union of Socialist Geographers (USG), written between 1974 and 1975, is a powerful statement that should continue to guide our current research programs: “The purpose of our union is to work for the radical restructuring of our societies in accord with the principles of social justice” (p. 157). A later point demonstrates their commitment to a socialist vision that is rarely seen in critical geography today: “We declare that the development of a humane, non-alienating society requires, as its fundamental step, socialization of the ownership of the means of production” (p. 157). The politics of early radical geography seeps out of every page in ways that are rarely seen within the modern academy. Radical geography was engaged in the politics of the civil rights movement (Chapter 1), antiapartheid struggles in South Africa (Chapter 11), contestations of the marginalization of black, working-class movements in North American inner cities (Chapters 2 and 7), and efforts to pursue different modes of geography (Chapters 3 and 7), among others. Thus, the volume is a welcome reminder that first and foremost, our politics should be guiding our program and mode of research.
The stories of Spatial Histories of Radical Geography also demonstrate, however, that politics is not enough and that our work must build durable sites of action and change. Early radical geographers, for their part, were forming new institutions and spaces for radical geography. Although many of these did not become long-lasting pillars of the discipline and academy, their imprints have carried on. These included magazines, journals, and newsletters (Antipode at Clark, Posición in Mexico, the USG newsletter, Contemporary Issues in Geography and Education in the United Kingdom) and institutions (the Commission on Geography and Afro-America, the Institute wing of the Detroit Geographical Expedition, the USG and later the Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group of the AAG, and the later emergence of the Antipode Foundation). Such work can operate beyond the confines of the contemporary demands of the academy, and thus this early organizing work is a refreshing reminder of its importance, as the discipline would not have been the same without it. Similarly, Karen land and environmental rights organizations of southern Burma have the institutional capacity to use the results of our collaborative research to fight for community land rights, which often seems more important than scholarly publications in a paywalled journal.
Perhaps most inspiring about reading from “elsewhere” was the ways in which the chapters of Spatial Histories of Radical Geography made the case for the importance of place and spatial connections for shaping the scholarship of early radical geographers and the emergence of a coherent, politically infused intellectual project. Linda Peake states that the aim of her chapter on the USG is “to recalibrate the geographical imaginary of the origins of radical geography from a singular point of departure to that of a network of politicized academic geography communities forming across and in relation to each other” (p. 150), which could as easily apply to the rest of the edited volume. Thus, this means that any site has emergent potential through its connections with other movements, politics, and intellectual currents, as well as the social-environmental contradictions of a particular place, whether it be Worcester, Baltimore, Berkeley, and Vancouver, or Kyoto, Singapore, and Myeik.
Yet, this history and vision speaks to not only the opportunities for radical geography today, but also its limits. It is heartening to read a history that seeks to move beyond North America and the Global North, as stated by the editors in the introduction: “we acknowledge that North America should not be taken as a privileged region from which to understand global radical geography” (p. 372). Ultimately, however, this is largely the history that is told. The bulk of the volume does focus on North America and the second part that seeks to go “beyond” includes a set of much shorter chapters on Japan, South Africa, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and France, which largely recount conflicts between localized factions of critically minded, but parochial geographers and the importation of radical geography from North America. This is no fault of the editors, as they have made a valiant effort to tell a different history, such as by showing the early role of race (Chapters 1 and 2), the presence of gender and racial discrimination (Chapters 2 and 3), and the critical strands of geography that preexisted or lay beyond North American imports (Part 2). Yet, that these stories still remain secondary to the dominant history told, and show the limits of that history itself, indicates that critiques of radical geography as too white, male, and European American still stand. Perhaps this speaks to the importance of decentering radical geography and letting alternative forms of radical and critical politics from elsewhere, such as the indigenous politics of land in southern Burma, speak back to the dominant spatial histories of radical geography so eloquently told in this collection.
Commentary by Chris Philo, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Writing in another forum for The AAG Review of Books, Mary Gilmartin (in Boyle et al. Citation2017) questioned histories of our discipline in which geographers are depicted as “fighters,” constantly staging academic turf wars around particular paradigms and struggling to occupy ever more intellectual and institutional “territory.” She wondered about deploying an alternative portrayal of “the geographer as lover” and doing more to recover histories—and to tell stories to ourselves—about geographers’ “passion for ideas, knowledge, research, teaching, or for changing the world” (Boyle et al. Citation2017, 54). To my mind, Spatial Histories of Radical Geography cleaves more to the “lover” than to the “fighter” pole of Gilmartin’s contrast. That might seem an odd claim, given that the early protagonists of radical geography were clearly “fighters”—self-consciously attacking wider structures of social injustice and environmental despoliation. In Gilmartin’s terms, however, they were also displaying a form of love, a fierce passion for progressive world changing, that fueled their fighting spirit, arguably more so than did narrow, inward-looking, intradisciplinary antagonisms (not that the latter were entirely absent, of course).
By my reading, it is indeed love, a passion that shines from every page of this remarkable volume edited by Trevor J. Barnes and Eric Sheppard. Gathered between two covers, it is a sustained love letter to radical geography, lovingly compiled, structured, and storied by the editors, who provide supremely insightful introductory and concluding bookends to the volume. Moreover, it is itself a monumental “labor of love” in bringing together so much rich, detailed, previously little-known, and maybe undocumented material in the one textual space (complemented by images, tables, and maps). The diverse contributors cannot but be passionate about the task before them—it really is the kind of task that one would not accept unless wholeheartedly committed—not least because it demands profound attention to details: It matters exactly who was involved, when and where, in what networks and communities, academic or “on the streets”; writing or editing which papers, pamphlets, journals, or newsletters; plotting what interventions, actions, and reactions; and so forth. One consequence is that the volume also demands a sort of “love” from the reader: However well-written, as is consistently the case throughout, its detailed retellings demand a lot from the reader, to stick with the detail, even the minutiae, rendering it a volume that ideally should be read slowly rather than skimmed for the main points (which would, in any case, be precisely to miss the point).
For me this was never a problem, as I loved taking my time to read slowly, attentively, from cover to cover. I am a firm believer that a properly loved text is one covered in scribbled annotations, and my copy of this volume has smudgy blue ink on almost every page, the endnote pages included. The frustration is that here I cannot engage in detail with the detail, but, genuinely, I have learned new things, and been forced to rethink what I thought I knew of the historiography, at the turn of every page. I am a highly receptive reader, though. Ever since first stumbling across early issues of Antipode as an undergraduate, I have been captivated by the inspiring and “revolutionary” birth-pangs of radical geography, becoming obsessed by the complexities of its emergence and the brimming eruption of diverse conceptual, methodological, and ethico-political possibilities—including the seeds of alternative class, poverty, gender, black, anticolonial, “underdeveloped,” “Fourth World,” and more geographical imaginations—in play right from the outset. A few years later (Philo Citation1998) I identified the “eclectic radical geographies” of these early years, meaning the late 1960s and early 1970s, and also pondered the dangers of subsequent moves that risked closing down this eclecticism, a subtheme echoing through chapters in this volume. My key claim for present purposes, though, is an honest acknowledgment that not all potential readers of the collection might be so patient, so passionate, about the detail. Readers looking to this volume for big-letter signposts about how radical geography should go forward in our troubled era might be disappointed, but I would urge them to look again: There are lessons to be learned from the history or, perhaps more acutely, from the ways in which contributors have elected to narrate this history. I return to this proposal when closing.
The issue of detail is also connected to the emphasis, hinted at earlier, on the where of radical geography. Drawing inspiration from recent moves to spatialize histories of science, knowledge, and ideas, the volume marks a decisive new step in turning a geographical sensibility back on our own disciplinary past. Necessarily wrapped up in that move is an alertness to diversity and eclecticism: to the fact that there was never any singular, agreed, radical geography, much as some practitioners might have wished there to be, but rather always, to repeat the now-hackneyed but still-essential pluralization device, multiple radical geographies.
The nine chapters comprising Part 1, “Radical Geography within North America,” coalesce into a wonderfully comprehensive retelling of radical geography’s origins on this landmass, with scant sense of omissions or even of further work needed to flesh out the retelling. Inevitably, that sense does not track into Part 2 of the volume, “Radical Geography beyond North America,” which cannot but be much more partial in which places feature and how their interconnections—with each other and their North American cousins—are represented. That is in no way to criticize the chapters here: Individually, they are superb. As the editors are well aware, postcolonial cautions could be stated about the very limited presence of retellings of radical geography from outside the Global North.
Different varieties of radical geographies have arisen from different congeries of scholars working—thinking, debating, acting, interacting—in different places. “Passion, emotions and multiple ties—with people, things and places—are important for the story of geography and geographers,” reflected Gilmartin (in Boyle et al. Citation2017, 53), a reflection outworked most effectively here, as different chapters take readers into the contextual specificities inflecting radical geography in North American cities and regions (Detroit, Worcester, Vancouver, Toronto, Baltimore, San Francisco, “the Midwest,” Quebec) and around certain university campuses (Clark, Simon Fraser, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin). In their chapter on Baltimore, covering how this city entered into the DNA of David Harvey’s crucial early formulations of a Marxist radical geography, Sheppard and Barnes develop the concept of “truth spot,” depicting a site whose particularity shapes knowledge originating therefrom but is then occluded as that knowledge becomes generalized. In a minor register, this concept—and the overall spatially de- and reconstructive logic of this volume—informs my account (Philo Citation2020) of how a valued ex-colleague of mine, Ronan Paddison, crafted a version of radical geography from the communities and field sites of postindustrial Glasgow.
To return to the theme of fighting and loving, chapters here record a lot of fighting, some of it pursuing progressive causes “out there” in the world and some of it staking out new turf “in here” in the academy, but what also receives comment are certain struggles within the emergent radical communities (of geographers, other scholars, unionists, local activists, and more) under the microscope. Most instructive but unsettling is the exposure of fault lines in the experiment of the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute commonly credited to William Bunge (Warren, Katz, and Heynen), with Gwendolyn Warren now provided an opportunity to voice her “side” of this revered experiment in radical-advocacy geography. Suffice to say, the “personal flaws” of William Bunge, charted unsparingly here, meant that “he undid himself time and time again” (p. 81). Similar concerns surface on occasion throughout the volume, meaning that certain leading radical geographers—white men, variously exhibiting traits of privilege, patriarchal authority, sexism, racism, and even homophobia—are not painted in the best light, and also captured is the otherwise unseen labor of many in the shadows of these dominant figures; for instance, those women working tirelessly to produce copies of Antipode or to broaden its content and direction (Huber, Knudsen, and Tapp). The “love” on the ground here was arguably too often compromised, perhaps even abused, and exceptionally difficult questions are thereby posed about the extent to which readers today can continue retrospectively to “love,” to revere, certain origin stories of “people, things, and places” in radical geography’s past. Significantly, I feel, the tendency throughout this volume is to resist the destructive banalities of a current “call-out culture,” avoiding what could otherwise become an uninformed “trolling” of this past. Instead, there is a sensibility that “the future of radical geography is better off if we recognise and take account of the bruises, slights and misrecognitions of its past” (p. 83), always remaining appreciative of the unsteady, uncertain, troubled, and troubling ground—full of inclusions but also beset by exclusions, displaying generosity but also unkindness, marked by both well meaning and ill judgment, replete with genius and error—on which radical geographies have been (and will continue to be) made. Spatial Histories of Radical Geography is undoubtedly the most compelling statement imaginable in all these respects.
Commentary by Michiel van Meeteren, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
Let me start by unambiguously stressing the importance of Spatial Histories of Radical Geography as a landmark achievement in the historiography of geography. Apart from rescuing fragile insights from oblivion, the book tackles major methodological questions for historians of recent geographic thought. Historiographical debates about geography have increasingly converged to a contextualist position (Van Meeteren and Sidaway Citation2020). Emerging in the late 1970s (Stoddart Citation1981), the contextualist position stresses the inherent situatedness of geographical practice and the impossibility of writing a singular history of geography. By now, even textbooks admit to contextualism and acknowledge their positionality (Sidaway, Van Meeteren, and Flint Citation2020). Livingstone’s (Citation1992) The Geographical Tradition became an exemplar (Kuhn Citation1970, 187; Boyle, Hall, and Sidaway Citation2019), at least in the United Kingdom (Ferretti Citation2019b), of how to write contextualist histories of geography as a discipline rather than biographies of individual geographers. Until now, though, writing such larger arcs in a frame of “situated messiness” ran into trouble when discussing the more recent histories (Van Meeteren Citation2019). How do you integrate oral history in the history of geography? How do you orchestrate the plurality of voices that might not have been heard before? How do you engage with history that is still alive and not yet fully confined to the archives?
To me, Barnes and Sheppard have compiled the exemplar from which we all can take cues on how to write situated histories of geography’s recent history. This review will outline why this volume is exemplary. I will offer critique as well, though. Critique comes in two varieties: aspects that the book has overlooked that I wished where there and aspects that inadvertently have fallen on the cutting floor, as one cannot do everything. I will make the case that we need to be heedful of those deleted scenes of the history of radical geography. We must take Spatial Histories of Radical Geography’s methodology rather than its content to be the exemplar.
With stating that Spatial Histories of Radical Geography is a methodological exemplar, I mean four things. First, the introduction to the book does a tremendous job at synthesizing the contextualist position; by arguing for geographic situatedness and inherent pluralism of both knowledge production and consumption. Second, Barnes and Sheppard show how to cope with inevitable fallibility when writing histories of geography. All historians of recent geography face demarcation problems and a sense of urgency. On the one hand, as episodes of the history of geography age, the number of primary sources inevitably shrinks, and memories fade. Yet with every bit of information one digs up, the story becomes more complicated. Heroes become less heroic, myths are busted, and grand theoretical battles chronicled in textbooks are unmasked as petty rivalries between academics. The best path under such circumstances, without reinforcing myths, is to acknowledge the partiality of narrative. We owe all the authors of this edited volume gratitude for preferring publishing fallible attempts over stalling perfectionism, difficult as such a choice might be. A third way in which Spatial Histories of Radical Geography is an exemplar is embracing positionality. Sheppard and Barnes fully acknowledge how the story of radical geography was crucial and inspirational to their personal academic trajectories. Yet, the book’s authors are encouraged not to hold back on the myth busting. Big names in the history of radical geography are depicted as caught up in misogyny and homophobia and the impact of a monist Marxism in radical geography is recounted. Fourth, the book foregrounds geographical pluralism of radical geography, in places and subjects. By regarding radical geography as a traveling project, new subjects and places come into view. Here Sheppard and Barnes make the most use of the book being an edited volume: Audrey Kobayashi, Gwendolyn Warren, Cyndi Katz, Linda Peake, and many others describe radical geography from different vantage points and show how the project was inherently plural. They reveal valuable perspectives on gender, race, and social reproduction that had been sidelined from the canon. In all those four respects, Spatial Histories of Radical Geography is the perfect work of reflexively dealing with the inevitable imperfection and incompleteness and leaving the historiography of geography, richer, and arguably neater.
Such an embrace of imperfection and incompleteness makes subsequent criticism complicated, as I fully acknowledge that you cannot do everything. Yet, there are three themes on which I really missed reflection: the relation between radical geography and its social-democratic counterparts, the silence on the relations between radical geography and socialist experiments around the world, and the beating around the bush when discussing the decline of radical geography in the 1980s.
In a recent personal reflection on his career (at the 2019 RGS-IBG conference in London; see Sidaway, Van Meeteren, and Flint Citation2020), English geographer Peter Taylor remarked on two issues about radical geography in general and the journal Antipode in particular. Taylor had become more intimately acquainted with Antipode during a visiting professorship at Clark in the late 1970s and hence has some firsthand insight in radical geography’s development. After praising Antipode’s vision on the environmental crisis and imperialism, he lamented that Antipode was completely silent on actually existing socialism (e.g., the Soviet Union) and not keen on publishing articles that argued that such a silence could be problematic. Second, he recalled skepticism about Marxist radical geography for a working-class person. According to him, the wholesome dismissal of social-democratic welfare states as an instrument to perpetuate capitalism by radical geography alienated working-class geographers from radical geography and made it a profoundly middle-class concern.
Taylor’s remarks merit reflection. First, perhaps there was not much about the Soviet Union, but there was a good dose of intellectual political pilgrimage (Hollander Citation1981) in Antipode. For instance, if we look at the published reports of the 1974 Union of Socialist Geographers (Citation1975) Seminar in Marxist Geography at Clark, there is significant discussion on developments in Maoist China, communist Cuba, the Indian Communist Party, and Third Worldism in Tanzania and Guinea. Yet these engagements with actually existing socialist regimes by radical geographers go almost completely unmentioned in this book, apart from a brief mention (p. 266) of Brian Higgins’s connection with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. This is a missed opportunity, as there is much to learn from experiences of how radical geographers can navigate the complexities of reporting on socialist projects that attained power. Similarly, I cannot help but wonder to what extent the neglect of social democracy and the welfare state made radical geography toothless when social-democratic welfare states subsequently got battered in the neoliberal era of the 1980s. Radical geographers seem to have been better at analyzing neoliberalism than social democracy.
In the conclusion of the book (p. 371), Sheppard and Barnes stress that Spatial Histories of Radical Geography is temporarily focused on radical geography’s early years. When the book mentions the transition between “radical geography” and a more pluralist “critical geography,” it seems to walk on eggshells for reasons that remain unexplained (pp. 19–22, 371). The demise of radical geography is described as the moment when Marxist geography gave way to pluralism and ivory towers, but the contextual how and why of that transition are hardly discussed. My own burning question about the extent to which the confrontational and acerbic style of radical geography’s dealings with its opponents and others outside the fold (e.g., pp. 202–03) contributed to the weakening of the institutional position of the discipline in United States in the 1980s (Haigh and Freeman Citation1982) remains unanswered.
Yet, a fascinating chapter of the book, by Peck and Barnes on Berkeley in between, does conjure the early 1980s. The Berkeley chapter captures a social-geographical perspective that beautifully conveys how close interaction within group of young scholar friends rebuilt one of the most influential schools. Yet it is also the most puzzling chapter. Some of the heroes of radical geography in this chapter are Meric Gertler, Michael Storper, and AnneLee Saxenian. I cannot help wondering if these scholars are included in the cast of radical geography, how did radical geography morph into the mainstream? Sheppard and Barnes are aware (p. 382) of the tensions generated by what Harvey (Citation1987, 368) once called “Formerly Radical Upwardly Mobile Professionals” (FRUMP) in geography, but how did this upward mobility change radical geography? The chapter shows how understanding the rise of flexible specialization and the knowledge-based economy brought radicalism to economic geography, yet between the lines you read how the discovery and admiration of how Silicon Valley worked simultaneously sowed doubts on Marxist certainties of a previous generation. California brought much insight on the resilience and change of the capitalist system, but one can almost feel how unobtrusively neoliberal sentiments also became salonfähig in the hot tubbing radical geography quarters during the 1980s. Although this volume allows me as reader to conjure these images, the book’s sparseness in discussing the eclipse of radical geography falls short of theorizing and understanding it.
If Spatial Histories of Radical Geography would have limited itself to North America, there would undoubtedly have been an uproar, and therefore it is not unexpected that the book includes five chapters (Part 2) on radical geography beyond North America. Yet this part of the book leaves me unsatisfied the most. This is not because of the individual contributions, which all invite plunging into interesting radical multilingual literatures. The selection poses questions, however. There are two ways in which I could theoretically see Part 2 fit in the book. One could discuss the influence of North American radical geography on radical traditions elsewhere, noting how the North American perspective inspired but perhaps also altered other traditions. Alternatively, one could try to be comprehensive on how radical geography was in different countries. The problem with Part 2 is that the editors did not choose and just let authors freewheel on their perspective, resulting on the one hand in a very partial overview of the influence of North American geography, but on the other hand leaving the suggestion of having a compendium of international cases. With such a compendium, though, questions of comprehensiveness and comparison loom large. For instance, how would I fit in the Belgium case, where the key statement of the quantitative revolution was backed up with a ten-page analysis of how important quantitative models are in Marxist Soviet geography (Saey Citation1968), effectively gluing the two revolutions together? Or what to think of the Dutch case, where radical geography was subsumed in an applied and pluralist tradition where geographers were educated for service in the welfare state (De Pater Citation2001). The largest ripple there was a strong antagonism at Nijmegen University, where students repeatedly occupied the university, invited David Harvey for a lecture, and the bitter intellectual debate (see Oomen Citation2008) was all about replacing development geography with dependencia theory (summarized in Ettema Citation1983). These sparsely documented stories remain to be told and put in a global perspective, where the North American experience would sometimes have played second fiddle. I am mindful that this would have been hard to achieve in Spatial Histories of Radical Geography, a fact readily acknowledged by Sheppard and Barnes (pp. 371–72), who invite others to chip in to fill those lacunae. The result, though, is a certain bluntness in theorizing the “beyond” North America bit of the book.
The fact that I am even flagging those lacunae in the book is testimony to the powerful methodology that keeps on asking new questions to the empirical materials brought forward in Spatial Histories of Radical Geography. The book is not, nor aspires to be, the definitive account of radical geography. Instead it invites us to challenge its findings, to plug gaps inevitably left unfilled. What the book does achieve in a definitive sense is the myth-busting of radical geography. After reading this book, any idea that radical geography was somehow a privileged episode of the history of geography, where the ugly side of academic politics and feuds were less prominent than other episodes, is shattered. That opens the door to revisiting other episodes of the history of geography: from regional geography, human–land relations, the dirty hands of applied geographers (Boyle et al. Citation2020), and the growth of feminist geography through an equally critical empathic historiographical lens. I am not sure whether that was the editors’ intention, but the methodology of Spatial Histories of Radical Geography has surely opened Pandora’s box.
Commentary by Jane Wills, Centre for Geography and Environmental Science, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK
I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about the geohistory of our discipline and why human geography looks and feels so radical compared to the rest of the academy. It is also exemplary as a model for how to tell disciplinary histories that are sensitive to the people, places, and circumstances of knowledge creation. This is a case where an edited book has been a brilliant vehicle from which to hear different voices and gather rich stories from a wide range of places. A number of the chapters include transcribed interview material from the leading protagonists in the geohistory of radical geography. This gives it a very personal tone, but the number of chapters included also allows it to stretch further than any other account of this history. Beyond the usual locations, chapters also cover radical geography in France, Japan, Mexico, and South Africa.
I particularly enjoyed reading about the less well-known aspects of the radical geography story. The standouts were Audrey Kobayashi’s chapter on “race” in early radical geography; Gwendolyn Warren and colleagues’ chapter revisiting the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute; Nick Blomley and Eugene McCann’s chapter on the activism at Simon Fraser University, Canada; and Jamie Peck and Trevor Barnes’s chapter about the remarkable group of people who came together at Berkeley in the late 1970s. These chapters name the often-unsung people who opened doors to allow ideas to flourish, and those who provided the money and labor to get things done. Many of the chapters also capture the emotional energy of the period when people formed friendships over ideas, thereby sharing experiences that remade their lives. In their chapter about David Harvey’s work in Baltimore, the editors include the story of Dick Walker encountering the radical economist Joan Robinson when he was an undergraduate at Stanford University. Robinson taught her lessons outside, wearing a Mao suit, and she told him that all his prior knowledge was wrong (p. 195). The book exposes the role of the university as a place to encounter, experience, and live new ideas.
Spatial Histories of Radical Geography also does a great job exploring how new ideas are developed and then transmitted (or not). Although we usually associate radical geography with the journal that still exists from that period (Antipode: A radical journal of geography), I learned a lot about the other printed media used to spread the word: the newsletter produced by the Union of Socialist Geographers and Transition produced (way ahead of its time) by the Socially and Ecologically Responsible Geographers group (both covered in Linda Peake’s chapter); and the journal Contemporary Issues in Geography and Education produced by the Association for Curriculum Development in Geography (in Joanne Norcup’s chapter). The plethora of groups (acronyms), journals, and activities reflect the energy of the period and there is a palpable sense of this being a movement, a messy but somehow overlapping tide of people trying to do things differently.
Some of the content of the book is also painful. In places, people reflect on their experiences of gender inequality and call out bad behavior even when the protagonists are dead. Maybe this needs to be done, but it made for hard reading. There is also a brutal honesty about some of the more unpleasant things that were done to promote radical geography that must have hurt those involved (on both “sides”). Dick Peet, for example, reflects on the hard struggle to “do theory” in geography (p. 108), but he also acknowledges the “nasty stuff” they did to establish their cause. Reflecting the tactics long used by revolutionary leftist groups, he recalls arriving early at conferences to identify “counter-revolutionary” scholars and sessions to target for action. He tells us that he “saw people almost faint when they saw this group of people, the comrades, sitting there with their arms folded” (p. 203). This must have been a very difficult time to be the old guard in the face of the rising vanguard of the new left.
The book also highlights that some parts of the movement were better at promoting their ideas than others. This is about the combined power of ideas, the infrastructure to transmit those ideas (journals, books, conferences), and the personalities of the people who were able to generate followers. In their conclusion, Barnes and Sheppard acknowledge that the emphasis on Marxism made the movement increasingly “narrow and exclusive” (p. 373), which is true, but not really the fault of the Marxists, who did an amazing job at spreading their ideas far and wide. Moreover, alternative perspectives also emerged from the centers of Marxist geography, at least partly as a reaction to the limits of that approach (particularly evident in the work later published by Graham and Gibson (p. 374).
More than fifty years after it began, and against all the odds, the movement for radical geography can be seen as a remarkable success. Indeed, it is now in danger of becoming a new orthodoxy. Barnes and Sheppard refer to the dilemma of this success in relation to “the implications of playing the neoliberal game” (p. 380). They reflect on the challenges of being a successful academic in a successful discipline in the contemporary university while also espousing radical or critical ideas. In what is probably the hardest hitting text in the book, they call on radical geographers to “reflect long and hard” on what they are doing today (pp. 380–82). They call for an “engaged pluralism” that works with a “broader range of radical voices,” thinks about teaching and institutional change, and works with marginalized people.
It is not clear, though, if neoliberalism is to blame for the problem here. It goes much deeper than that. Today it is generally possible to tell what geographers are going to say before they open their mouth or put pen to paper. A radical orthodoxy is an oxymoron and this is a particular problem for an academic discipline like geography that has its roots in the particularity of place and context. How can it be possible to know the answers without starting with the contingency and happenstance of place?
For my money, a new radical geography would have to revisit the things that were lost in the period covered by the powerful accounts in this book. We might need to go back to the earlier traditions of place-based scholarship that were sometimes lost, at least in part, with the emergence of now standardized (leftist) theories of everything. Indeed, my frustration with the new orthodoxy of the discipline has prompted an interest in the tradition of pragmatism (Wills and Lake Citation2020). Pragmatism provides a way to combine an interest in place and the particular (that was evident in the emergence of early radical geography as documented in Spatial Histories of Radical Geography) with an orientation to scholarship and knowledge production that is about more than description. Rather than taking its cue from existing theory, academic debate, or prevailing intellectual concerns, pragmatic inquiry reorients the focus of research to working with a particular social group or community. By starting with conversation, we can retain an openness to the practical matters of pressing local concern that might, or might not, demand the creation of ideas that can travel far beyond the “truth spots” from which they emerge.
Commentary by Ben Wisner, Visiting Professor, Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction, University College London, London, UK
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It made me remember and caused me to regret, to squirm, and to laugh aloud. It stimulated questions. That is largely because the book was about my youth, places I know and people with whom I have argued, whom I have read and admire. I cannot guess how the book will be experienced and interpreted by younger audiences. The book is part oral history, part contribution to the biography of thought leaders such as David Harvey, part sociological reflection, especially on a more sexist and masculinist period in North American academic life. It also is a limited introduction to some of the “radical” ideas and methods with which those of us involved experimented. Finally, the text also would like to be a contribution to the history of geographical thought, in a long series of such books. The editors do their best to put the many voices of multiple chapter authors and those interviewed into context and draw out what meaning there might be for the future. Is the book successful in any, some, or all of these tasks? I am too close to the events to judge. What I can do, however, is briefly to attempt my own small and somewhat eccentric contribution about those beginnings and what has transpired since.
Then/There
The early days of radical geography span a very long “Sixties,” roughly 1969 (founding of Antipode) through the early 1980s. It took place during the last of what Picketty (Citation2014) called the three golden decades of quasi-socialized, semiequitable mass consumption that made use of forces of production built up during World War II to feed pent-up demand. That began to end with the elections of Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and Ronald Reagan. What began as youthful rebellion against war and awareness of persistent poverty amidst plenty within a few years took up Marxism as a lens through which more systematically to understand what was becoming neoliberalism and a guide to action.
Throughout these early days, the chapters on North America agree, women suffered exclusion and even abuse. Gender was not a theme taken up, nor, as also documented in this book, was discussion of race often led by black geographers. What the chapters do not say is that environmental issues were also not often topics, with some exceptions such as an early critique of neo-Malthusianism. As I recall my own attitude at the time, shared by other graduate students, the nascent environmental movement that was growing at that same time seemed a distraction from the antiwar movement. The first Earth Day celebration was in 1970. The Clean Water Act in the United States followed in 1972, as did the first global United Nations conference on the human environment, held in Stockholm. Early radical geography was activist as well as scholarly. Early radical geography did not climb aboard that train, nor did mainstream geography departments respond quickly to the demand for “environmental studies” as competing departments with that name began to spring up in the 1980s.
“Expeditions” inspired by the Detroit Expedition and Institute sprung up, as did other sorts of community outreach such as the “miniversities” created in Worcester, Massachusetts, Boston, and New York City. The New York miniversity took place in a Chinese restaurant, where the owner was one of the students, recalls Professor David Stea (personal communication February 9–14, 2020), and the one in Worcester was in a storefront. The idea was to provide accredited university courses for people without the huge costs associated with university physical plant and infrastructure. The driving force behind miniversities was a Clark sociology professor, Howard Stanton, who, with Jim Blaut and David Stea, made up a part of the radical turn in social science and geography there (although only Blaut’s role is generally acknowledged). Miniversities were accredited by Goddard College in Vermont.
Action had to balance reflection and practice with theory. The “expeditions” and much of the other forms of outreach were urban forms of practice that took up housing issues, poverty, inequality, and internal colonialism. The “expeditions” mobilized conventional spatial analysis and mapping tools used for, but with some exception, not by low-income residents of ghettos and inner cities. Methods and tools of participation action research, coproduction of knowledge, and citizen science were yet to become widespread. Although “perception studies” were used by geographers focused on natural hazards and risks, these were largely overlooked or not considered radical enough.
The book tells us that in North America it was students and untenured professors who began the paradigm shift and turn toward activism. Radical geography was a movable feast, with people moving from home to home for shared meals and discussions. I recall one “seminar” in a jail cell in Worcester, when graduate students and professors were arrested for obstructing the military induction center. It was itinerant and anarchic. This had the strength of diffusing and sharing ideas and methods in new places as students and professors changed universities. Weaknesses, though, included interrupted continuity, many plans undeveloped or not followed through, ideas without action, research funding proposals denied, and a lack of credibility that resulted in some talented people leaving academia. According to the authors of the chapters on Mexico and South Africa, the dominance of conventional geography was hard to overcome and became harder as neoliberalism began to affect Mexican universities in the 1980s and in the transition and after the end of apartheid in South Africa. Similar pressures came increasingly to bear on North American academics, hence the relatively rapid shift from the more informal to formalization and professionalization, for example, of Antipode, first with formal peer reviewing introduced in 1981 and later by becoming a Blackwell (subsequently Wiley) journal.
Beyond
What I find a bit disappointing is treatment of lands beyond North America. I have no complaint about the chapters on Japan, South Africa, Mexico, Great Britain, and France. They are interesting and substantial. The problem is twofold. First, there were influences from Africa and Latin America on the creation and development of radical geography. The “spatial histories” compiled by Barnes and Sheppard should document two-way influences. This should not just be the story of how North American radical geography diffused “beyond,” but also how the Global South was part of its creation. Second, and a corollary of the first, there is more to Africa and to Latin America than South Africa and Mexico. A similar point might be made about Asia, but my experience does not allow me to comment on those influences.
For example, Blaut (Citation1994) and his Colonizer’s Model of the World were influenced by the writings of Walter Rodney and Clive Thomas, who taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in the early 1970s. The exiled Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos was another influence. Those and Tanzanian radical thinkers such as Issa Shivji frequented an informal workshop on “the Hill” (university) on Sunday mornings known as “Sunday school.” Having been a liberal antiwar activist and vague anti-imperialist while at the University of Chicago doing a master’s in philosophy (1965–66) and at Clark and when I helped found Antipode, it was in Dar es Salaam that I had my first contact with a systematic reading of Marx, Lenin, and Kautsky, all of which were to be found in cheap Moscow editions at a bookstore in town. These African, Afro-Caribbean, and Brazilian radicals (historians, political economist, and geographer) shaped my PhD, my contribution to the Antipode paper, “Theses on Peasantry” (Blaut et al. Citation1977), and in turn the group effort, At Risk (Blaikie et al. Citation1994), a book that juxtaposed a critical political ecological understanding of natural hazards and disasters to the then dominant liberal paradigm.
The first edition of At Risk was written slowly, between 1988 and 1993, and in the last few years of its creation, the combined influence of a number of germinal Latin American thinkers was vital. The argument that disasters are socially constructed and the product of failed “development” was growing steadily in Andean and Central American countries from the mid-1980s. Figures such as Andrew Maskrey (Peru), Allan Lavell (Costa Rica), Pascal Girot (Costa Rica), Gustavo Wilches-Chaux (Colombia), Gisella Gellert (Guatemala), Elizabeth Mansilla, and Virginia García Acosta (the last two Mexican but not mentioned by Crossa) were among the first to link up in a network of social scientists working on disasters that remain active (La Red,https://www.desenredando.org/).
That said, I am aware that I am stretching the notion of “radical geography” beyond what it was or aspired to be in the years 1969 through 1982. The editors explain its limits (pp. 371–72): It is “temporally limited” to the early years, “spatially limited,” and not “all the spaces of early radical geography” were captured. Each chapter’s “narrative … is a situated account, shaped by its authors’ predilections and conceptions of radical geography.” The editors stress that “North America should not be taken as a privileged region.” Nevertheless, early radical geography was not completely devoid of an awareness of the two-way street, across North–South. David Slater, a great development geographer who, like Blaut, left us too early (both died at age seventy), wrote an important critique of “underdevelopment” for Antipode in 1973 (Slater Citation1973). He shows a deep appreciation for Caribbean writers, Beckford and Rodney, and for authors from Brazil (Josue de Castro) and the German-born Mexican sociologist Rudolfo Stavenhagen. He also has substantial endnotes on Cuba’s achievements (Slater Citation1973, 32). Slater was in Tanzania in the 1970s, too, and Blaut’s master’s work was in Trinidad and his doctoral research was conducted in 1950s Malaya and Singapore. Both were pioneers in the radical geographical readings of the history and trajectory of the Global South, drawing on an array of influences and writers (Ferretti Citation2019a).
My own predilection is to look at things from a critical political ecological point of view. In the early days, just as race and gender were marginal considerations, so also human–nature relations were not at all as common as spatial, political economic themes (Wisner Citation1978).
Now/Here
Radical geography began while the United States was at war in Vietnam. The war caused students and young academics to become aware of imperialism in a vivid, albeit unsystematic way. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg came later. Now the United States is mired in Afghanistan, capital is more transnational than ever, and resource wars rage. When young geographers read Marx, the Soviet Union and China were Cold War enemies. Later they were friends. Now Russia and China are increasingly scripted as enemies again. The radical turn was also a reaction to the failure of the civil rights movement to provide equity and social equality to minorities. The urban reflection of that failure was an early research subject. Today, the prison-industrial complex locks up five black Americans for every one white. The new Jim Crow persists. Antipode was founded only a few years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and before the watershed world conferences and legislation that made the “human environment” a major political topic. Today climate change deniers lead major nations and COP26 in Glasgow at the end of 2020 might fail yet again to achieve agreement on necessary cuts to greenhouse emissions.
Plus ça change? Yes, in part, and to that extent, the structuralist, political economic framings and tools of mature radical geography are still required. In addition, digital media and hypercommodification have so troubled and obscured the concept of “truth” and “reality” that other complementary approaches are needed. Demystifying language and calling out untruth is more essential than ever with the circulation of such slippery buzzwords as resilient, sustainable, and climate-smart. Radical geography was good at “speaking truth to power,” but that is more difficult in a postmodern era compounded by the politicization, even weaponization, of words such as truth, migrant, and expert.
Care and compassion are also vital. The gift of feminism is that radical geography today can incorporate a sensibility, way of knowing, and “being with” people who were once thought of as “research subjects” that transcends participant-observation or coproduction. In an early issue of Antipode, I published an essay on the use of phenomenology in geography with fellow graduate student, Danny Amaral (Amaral and Wisner Citation1970). Visiting professor Anne Buttimer inspired us. We were groping awkwardly for a way of doing science in an integral way, a manner that took people’s feelings into account and not just what was technified as “indigenous technical knowledge” and, of course, given an acronym, ITK. Oddly, or perhaps not so strangely, fifty years later, I have returned to phenomenology, care, and compassion at the center of my own interpretation of radical geography.
Response by Trevor J. Barnes, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and Eric Sheppard, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
We are enormously grateful for, and gratified by, these responses to Spatial Histories of Radical Geography, deeply honored and moved. We are especially appreciative of James D. Sidaway and Shaun Lin for initiating and coordinating this review forum. In responding we do not speak on behalf of the individual authors or their chapters. Rather, our aim is to address only larger issues that as editors we were responsible for that include the volume’s scope, structure, and substance, as well as its general methodological argument.
Someone said to us that putting together the book must have been like “herding cats.” It wasn’t. Working with the authors was incredibly rewarding (and here we also want to acknowledge the important early galvanizing contributions of Linda Peake). Everyone believed in the project, even though, or maybe because, we each held different versions of it. When we invited authors, we did not specify how they should write, or what their argument should be. The invitation was meant as an open provocation. Authors brought their own reasons for participating, which were often multiple. They included, among others, a desire to record oral histories from early participants, poignantly pressing, given that several died before the book’s publication; to amend existing histories of radical geography by filling in absences and reshading emphases; to correct past political and ethical wrongs especially around gender; to experiment with new methodological arguments and forms of writing; to venerate figures not usually venerated; to recall past events and experiences from our own lives within radical geography; and, following Chris Philo, to express love for radical geography, both the agony and the ecstasy. Everyone wrote a love letter of some kind. The collection thus functioned as a kind of “boundary object,” allowing everyone to contribute with conviction and ardour, no matter how different their motivations, to write with integrity and compassion (Star and Griesemer Citation1989).
Was it possible to include everything? Of course not. Flaubert said, “history is like drinking an ocean, and pissing a cupful” (quoted in Lowenthal Citation2019, 158). Indeed, most of the critical comments in these commentaries address editorial sins of omission rather than commission (we return to these later). How the book turned out reflects, of course, our own positionality as editors: our view about how knowledge production works, our personal and scholarly limitations and biases, the conjunctural context, and our sociogeographical networks. We were also working within word limits (generous, although inevitably never enough), the aims of the Antipode book series editors, and reviewers’ comments.
We never intended the book to be the complete history of radical geography. In our view, knowledge production is always shaped by the spaces and times in which knowledge is crafted. It is local knowledge, partial and situated, not universal; it connects unevenly as it travels through space and time, mutating along the way. Consequently, there can be no such thing as a single unbroken definitive history. Van Meeteren suggests this opens “Pandora’s box,” offering an opportunity to write similar accounts for other episodes in the history of geography. We hope so.
The open box metaphor is also a nod to the work of Latour and the larger literature of science studies on which we also drew in conceiving the book. Latour (Citation1987) famously contested the traditional black-box approach to writing about science; that is, treating the practices of science—“science in the making” (Latour Citation1987, 4)—as opaque. In the black box view, science is described only as inputs, such as Bunsen burners and (too often white, male) humans in white coats, which are turned into outputs, a paper in Nature, the statement of a fundamental natural law, with the intermediate processes of transformation obscured, black boxed. In contrast, Latour’s intent is to unbox and demystify science: prying off its lid to reveal the not-always virtuous, not-always rational, multiagentic, multiform muddied and complex processes and practices that lie below. We conceived this volume as contributing to an un-black-boxing of radical geography. The movement could not be written in the form of inputs like disgruntled graduate students and 1960s born-again radical professors, turning “just like that” into outputs like Antipode and Social Justice and the City. Rather, it has been a drawn-out, messy, impure, sometimes ugly, sometimes inspiring cascading series of dynamic spatiotemporal relations among people, sites, and things in which social power, institutions, gender, and race figured large. With the top of radical geography’s black box jimmied open, that is what is revealed and so tellingly narrated in the substantive chapters of our volume.
The book clarifies why there can be no single definitive history of radical geography—no definitive origin point for the movement, historical or geographical. The best we could do, the only thing we could do, was to assemble a set of stories, each set in a particular place and time and narrating some aspect of radical geography. We saw our task as identifying potential starting points, encouraging authors to collect relevant gray literatures, interview protagonists, and tell this from their particular positionality. Of course, the stories were not random, their authors believing that they had wider significance, with overlaps and linkages among them. They cannot be seamlessly joined, pressed, and ironed into a single smooth narrative fabric: The inevitable wrinkles, loose threads, frayed edges, ripped and missing pieces are formative.
Importantly, from the beginning the book was collectively shaped. The inspirations were an essay commissioned by Lawrence Berg for another book (Peake and Sheppard Citation2014) and a request from trustees of the Antipode Foundation to publish a history of radical geography to mark the half-century anniversary of Antipode. The Foundation funded a 2013 workshop in Vancouver, with AAG annual meeting sessions in 2013 and 2016 bringing together a number of the authors helping to craft (some of the most creative aspects of) the project. Unfortunately, some of the initial voices were lost along the way, but new voices, together with the Antipode book series editors and their animated manuscript reviewers, enriched the final product. Antipode’s 50th birthday, 2019, determined the deadline.
As with the injunction to our contributors, we conceived the collection as a larger provocation: a spur, for others to dispute, to amend, and most important to augment and enlarge. It is an invitation to join the conversation; to supplement the always partial stories of radical geography narrated here with yet more stories, such as those around “the relative invisibility of the oppression of disabled people” (Chouinard), or “the tradition of pragmatism” (Wills), or the full “plurality of radical approaches” including “that of anarchism” (Ferretti), or of “actually existing socialist regimes” (Van Meeteren) and “other influences, such as Third Worldism” (Van Meeteren and Sidaway Citation2020, 41), signaled also in Sidaway and Lin’s introduction here. Our vision for the histories we collected is not that they are the last word, but they become a stimulus for yet other narrations. Let a thousand spatial histories of radical geography bloom.
We bounded the project in two ways: a North American focus limited to the initial decades (up to the early 1980s). The geographical restriction reflects not only our spatial positionality, but the fact that there was already a forthcoming collection edited by Berg and Best about the global history of radical geography (Peake and Sheppard Citation2014 was commissioned as its chapter about Anglophone North America). Sixteen chapters were planned, divided by countries and language groups (five of which are Anglophone). We wanted to complement rather than duplicate this collection. After many delays, this book is expected soon to see the light of day (Berg et al. forthcoming), hopefully filling some of the more-than-Anglophone gaps noted by many of our reviewers. Of course, we are all too aware of the geographical gaps in our own book’s coverage. That is why we wanted also to include in our volume stories of radical geography beyond North America, and hence the second part. In the original invitation to the authors of that part we asked them to examine only how North American scholarship affected radical geography elsewhere. Fortunately, several of the authors ignored our overly narrow request, writing much more expansively (albeit constrained by our tight word restrictions). We are excited to see the re-excavation of non-Anglophone radical geography by Ferretti, Wisner, and others that will add yet further to the accounts provided by our authors in the second part. No doubt this will do as much to disrupt Anglocentrism as the chapters in the first part of our book disrupted the Clark-centrism of the North American history of radical geography.
A consequence of the temporal limitation was a focus on the Marxism that came to dominate that period. As Ferretti and others noted, however, this glossed over other strands of radical geography also practiced during the same time, as well as before, such as anarchism. We acknowledged that in our text (there are some seventeen substantive references to anarchism); indeed, we personally experienced it (anarchism was central to radical geography at Minnesota, where both of us were based). We were also determined that the book provide the detail so appreciated by Philo. We believed that if detail was to be recorded it was now or never, but that detail also was integral to our methodological approach of seeking explanation in context and specific concrete practices (the basis of un-black-boxing; see van Meeteren). That said, as our series editors (Vinay Gidwani and Sharad Chari) reminded us, for many readers the early 1980s would feel long ago and far away from contemporary radical geography. For that reason, we sought to bring the radical geography story up to the present in the concluding chapter, documenting the subsequent diversification of radical and critical geography. We proposed that the conditions of possibility for radical geography’s contemporary multifarious nature derived from the disciplinary impact of its more squarely Marxist phase, a narrowing that enabled diversification (exemplified by Gibson’s intellectual biography described here). We also offered self-critical reflections on the contradictions posed to radical geography by its disciplinary empowerment (our “hardest hitting text” according to Wills).
We perceive differences across the reviewers, and concerns, about what counts as radical geography. These are, in part, language questions. Ferretti rightly reminds us that “radical” does not travel smoothly outside the Anglophone realm, and that radical geography should prioritize multilingual scholarship (we list this as one of radical geography’s quandaries in the conclusion). It is also an issue within English, though, given the 1980s discursive shift from “radical” to “critical” geography. Lest we be misunderstood, this shift does not mark the demise of radical geography, and we certainly do not countenance a Marxist ideological monopoly (acknowledging that others disagree). We used radical/critical geography to denote everything captured by these two adjectives as belonging to radical geography—leaving the adjudication of its outer boundaries to others. Here lies a further provocation: the updating of radical geography’s spatial histories.
Finally, we were particularly struck by how the diverse positionalities of the various reviewers shaped their perspectives: From old radical hands recounting what these earlier days meant, to younger bloods wishing for more. Reading across the reviews, we see new windows on radical geography clattering open. This reinforces our point about the importance of acknowledging, celebrating, and documenting all possible voices. We are delighted to hand off this baton to the next generation!
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