Queen Mary

two sections of the book together. Despite these caveats, however, the author has written an intellectually stimulating work, which critically combines an assessment of ideas with an evaluation of policies at the interface of media, culture and democracy.

Mark Turner's basic premise is simple: 'the city is an active force, an agent that creates certain kinds of behaviour, true to the modern urban sensibility ' (p. 127). His focus is one such 'behaviour': cruising Á/ the glances exchanged between men on New York and London's streets.

The idea that modern urban life actuates particular social practices is well established. The streets' erotics have their literary and academic canon. But Backward glances compels us to rethink how we understand both ways of being in the city and what makes cities sexy. Its distinctiveness is twofold. First, Turner locates the pleasures of 'mutual recognition' in precisely the fragmentation and anonymity of urban culture. Cruising, indeed, 'exploits the ambivalences and uncertainties inherent in the city' (p. 7). It is, as such, characteristic of urban modernity. Ranging from Whitman to Hockney, Turner moves to evoke the erotic 'excitement of the passing moment ' (p. 118). Second: Turner's cruiser disrupts the dominant status of the 'Ur-man of urban modernity' Á/ the ever-watching fla ˆneur (p. 29). If the fla ˆneur is outside the crowd, the cruiser is immersed in it. Reciprocal glances are 'a vital point of interaction, an expression of togetherness rather than of alienation, of connection rather than separation' (p. 59). Turner highlights those everyday fleeting connections when individuals look at those around them. The cruiser suggests alternative modes of urban movement.

Backward glances thus challenges us to think about the erotics of the city, and the relationship between social formation and subject formation more generally. More problematically, it raises questions about how we write the history of sex and the city. Turner's 'backward glance' signifies his engagement with the past. But what's he glancing at? 'I look to the past to help me understand something about cruising, and our cities, and sexuality, and the ways we have of representing all of these, in the present, now ' (p. 9). This only gets us so far: how are 'now' and 'then' related? Cruising, Turner states, 'is not transhistorical' (p. 9). Moreover, he repeatedly defines his as a queer history, not the 'recovery' of hidden 'gay' cruisers (pp. 42 Á/6, 112).

Strangely, however, Turner's analysis effaces these points. Turner works by laying fragments from different times alongside one another Á/ moving between 1880s porn and Jarman's journals in one paragraph (pp. 50Á/1). Sometimes this highlights 253 Reviews in brief explicitly pulled the two sections of the book together. Despite these caveats, however, the author has written an intellectually stimulating work, which critically combines an assessment of ideas with an evaluation of policies at the interface of media, culture and democracy. Mark Turner's basic premise is simple: 'the city is an active force, an agent that creates certain kinds of behaviour, true to the modern urban sensibility' (p. 127). His focus is one such 'behaviour': cruising Á/ the glances exchanged between men on New York and London's streets.

Queen

The idea that modern urban life actuates particular social practices is well established. The streets' erotics have their literary and academic canon. But Backward glances compels us to rethink how we understand both ways of being in the city and what makes cities sexy. Its distinctiveness is twofold. First, Turner locates the pleasures of 'mutual recognition' in precisely the fragmentation and anonymity of urban culture. Cruising, indeed, 'exploits the ambivalences and uncertainties inherent in the city' (p. 7). It is, as such, characteristic of urban modernity. Ranging from Whitman to Hockney, Turner moves to evoke the erotic 'excitement of the passing moment' (p. 118). Second: Turner's cruiser disrupts the dominant status of the 'Ur-man of urban modernity' Á/ the ever-watching fla ˆneur (p. 29). If the fla ˆneur is outside the crowd, the cruiser is immersed in it. Reciprocal glances are 'a vital point of interaction, an expression of togetherness rather than of alienation, of connection rather than separation' (p. 59). Turner highlights those everyday fleeting connections when individuals look at those around them. The cruiser suggests alternative modes of urban movement.

Backward glances thus challenges us to think about the erotics of the city, and the relationship between social formation and subject formation more generally. More problematically, it raises questions about how we write the history of sex and the city. Turner's 'backward glance' signifies his engagement with the past. But what's he glancing at? 'I look to the past to help me understand something about cruising, and our cities, and sexuality, and the ways we have of representing all of these, in the present, now ' (p. 9). This only gets us so far: how are 'now' and 'then' related? Cruising, Turner states, 'is not transhistorical' (p. 9). Moreover, he repeatedly defines his as a queer history, not the 'recovery' of hidden 'gay' cruisers (pp. 42 Á/6, 112). Strangely, however, Turner's analysis effaces these points. Turner works by laying fragments from different times alongside one another Á/ moving between 1880s porn and Jarman's journals in one paragraph (pp. 50Á/1). In the early 1940s, the cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that each historical epoch created its own distinctive 'chronotype', or conception of space. In loose pursuit of this Bakhtinian inspiration, the collection of essays under review sets out to identify and explore the chronotype of the Stalin period of Soviet history, from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. The sort of generalized formula for the understanding and deployment of spatiality that might constitute a chronotype does not ultimately emerge, it must be said; but the essays do succeed quite brilliantly in illustrating the diversity, richness, and overall importance of space and the geographical landscape for the political aesthetics of Stalinist culture. And because culture, in the Nietzschean spirit of interwar European totalitarianism, constituted a carefully managed part of a larger project of political manipulation and control, the essays provide important insight into the political mind of Stalinism as well.

For the most part, they deal with representations of space and landscape in Soviet popular culture, including Socialist-Realist art and literature, songs, advertising, theatre, cinema, magazines and even postage stamps. The cohesiveness of the collection is unsettled by a certain ambivalent tension between the alternative kinds of spatiality under analysis, captured in the juxtaposition of 'space' and 'landscape' in the volume's title and subtitle. Although clearly related, these terms refer in fact to very different things: the abstract space of physics and geometry (the arrangement of figures in paintings, for example, or of buildings in architectural ensembles), as opposed to the real-existing natural and cultural landscapes of the physicalgeographical world. Both alternatives form an integral part of the book's larger subject, to be sure, but the conceptual and material disjuncture between them might well have been more carefully problematized. Overall, the essays gathered in The landscape of Stalinism are well conceived, probing and stimulating, and demonstrate how successfully geographical concerns with the representation 254 Reviews in brief dissonances; more often, it renders cruising ahistorical. The epilogue recognizes how 'cruising the streets of our cities isn't what it used to be' (p. 162). Again, this is disengaged from what comes before: 'change' is equated with cyberspace. Sure, the internet has reconfigured sexual geographies, but what about the changing nature of the city itself? For Turner, the 'modern city' remains almost static over 150 years. But the city is an organic entity that changes over time Á/ London 1885 isn't London 2005. To map those differences would also allow us to trace how the ways we walk the city Á/ the stories we tell about our backward glances Á/ have themselves changed over time. That's my challenge.

University of Liverpool

MATT HOULBROOK

The landscape of Stalinism: the art and ideology of Soviet space. Edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2003. 315 pp. $50.00 (£38.00) cloth. ISBN 0 295 98333 7.

In the early 1940s, the cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that each historical epoch created its own distinctive 'chronotype', or conception of space. In loose pursuit of this Bakhtinian inspiration, the collection of essays under review sets out to identify and explore the chronotype of the Stalin period of Soviet history, from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. The sort of generalized formula for the understanding and deployment of spatiality that might constitute a chronotype does not ultimately emerge, it must be said; but the essays do succeed quite brilliantly in illustrating the diversity, richness, and overall importance of space and the geographical landscape for the political aesthetics of Stalinist culture. And because culture, in the Nietzschean spirit of interwar European totalitarianism, constituted a carefully managed part of a larger project of political manipulation and control, the essays provide important insight into the political mind of Stalinism as well.

For the most part, they deal with representations of space and landscape in Soviet popular culture, including Socialist-Realist art and literature, songs, advertising, theatre, cinema, magazines and even postage stamps. The cohesiveness of the collection is unsettled by a certain ambivalent tension between the alternative kinds of spatiality under analysis, captured in the juxtaposition of 'space' and 'landscape' in the volume's title and subtitle. Although clearly related, these terms refer in fact to very different things: the abstract space of physics and geometry (the arrangement of figures in paintings, for example, or of buildings in architectural ensembles), as opposed to the real-existing natural and cultural landscapes of the physicalgeographical world. Both alternatives form an integral part of the book's larger subject, to be sure, but the conceptual and material disjuncture between them might well have been more carefully problematized. Overall, the essays gathered in The landscape of Stalinism are well conceived, probing and stimulating, and demonstrate how successfully geographical concerns with the representation

  Sometimes this highlights dissonances; more often, it renders cruising ahistorical. The epilogue recognizes how 'cruising the streets of our cities isn't what it used to be' (p. 162). Again, this is disengaged from what comes before: 'change' is equated with cyberspace. Sure, the internet has reconfigured sexual geographies, but what about the changing nature of the city itself? For Turner, the 'modern city' remains almost static over 150 years. But the city is an organic entity that changes over time Á/ London 1885 isn't London 2005. To map those differences would also allow us to trace how the ways we walk the city Á/ the stories we tell about our backward glances Á/ have themselves changed over time. That's my challenge.

	University of Liverpool	MATT HOULBROOK
	The landscape of Stalinism: the art and ideology of Soviet space. Edited by
	Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2003. 315
	pp. $50.00 (£38.00) cloth. ISBN 0 295 98333 7.

Reviews in brief


dissonances; more often, it renders cruising ahistorical. The epilogue recognizes how 'cruising the streets of our cities isn't what it used to be ' (p. 162). Again, this is disengaged from what comes before: 'change' is equated with cyberspace. Sure, the internet has reconfigured sexual geographies, but what about the changing nature of the city itself? For Turner, the 'modern city' remains almost static over 150 years. But the city is an organic entity that changes over time Á/ London 1885 isn't London 2005. To map those differences would also allow us to trace how the ways we walk the city Á/ the stories we tell about our backward glances Á/ have themselves changed over time. That's my challenge.

University of Liverpool

MATT HOULBROOK

The landscape of Stalinism: the art and ideology of Soviet space. Edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2003. 315 pp. $50.00 (£38.00) cloth. ISBN 0 295 98333 7.

In the early 1940s, the cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that each historical epoch created its own distinctive 'chronotype', or conception of space. In loose pursuit of this Bakhtinian inspiration, the collection of essays under review sets out to identify and explore the chronotype of the Stalin period of Soviet history, from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. The sort of generalized formula for the understanding and deployment of spatiality that might constitute a chronotype does not ultimately emerge, it must be said; but the essays do succeed quite brilliantly in illustrating the diversity, richness, and overall importance of space and the geographical landscape for the political aesthetics of Stalinist culture. And because culture, in the Nietzschean spirit of interwar European totalitarianism, constituted a carefully managed part of a larger project of political manipulation and control, the essays provide important insight into the political mind of Stalinism as well.

For the most part, they deal with representations of space and landscape in Soviet popular culture, including Socialist-Realist art and literature, songs, advertising, theatre, cinema, magazines and even postage stamps. The cohesiveness of the collection is unsettled by a certain ambivalent tension between the alternative kinds of spatiality under analysis, captured in the juxtaposition of 'space' and 'landscape' in the volume's title and subtitle. Although clearly related, these terms refer in fact to very different things: the abstract space of physics and geometry (the arrangement of figures in paintings, for example, or of buildings in architectural ensembles), as opposed to the real-existing natural and cultural landscapes of the physicalgeographical world. Both alternatives form an integral part of the book's larger subject, to be sure, but the conceptual and material disjuncture between them might well have been more carefully problematized. Overall, the essays gathered in The landscape of Stalinism are well conceived, probing and stimulating, and demonstrate how successfully geographical concerns with the representation 254 Reviews in brief dissonances; more often, it renders cruising ahistorical. The epilogue recognizes how 'cruising the streets of our cities isn't what it used to be' (p. 162). Again, this is disengaged from what comes before: 'change' is equated with cyberspace. Sure, the internet has reconfigured sexual geographies, but what about the changing nature of the city itself? For Turner, the 'modern city' remains almost static over 150 years. But the city is an organic entity that changes over time Á/ London 1885 isn't London 2005. To map those differences would also allow us to trace how the ways we walk the city Á/ the stories we tell about our backward glances Á/ have themselves changed over time. That's my challenge.

University of Liverpool

MATT HOULBROOK

The landscape of Stalinism: the art and ideology of Soviet space. Edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2003. 315 pp. $50.00 (£38.00) cloth. ISBN 0 295 98333 7.

In the early 1940s, the cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that each historical epoch created its own distinctive 'chronotype', or conception of space. In loose pursuit of this Bakhtinian inspiration, the collection of essays under review sets out to identify and explore the chronotype of the Stalin period of Soviet history, from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. The sort of generalized formula for the understanding and deployment of spatiality that might constitute a chronotype does not ultimately emerge, it must be said; but the essays do succeed quite brilliantly in illustrating the diversity, richness, and overall importance of space and the geographical landscape for the political aesthetics of Stalinist culture. And because culture, in the Nietzschean spirit of interwar European totalitarianism, constituted a carefully managed part of a larger project of political manipulation and control, the essays provide important insight into the political mind of Stalinism as well.

For the most part, they deal with representations of space and landscape in Soviet popular culture, including Socialist-Realist art and literature, songs, advertising, theatre, cinema, magazines and even postage stamps. The cohesiveness of the collection is unsettled by a certain ambivalent tension between the alternative kinds of spatiality under analysis, captured in the juxtaposition of 'space' and 'landscape' in the volume's title and subtitle. Although clearly related, these terms refer in fact to very different things: the abstract space of physics and geometry (the arrangement of figures in paintings, for example, or of buildings in architectural ensembles), as opposed to the real-existing natural and cultural landscapes of the physicalgeographical world. Both alternatives form an integral part of the book's larger subject, to be sure, but the conceptual and material disjuncture between them might well have been more carefully problematized. Overall, the essays gathered in The landscape of Stalinism are well conceived, probing and stimulating, and demonstrate how successfully geographical concerns with the representation and social signification of space and landscape have been taken over by other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

University College London MARK BASSIN

Art of the garden: the garden in British art, 1800 to the present day. Edited by Nicholas Alfrey, Stephen Daniels and Martin Postle. London: Tate. 2004. 256pp. £40.00 cloth; £29.99 paper. ISBN 1 85437 544 X cloth; 1 85437 502 4 paper.

The key to this exhibition (Tate Britain 3 June Á/30 August 2004, followed by Belfast and Manchester) and its catalogue, is in the title: it's about art, as well as about gardens. This at once presents a tension for both viewer and reader, because art and gardens are practices that require different modes of engagement and interpretation, different 'ways of seeing'. The editors observe that gardening is currently the most popular leisure activity in the UK, and suggest that England is a 'quintessential' nation of gardeners. This claim for gardening greatness is often made for England, and the editors/curators work hard to substantiate it, while recognizing that gardening cultures extend across the British Isles, particularly to Scotland. Largely, however, they work with a very particular variety of Englishness. Their achievement is to successfully disturb the idea of green pleasantness that the English garden is popularly supposed to convey.

For example, although parts of the exhibition speak to notions of innocence, purity and the pastoral, many of the pictures subtly upset such notions. One such upset is provided by Peter Rabbit. In a tiny watercolour by Beatrix Potter a pair of ears point out of a watering can, invoking memories of childhood, and the right of animals to live in gardens too, along with plants and other non-human forms. This was the cleverness of the show, to demonstrate the ambiguity of garden spaces in witty and sharply observed ways, but I fear that the curators may have been too knowing for their visitors. Art of the garden is pleasing Á/ or perhaps 'patriotic and polite', as Humphrey Repton once described the English garden landscape Á/ but notwithstanding such a popular theme, it was an intellectual show.

In their introduction the editors anticipate the tension produced by their title. They suggest that they wanted to present the artworks as 'imaginative constructs in their own right' Á/ a justifiable aim, given the English predilection for gardening, and arguably a function of public display. Yet because these were pictures of gardens, themselves imaginative constructs, there was a paradox at the heart of the exhibition, a problem of representation. In the catalogue this is less troubling, but the show was full of double representations and extraordinary ambiguities, such as Helen Allingham's watercolour of Gertrude Jekyll's garden, or Anya Gallacio's Red on green . The strength of the catalogue is that it addresses those ambiguities in ways that exhibition captions alone could not (in spite of some perhaps over-explicit captions). For this reason, readers of the catalogue may be better satisfied. The key to this exhibition (Tate Britain 3 June Á/30 August 2004, followed by Belfast and Manchester) and its catalogue, is in the title: it's about art, as well as about gardens. This at once presents a tension for both viewer and reader, because art and gardens are practices that require different modes of engagement and interpretation, different 'ways of seeing'. The editors observe that gardening is currently the most popular leisure activity in the UK, and suggest that England is a 'quintessential' nation of gardeners. This claim for gardening greatness is often made for England, and the editors/curators work hard to substantiate it, while recognizing that gardening cultures extend across the British Isles, particularly to Scotland. Largely, however, they work with a very particular variety of Englishness. Their achievement is to successfully disturb the idea of green pleasantness that the English garden is popularly supposed to convey.

For example, although parts of the exhibition speak to notions of innocence, purity and the pastoral, many of the pictures subtly upset such notions. One such upset is provided by Peter Rabbit. In a tiny watercolour by Beatrix Potter a pair of ears point out of a watering can, invoking memories of childhood, and the right of animals to live in gardens too, along with plants and other non-human forms. This was the cleverness of the show, to demonstrate the ambiguity of garden spaces in witty and sharply observed ways, but I fear that the curators may have been too knowing for their visitors. Art of the garden is pleasing Á/ or perhaps 'patriotic and polite', as Humphrey Repton once described the English garden landscape Á/ but notwithstanding such a popular theme, it was an intellectual show.

In their introduction the editors anticipate the tension produced by their title. They suggest that they wanted to present the artworks as 'imaginative constructs in their own right' Á/ a justifiable aim, given the English predilection for gardening, and arguably a function of public display. Yet because these were pictures of gardens, themselves imaginative constructs, there was a paradox at the heart of the exhibition, a problem of representation. In the catalogue this is less troubling, but the show was full of double representations and extraordinary ambiguities, such as Helen Allingham's watercolour of Gertrude Jekyll's garden, or Anya Gallacio's Red on green . The strength of the catalogue is that it addresses those ambiguities in ways that exhibition captions alone could not (in spite of some perhaps over-explicit captions). For this reason, readers of the catalogue may be better satisfied.

Reviews in brief


Geraldine Pratt

Edinburgh

Working feminism puts feminist theory to work on the concrete struggle of Filipino domestic workers caught up in a global chain of feminized and racialized exploitation. Geraldine Pratt insists that feminism be understood in the historical context of colonialism, as well as highly uneven global economic development. A 'cosmopolitan feminism' is advocated which engages 'real situations' and worlds beyond 'the west' (p. 13). The author situates Filipino migration to Canada in a process of 'collaborative empire'. This sees national debt propel Filipino workers overseas, chasing the prospect of a better future, at the same time as the receiving country offers immigration as a means of plugging persistent labour shortages (primarily in health care), as well as presenting middle-class families with affordable private child care as partial compensation for a diminishing welfare state.

Working feminism provides rich detail and soul to the bald story told by labour market statistics of migrant women ghettoized in jobs for which they are overqualified. The author draws on in-depth interviews with government officials, nanny agents, family employers and migrant domestic workers to illustrate how Filipinas are produced as long-term, low-paid caregivers through powerful local cultures of racialized power. State immigration policy is not alone responsible for perpetuating unequal tiers of citizenship. Family employers, for example, absorb from the nanny agencies the distinction between 'passive and loyal' Filipino 'housekeepers' as compared to 'educated' European 'nannies' (who may command $150 more per month and assume superior rights for the same job). This way the Filipina domestic is depicted as someone 'who is loving and hard-working but will let your children pee in the park ' (p. 53).

This book powerfully reinforces evidence of a global chain of exploitation. This global care chain binds middle-class women's participation in employment to the subjugation of migrant female labour, (re)producing middle class women 'in relation to their female counterpart, the racialized servant ' (p. 32). In this respect, the author candidly admits that she turned to look at the case study of domestic workers in Vancouver precisely because of the discomfort it created for her Á/ as a middle-class white woman with a young child Á/ where she recognized that her gains in gender equity in the labour market (such as they are) rest on the availability of low-waged women of colour and unpaid grandmothers.

Far from shunning the provocative question of why some academic researchers may choose never to leave the safe confines of the university library, Geraldine Pratt uses the dialogue between feminist theory and practice to reflect on the problems of political engagement as a critical geographer. She is disarmingly honest about the 'messiness of social engagement'. The book's energy and passion owes much to her collaboration with an activist group, the Philippine Women's Centre, yet this engagement is not without contradiction and compromise. One of the most important issues this book raises, therefore, is the question how the academy can contribute more meaningfully to grass-roots transformation. One way is to disseminate research more 256

Reviews in brief

Working feminism. By Geraldine Pratt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2004. 218 pp. £14.99 paper. ISBN 0 7486 1570 9.

Working feminism puts feminist theory to work on the concrete struggle of Filipino domestic workers caught up in a global chain of feminized and racialized exploitation. Geraldine Pratt insists that feminism be understood in the historical context of colonialism, as well as highly uneven global economic development. A 'cosmopolitan feminism' is advocated which engages 'real situations' and worlds beyond 'the west' (p. 13). The author situates Filipino migration to Canada in a process of 'collaborative empire'. This sees national debt propel Filipino workers overseas, chasing the prospect of a better future, at the same time as the receiving country offers immigration as a means of plugging persistent labour shortages (primarily in health care), as well as presenting middle-class families with affordable private child care as partial compensation for a diminishing welfare state.

Working feminism provides rich detail and soul to the bald story told by labour market statistics of migrant women ghettoized in jobs for which they are overqualified. The author draws on in-depth interviews with government officials, nanny agents, family employers and migrant domestic workers to illustrate how Filipinas are produced as long-term, low-paid caregivers through powerful local cultures of racialized power. State immigration policy is not alone responsible for perpetuating unequal tiers of citizenship. Family employers, for example, absorb from the nanny agencies the distinction between 'passive and loyal' Filipino 'housekeepers' as compared to 'educated' European 'nannies' (who may command $150 more per month and assume superior rights for the same job). This way the Filipina domestic is depicted as someone 'who is loving and hard-working but will let your children pee in the park' (p. 53).

This book powerfully reinforces evidence of a global chain of exploitation. This global care chain binds middle-class women's participation in employment to the subjugation of migrant female labour, (re)producing middle class women 'in relation to their female counterpart, the racialized servant' (p. 32). In this respect, the author candidly admits that she turned to look at the case study of domestic workers in Vancouver precisely because of the discomfort it created for her Á/ as a middle-class white woman with a young child Á/ where she recognized that her gains in gender equity in the labour market (such as they are) rest on the availability of low-waged women of colour and unpaid grandmothers.

Far from shunning the provocative question of why some academic researchers may choose never to leave the safe confines of the university library, Geraldine Pratt uses the dialogue between feminist theory and practice to reflect on the problems of political engagement as a critical geographer. She is disarmingly honest about the 'messiness of social engagement'. The book's energy and passion owes much to her collaboration with an activist group, the Philippine Women's Centre, yet this engagement is not without contradiction and compromise. One of the most important issues this book raises, therefore, is the question how the academy can contribute more meaningfully to grass-roots transformation. One way is to disseminate research more widely, beyond the narrowly elitist publications deemed suitable output for the purpose of justifying funding, to give something back to the communities under scrutiny. In this I fervently endorse the author's plea for applied research to be valued more highly in terms of academic career development.

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

HELEN JARVIS 257

Reviews in brief widely, beyond the narrowly elitist publications deemed suitable output for the purpose of justifying funding, to give something back to the communities under scrutiny. In this I fervently endorse the author's plea for applied research to be valued more highly in terms of academic career development.

University of Newcastle upon Tyne HELEN JARVIS

Reviews in brief


For geographers, rhythm is one of the most seductive and elusive of concepts. And, as Tom Mels's expansive introductory essay to this collection demonstrates, it is possible to trace the 'lineage of a geography of rhythms' through various theoretical and empirical trajectories. The content and tone of this volume is, however, dominated by one particular trajectory -humanistic geography. As such, in addition to being a welcome contribution to wider geographical engagements with temporality, for this reader the book served as useful reminder of intellectual traditions that have sometimes been under-acknowledged within culturally inflected human geography, and more particularly in work about rhythm. A more specific touchstone for the contributions to this volume is Anne Buttimer's writing in the late 1970s about the rhythms of time-space. As Mels suggests, while Buttimer's interest in rhythm emerges from a particular concern with the phenomenological and existential elements of everyday life, this interest resonates in different ways with aspects of time-geography, Marxist geography, and with the 'rhythmanalysis' of Bachelard and Lefebvre.

Buttimer's humanistic engagement with the rhythms of place is read by Mels as an enlivening gesture -an effort to animate space in the context of an increasingly 'reified world of positivist science and technocracy' (p. 8). Despite the diversity of their subjects, each of the chapters in this book can be read as an attempt to foreground the lived temporality of space and to disrupt the 'danse macabre of abstract time-space' (p. 34). Some chapters have an immediately familiar humanistic tone, most notably those by Tuan, Ley and Bunkse, each of which engages with the rhythms of place, home and displacement. Unsurprisingly, there are also discussions focusing on the possibilities and problems of attuning with a degree of authenticity to the multiple rhythms of place and landscape (Bunkse, Johnson, O'Reilly, Relph, Sack). Other authors work to draw out the literal and metaphoric choreography of the connections and contradictions between the lived rhythms of place and wider social, political and economic processes (Aquist, Clark, Godlewska, Olwig, Relph, Seamon). And at times this choreography is affectively amplified by the rhythms of an enactive style of writing (Olsson).

Admittedly, the diversity of the collection means that the connections between some contributions and the central thematic of rhythm is not always entirely clear, although presumably this reflects the editor's desire to engage the multiple rhythms of the discipline and, indeed, to avoid disciplining the meaning of rhythm itself. More importantly, for this reader -and perhaps others -the humanistic tone of the book prompted a series of important questions. Does abstraction always work against the apprehensions of lived, animate space? Is rhythm always affirmatively animating? Are such animations distinctively human? And what kinds of styles of work might apprehend more (and less) than human rhythms? While the contribu- tions here hint at possible and interesting answers, they are -perhaps inevitably - circumscribed by the tradition from which the collection emerges.

School of Geography, University of Southampton DEREK MCCORMACK

The globalization of sexuality. By Jon Binnie. London: Sage. 2004. 167 pp. £60 cloth; £19.99 paper. ISBN 0 7619 5935 1 cloth; 0 7619 5936 X paper.

In T7e globalization of sexuality, Jon Binnie cogently demonstrates how the cultural interpenetrates with the economic in processes of 'queer globalization', countering both the economic determinism of much globalization research (where the globalization of culture is posited as a consequence of transnational economic flows) and the largely anti-materialist bias of queer theory and gay/lesbian studies (which often marginalize questions of class and economics). He also takes issue with researchers of sexuality, particularly Altman, who overemphasize a political economic basis to queer globalization, and argue that so-called 'global gay' culture is a consumption-based byproduct of the US domination of international economic linkages. Instead, Binnie explores the mutual relationship between (homo)sexual desire and political economy manifested on interconnected local, national and global scales.

Several key themes emerge. Prominent among them is a consistent critique of the class bias implicit in constructions of gay/lesbian/queer (GLQ) identities: the cost of participating in the consumer spaces of commercial 'gay villages', or in the events which symbolize 'global gay' (e.g. the Gay Games, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras), means that GLQ identity is a middle-to-upper-class identity. This distances working-class queers from a claim to GLQ identity, and has further implications in the context of globalization. Binnie demonstrates that global citizenship, and the associated ability to advance GLQ rights internationally, is reserved for the economically active and powerful. The development of GLQ rights in an international context consequently reflects middle-to-upper-class values, further marginalizing working-class queers. This raises the related issues of authenticity and inclusion/exclusion: who has the right to belong to, and participate in, the 'queer community'? In a globalized world, authenticity seems to be based on the ability to pay and to adhere to middle-to-upper-class values of moral respectability. Binnie also critiques the ethnocentrism of GLQ studies -not only the US bias in the production of knowledge, but also the emergence of a 'new racism' where nation-states' levels of development are measured by their differing attitude towards homosexuality, permitting some nations to claim a moral high ground in an international context based on the extension of rights to queers. Binnie suggests that in this context the internationalization of GLQ activism may be part of a neocolonial 'Western' civilizing mission. A related theme is the invisibility of national identity in questions of queer globalization. Binnie is critical of those who claim that national cultural differences are erased by transnational connectivity and 'global gay' consumer culture. Although gay bars may look similar in global cities, cultural differences mean that queers use these spaces in different ways. He is thus sensitive


colour plates which show exactly how Ernst exploited his fortuitous exposure to the exotic.

ROGER CARDINAL

Appalachian folkways. By John B. Rehder. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. 353 pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN 0 8018 7879 9.

This work clearly demonstrates the author's long-time personal involvement and fascination with the southern Appalachian region. Readers looking for an encyclopedic, detailed and well-researched account of the cultural traits that make this place unique, sprinkled with Rehder's anecdotes and colourful language, will benefit greatly. For example, he uses the colloquial 'likker' (p. 197) when discussing moonshine in order to showcase and document the folk language, one of many such decisions of his that contribute to the preservation of a time and place.

The work is regional-descriptive in nature, unique in today's cultural geography writing, which generally relies more on systematic analysis. The advantage to this method is that it frees the author to guide the reader through Appalachia, giving an informative, trustworthy and entertaining view of his home. If anyone is in the position properly to understand the stereotypes of this cultural region, Rehder shows, through personal history and careful documentation, that he is the one, and anyone interested specifically in the southern Appalachian region will find the book extremely valuable.

There are two related disadvantages to this framework. One is that it hints at many key geographical ideas, but does little to treat them at a deeper level. Themes such as scale, diaspora and boundaries are implied at various points, but not discussed in the context of a wider geographical literature. Such is not the aim of the book, however, and readers should not expect to find these types of engagement. The second disadvantage is that readers are left to correlate Rehder's precise inventory of folkways such as architecture, food, music, language and belief systems for themselves. These are held together because they supposedly share a particular time and place, yet some of the criteria of significance for selecting what is an 'Appalachian folkway' are not consistent, leaving the reader to wonder how they are related. Given this, the overriding criterion of significance seems to be time. After a certain point in the twentieth century and before a certain point in the nineteenth century, the ways of life in Appalachia are generally not considered 'folk' in this book. This temporal framing seems to be paralleled by European migrations as the beginning point and modern technology as the endpoint, but this is not made explicit in the text. The infrequency of connection, however, does not detract from Rehder's meticulous account of what is often recognized as southern Appalachian culture.

Department of Geography

NICHoLAs BAUCH University of Wisconsin-Madison


come   L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire

Geography and the art of life. By Edmunds Valdemars Bunkse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. xvii + 122 pp. $36.95 cloth. ISBN 0 8018 7722-9.

It should come as no surprise that autobiography has become an increasingly common genre in academic geography. Why should geography be immune from the cultural forces that celebrate the self in all areas of contemporary life? Also, current methodological orientations in the discipline give added legitimacy to such work.

The best examples include those providing personal insights into the creation and formation of different schools of thought or the intersections of self, place and landscape. At the other extreme are attempts to mask revenge as criticism and indulgence as insight. The work under review thankfully fits within the first group. Edmunds Bunkse has written a graceful and engaging story of his search for both hearth and cosmos, or, in his terms, his experience of both home and road. He describes this work as a geography of heart and soul that gives witness to his childhood experiences during the Second World War and explores the artistic side of geographical sensibilities. The result is a thematic narrative of place, space and self that is both erudite and accessible.

The narrative begins with dramatic moments of impending peril during the later stages of the Second World War, and provides a moving account of his family's experiences in the chaotic wartime conditions of his native Latvia. Descriptions of his family's flight from their home, refugee camps, tense encounters with advancing and retreating Soviet and German armies and a pervasive sense of physical threat are framed by a child's view, an undifferentiated mix of innocence, fear, bewilderment and curiosity. Bunkse's retelling of these events includes vivid geographical settings, suffused with an adult's understanding of landscape and nature. The author then takes the reader through equally geographical descriptions of his experiences as a refugee and his struggles to find the security of home in the foreign landscapes of North America.

His later return as an adult to Soviet-controlled Latvia illuminates the contradictions inherent in the experience of exile, that is, a longing for 'home' confounded by a confusion about its location and a complex identity as a 'spatially fractured being'. A quest for re-creating the remembered harmony of landscapes that exhibit both the closed secure places of his early childhood and the open expanses of the Latvian countryside leads both to a wanderlust and to an urge to remake places. The thread that connects the various parts of the narrative is the search for 'protected intimacy within immensity', or what could be viewed as a desire for the experience of secure enclosure amid open spaces.

The final chapter brings together the themes of travel, a brief mention of an early interest in architecture and the desire for creating places of 'protected intimacy'. Bunkse describes here the building of an ideal house, one based in the abstract poetics of Gaston Bachelard. This curious project of materializing Bachelard blends the exile's search for home, the architect's interest in the enclosure of space and the humanist geographer's concern with place-making. It is the most conceptual part of the book, but, curiously, also the most personally revealing section of an otherwise somewhat distanced memoir.

The book is a pleasure to read, modest in expression and large in its scope. It reinforces the association of humanism with the search for universals in human experience, but the nuances of the narrative belie the cliche about geographical humanism as an uncomplicated nostalgia.

Department of Geography J. NiCHoLAs ENTRIKIN University of California, Los Angeles The past is not dead: facts, fictions, and enduring racial stereotypes. By Allan Pred. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. 2004. 280 pp. £49.50 cloth; £16.50 paper. ISBN 0 8166 4405 5 cloth; 0 8166 4406 3 paper. 7Te past is not dead continues Allan Pred's excoriating critique of Swedish racism, begun in his previous work, Even in Sweden (2000). His new book focuses on two interlocking montages: a study of an African-Caribbean slave, Badin, who was brought to the Swedish court from St Croix in 1758 and who died in Stockholm in 1822; and a (shorter) study of present-day racial stereotyping, illustrated by the public exhibition of Hartkopf's Wax Cabinet, originally displayed in Stockholm in the 1890s, at the National Historical Museum in December 1999. Pred uses the techniques of montage and juxtaposition throughout the book, with comments from contemporary refugees and immigrants set alongside fragments from Badin's nineteenth-century recollections and other historical extracts. The author has made great demands of his publisher through the use of different typefaces and font sizes, indented passages and italics -and they have responded with aplomb. This is a scholarly work, with over 60 pages of notes, infused with a quiet rage as Pred relentlessly demonstrates the persistence of earlier styles of racist thinking in the present day. While Pred has scoured the archives to establish as much as can reasonably be deduced about his subject's biography, Badin remains a somewhat ghostly figure (also known as Adolph Ludvig Gustaf Albrecht Couschi, his birth date never accurately established). Badin featured in a play by Strindberg and in a number of popular novels. His portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Stockholm. He was a contemporary of Linnaeus and participated in contemporary debates about racial character and climatic determinism. But, with so little hard evidence to hand, much of the book relies on historical reconstruction and conjecture, signalled by the repeated use of interrogatives ('Was it not more than likely that ... ?', 'Is it not very possible ... ?'). Yet it is precisely such ambiguity that is central to Badin's place in the racist imaginary, where the combination of desire and dread, fear and fascination, play off these 'fictionalised facts and factualised fictions', reinforcing the power of collective memory and selective amnesia. The book closes with a discussion of the lack of public outcry over the 1999 exhibition which included the horrifying display of the skin of a black African 'native' and an encased 'Negro penis', evoking memories of the 'Hottentot


scholars ofJapan concerned with the politics of identity in the premodern and modern periods.

Department of History ERIC C. RATH University ofKansas For space. By Doreen Massey. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2005. 232 pp. £60.00 cloth; £18.99 paper. ISBN 1 4129-0361 0 cloth; 1 4129 0362 9 paper.

For space is the seemingly inevitable outcome of Massey's vocation, her passion for encouraging many disciplines and key thinkers to think more seriously about 'space'. Massey describes 'space' as the sphere of possibility, produced and disrupted through multiple, sometimes overlapping stories, heterogeneous historical and geographical trajectories that are embodied and become relational to each other, often spanning local-global connections. Being careful not to reduce her complex argument to spatial fetishism, she systematically demonstrates that we are therefore 'responsible' to (implicated in the production of) the practised relations that give meaning to space.

Whilst it is impossible in this short review to go into any details of what 'space' really means for Massey, I will focus instead upon how she relates her work to the particular political tradition from the Left that she has influenced over the years, specifically that of radical democracy. Massey draws attention to the growing plurality and hetero- geneity of political alliances which disrupt grand narratives that close down our understanding of, and the possibilities for, space -those narratives which perpetuate the inevitability of capitalism, the inevitability of Western ideas of development, progress, modernity and so on; narratives which downplay the fact that space is heterogeneous, composed of a plurality of trajectories and practiced relations.

For space will no doubt stimulate important debates for this political tradition and beyond, particularly the latter few chapters, concerning how we are 'responsible' to the practised relations that produce and disrupt space. As a start, I raise the following questions. Given that the Left has reoriented away from specific visions of how places should be, toward an emphasis upon the ongoing (re)formation of a plurality of different political alliances, can (should) anyone decide what 'responsibility' means and how they respond? Or are publicly accountable institutions necessary to mediate, in some shape or form, the response? For the issue of responsibility also raises important questions for those growing number of varied political alliances (anti-capitalist activists, peace demonstrators, the European Social Forum, for example) that are 'responsible' to the people which they claim to speak for in different parts of the world.

Stimulated to think about the issue of responsibility more generally, I thought about how we should look upon the rise in influence of Deleuze across academic disciplines. For Deleuze certainly privileged escaping, and fleeing the social, over the formation of wider common spaces of social engagement that are necessary to develop what societies, operating beyond a certain scale, can, and cannot, allow 'responsibility' to mean. Given her new emphasis upon responsibility, whilst Massey engages with Deleuze in many ways, I therefore hope to hear more from' her about Deleuze's normative aspiration in the future.

In highlighting the issue of 'responsibility' for spatial relations more generally, For space provides an extremely useful platform from which to stimulate this and many other debates, shaping new understandings of the space of democracy for the Left. Real cities focuses upon the phantasmagorias of the city -the dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts that flit through urban experience -and the book's title is unironic in its insistence upon the centrality of the emotional and imaginary dimensions of city life, every bit as 'real' as material, economic and political effects. Featuring diverse examples, including the dreamy desires produced by advertising, voodoo practices, horror films and terrorist attacks, Steve Pile convincingly conjures up the spectral cast of the city. Drawing on the pertinent if predictable theoretical insights of Benjamin, Simmel and Freud, Pile shows how these urban phantasms are, like dreams, elusive, unexpected and only partially recognizable, and often concealed by seemingly more evident encodings. For instance, the desires provoked by advertisements hide other longings. In urban margins, thresholds in which normally discrete things mingle, temporalities, spaces, desires and fears are mixed up as in dreams. These mundane settings are not sites in which cold, evident meaning is apparent but where whispered, surreptitious messages must be decoded or affectively sensed. Interestingly, Pile also draws upon ideas about networks to look at the spaces of connection in which hauntings, magic and dreams circulate and intermingle. These networks of affect, meaning and power produce fragmentary inter-spectralities and desires that connect cities and conjure up larger spatial entities and histories. And as is the case with voodoo in New Orleans, these local phantasmagoria are apt to be produced out of such global connections. Cities thus possess a distinctive phantasmagoric mix of particular hauntings, atmospheres and sensations.

There are shortcomings. One longs for a discussion of cities other than London and New York -about popular spiritualism in Stoke-on-Trent, or creepy provincial suburbs, for instance. In addition, the ghost may well be a figure of grief, but I would like to hear about some friendlier phantoms that haunt us with utopian, sensual or convivial impressions. The great unspoken subject in the book appears to be religion, to which many of the themes connect. Moreover, chapters are somewhat uneven in quality, although this is an inevitable consequence of a broad overview such as this. More importantly, Pile shows that phantasms can enter the politics of the city, critique policies that forget the past too quickly, interrogate manufactured desires and disrupt

  upon Tyne Real cities. By Steve Pile. London: Sage. 2005. 216pp. £70.00 cloth; £21.99 paper. ISBN 0 7619 7041 X cloth; 07619 7042 8 paper.


Deleuze in many ways, I therefore hope to hear more from' her about Deleuze's normative aspiration in the future.

In highlighting the issue of 'responsibility' for spatial relations more generally, For space provides an extremely useful platform from which to stimulate this and many other debates, shaping new understandings of the space of democracy for the Left. Real cities focuses upon the phantasmagorias of the city -the dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts that flit through urban experience -and the book's title is unironic in its insistence upon the centrality of the emotional and imaginary dimensions of city life, every bit as 'real' as material, economic and political effects. Featuring diverse examples, including the dreamy desires produced by advertising, voodoo practices, horror films and terrorist attacks, Steve Pile convincingly conjures up the spectral cast of the city. Drawing on the pertinent if predictable theoretical insights of Benjamin, Simmel and Freud, Pile shows how these urban phantasms are, like dreams, elusive, unexpected and only partially recognizable, and often concealed by seemingly more evident encodings. For instance, the desires provoked by advertisements hide other longings. In urban margins, thresholds in which normally discrete things mingle, temporalities, spaces, desires and fears are mixed up as in dreams. These mundane settings are not sites in which cold, evident meaning is apparent but where whispered, surreptitious messages must be decoded or affectively sensed. Interestingly, Pile also draws upon ideas about networks to look at the spaces of connection in which hauntings, magic and dreams circulate and intermingle. These networks of affect, meaning and power produce fragmentary inter-spectralities and desires that connect cities and conjure up larger spatial entities and histories. And as is the case with voodoo in New Orleans, these local phantasmagoria are apt to be produced out of such global connections. Cities thus possess a distinctive phantasmagoric mix of particular hauntings, atmospheres and sensations.

There are shortcomings. One longs for a discussion of cities other than London and New York -about popular spiritualism in Stoke-on-Trent, or creepy provincial suburbs, for instance. In addition, the ghost may well be a figure of grief, but I would like to hear about some friendlier phantoms that haunt us with utopian, sensual or convivial impressions. The great unspoken subject in the book appears to be religion, to which many of the themes connect. Moreover, chapters are somewhat uneven in quality, although this is an inevitable consequence of a broad overview such as this. More importantly, Pile shows that phantasms can enter the politics of the city, critique policies that forget the past too quickly, interrogate manufactured desires and disrupt normative space and time. Real cities is a major addition to theorizing emotional and imaginary urban geographies, always lucid and accessible.

Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences TIM EDENSOR Manchester Metropolitan University

On the border: society and culture between the United States and Mexico. Edited by Andrew Grant Wood. Lanham, MD: SR Books, Rowman & Littlefield. 2004. 320 pp. $24.95, paper. ISBN 0842051732.

The border between Mexico and the United States is fast becoming one of the most dynamic cultural regions in North America. As this region expands and evolves, popular perceptions are continuously challenged by new insights into the historical and social development of what has become known as the border to most Americans. Without question, it is popular perceptions of border culture that are investigated and challenged by the contributors of On the border. Whereas many compilations in border studies seek to produce a more generalized vision of this region, Andrew Wood and his 13 fellow contributors attempt a self-proclaimed 'eclectic'-and at times eccentric -view of the Frontiera social mosaic.

Unfortunately, the book's eclectic nature might be seen by some as a weakness of this compilation. Because of the diversity of chapters, a confusing stylistic contrast emerges between pieces that range from traditional scholarly essays to works comprising casual field observations. A variance in methodologies and a surplus of insider terminology will distract some readers who might fail to interpret the connections between, say, Maria Arbelaez's musings on low-budget, Fronterizo-aimed films and Dan Arreola's Nogales postcard collection. That being said, the above contributions are perhaps two of the most innovative and insightful, and will, if carefully presented, most likely spur dialogue among graduate students wherever assigned.

The above statement, of course, introduces a necessary caveat. Whoever requires this book for an undergraduate course in regional studies will no doubt incur a wave of scholastic disengagement. On the border is a book best suited for graduate seminars- an environment that will facilitate instructors seeking to tie diverse vignettes to a larger framework. It is in this context that students will be positively engaged, and forced to question their own individual constructions of the region. For example, the tenuous history of Mexican Catholicism has long been deconstructed, but Paul Vanderwood's field notes on Juan Soldado encourage a new perspective on the cultural significance of this type of religious veneration. Likewise, Victor Macias-Gonzalez' examination of homosexuality in Porfirian Mexico is an engaging essay with new applications for queer theory to the region-an often misinterpreted social factor in studies of the machismo north.

Despite the inclusion of one or two distracting pieces, On the border is an insightful contribution to border studies. In drawing from an interdisciplinary mosaic of academic perspectives and alternative methodologies, Andrew Wood has compiled a volume that

  School ofArchitecture, Planning and Landscape JONATHAN PUGH University of Newcastle upon Tyne Real cities. By Steve Pile. London: Sage. 2005. 216pp. £70.00 cloth; £21.99 paper. ISBN 0 7619 7041 X cloth; 07619 7042 8 paper.


Keywords: negotiating architecture, urbanism, and colonialism

begs a fresh look at the development of the social and political relationship between the US and Mexico. Ultimately, the book succeeds in that it encourages even those with a strong background in border studies to reconsider their own perceptions of the region.

Department of Geography

JOSHUA LONG University of Kansas Indigenous modernities: negotiating architecture, urbanism, and colonialism.

ByJyoti Hosagrahar. New York: Routledge. 2005. 224 pp. £75 cloth, £24.99 paper. ISBN 0415323754 cloth; 0415323762 paper. Jyoti Hosagrahar frames this examination of nineteenth-to twentieth-century Delhi with the concept of colonial modernity. Her interest is in the intersection between modernization, the reordering of space, and modernism, the experience of that space. However, she openly admits that the focus of this work is architecture and the built environment, with the emphasis of the six excellent chapters laid on the creation of space, rather than on its negotiation. Hosagrahar does, however, at times pick out those occasions on which the occupation of space has thwarted self-conscious attempts at modernisation, never better than in her detailing of the negotiation and circumvention of the Delhi Municipal Committees by-laws and the persistence of community-based urban ordering. Each chapter moves chronologically, from the Delhi of the 'Mutiny' (1857) to infrastructural work before independence (1947), whilst also charting an analytical movement from the spaces of havelis (mansions), to the streets, geographies of health, city expansion and urban improvement.

Following such a trajectory, Hosagrahar also provides a stunning refutation of the colonial urban historiography that depicts European enclaves as the repositories of modernity and the native quarters as calcified museums of tradition. One of the outstanding features of this work is the way that approaches to space form the driving force of the narrative. After attempts to create a post-Mutiny placatory civic space (libraries, clock towers, railways), the bargaining and defiance of political society in public space soon came to the fore, just as public hygiene projects came to rely on traditional sweepers and cleaners. In terms of economic space, the state struggled with the paradoxical demands of laissez-faire trade and controlled urbanism, laying out a new commercial district without the powers to control the forces unleashed. As the com- parison between the health of New Delhi and the disease of Old Delhi increased in the twentieth century, the colonial government instituted spaces of improvement. Hosa- grahar dwells briefly on the architectural modernism of the Delhi Improvement Trust, although she also stresses its failure to tackle the slum crisis or regulate housing prices.

In conclusion, Hosagrahar returns to the idea of colonial translations of modernity and local resistance. While these trends are made empirically obvious throughout the book, some theoretical considerations would have made the chapters cohere more clearly in line with the book's title. However, the clarity of archival analysis articulates many of these points, and establishes this text as an important contribution to the study of East and West in the muddled and contested spaces of everyday colonial interaction.

School of Geography

STEPHEN LEGG University of Nottingham

For the city yet to come: changing African life in four cities. By Abdoul Maliq Simone. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. x + 297 pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN 0 8223 3445 3.

This book is about life in contemporary African cities. Its central theme is that the difficult process of making a living in such places prompts people to engage in a variety of formal and informal arrangements, involving creative improvisation as opportunities for personal or group advantage present themselves. As the author explains, this invokes 'attempts to look at how African cities become a locus for the elaboration of translocal economies unfolding and deployed within logics and practices that stand aside from the usual notions of growth and development. Far from being marginal to contemporary processes of scalar recomposition and the reimagination of political communities, African cities can be seen as a frontier for a wide range of diffuse experimentation with the reconfiguration of bodies, territories, and social arrangements necessary to recalibrate technologies of control' (p. 2). As this suggests, a central feature of the processes involved is their spatiality. There are four case studies: the Projet de Ville in Pikine, a suburb of Dakar in Senegel; Winterveld, a largely informal collection of settlements in South Africa; Douala in Cameroon; and Jidda in Saudi Arabia. These are followed by discussions of historical background on African urbanization and general observations on the contemporary urban scene.

The case studies provide a fascinating account of how people make out in these cities. The emphasis is on how specific actors may reach and extend themselves, or propel themselves outwards from the everyday circumstances and places to which they are accustomed, within economic, political and social structures which may be far from transparent. Two reservations have to be made. The first concerns the method adopted: despite references to structured interviews with key participants in one case study and discussions with nearly 100 people from different walks of life in another, the actual voices and personal stories of Simone's elusive informants hardly ever appear. The second concerns the absence of maps, which would have helped readers unfamiliar with the cases in question to appreciate their spatial structure, such as the relationship of Winterveld with Bophuthatswana and Pretoria in the peculiar geography of apartheid. The more general chapters draw on a wide range of examples to portray urban life in ways which challenge much conventional wisdom in geography and development studies. Overall, this book offers a wealth of empirical detail and subtle interpretations, providing much food for thought for anyone interested in the way cities are changing, not only in Africa but also in other parts of the underdeveloped world.

Queen Mary, University ofLondon DAVID M. SMITH


come

Bruce Elliott, in his chapter on return to rural Ireland from the United States, considers transnationalism as well as discussing attempts to define various migrant movements.

Overall, then, Emigrant homecomings stresses the importance of return migrants/ return movements to processes of migration, and in this respect is a valuable text. However, the book lacks critical engagement with the key themes in contemporary studies of (trans)migration, including Á despite its claims Á the complexity of identity and notions of home; and in this respect it was disappointing.

Canberra, Australia

GEORGINA GOWANS

Manufacturing suburbs: building work and home on the metropolitan fringe.

Edited by Robert Lewis. Philadelphia. The contributors to Manufacturing suburbs all question the conventional understanding of the North American suburbanization process as one led by the establishment of dormitory spaces for the Anglo bourgeoisie outside the city alongside the evolution of mass transportation allowing commuting to work. While this pattern of 'residential suburbanization' did occur, Manufacturing suburbs shows that it was accompanied by more complex and varied sets of processes. The focus of the book is 'industrial suburbanization' between 1850 and 1950. It demonstrates how the expansion of industry to the urban fringes often played an integral or primary role in the development of suburbia from the start of this period, not remaining insignificant until after the Second World War, as is customarily believed. While many places and factors are discussed in this book, the main thrust of industrial suburbanization involved housing following industry to the suburbs to accommodate workers' daily walk to employment. When transport did play a role in suburbanization, it often concerned freight not people movement. Another interesting twist is recorded in Heather Barrow's chapter, which shows the influence of the Ford car business on industrial (rather than residential) suburbanization in Detroit through its role as a profitmaking industry, not a producer of commuter vehicles. The rewriting of the role of transport in the history of suburbanization challenges common narratives of the class and home Á work relations of suburbia.

The focus on industrial suburbanization provides a working-class history to suburbanization in this period, thus also making visible the presence, influence and labour of women and ethnic minorities in the development of a place seen predominantly as an Anglo form embodying very particular gender relations.

Like the Detroit chapter, two others challenge the reality of seminal places linked to modern suburbanization. Mary Beth Pudup shows how the conventional understanding of suburbia enshrined in the Chicago School model does not, due to its ahistorical origins, even describe its Alma Mater. Similarly, Greg Hise questions the accuracy of understandings of suburbanization learnt from the example of Los Angeles.

Cultural geographers have seen suburbs primarily in terms of the traditional marriage of town and country for the middle classes. However, evidence here of different ideologies, economic and social processes and actors fuelling suburban development demands a new cultural politics of suburbia, which can, in both historic and contemporary contexts, address the material base of these places and the lives within them.

The primary concern of Manufacturing suburbs is industrial location. However, in a number of the more theoretically broad-based contributions to the volume, such as those by Richard Walker and Robert Lewis, Gunter Gad and Richard Harris's concluding chapter, links between issues in the book and questions addressed by cultural geographers begin to be raised. Manufacturing suburbs also offers the novel prospect of a cultural geography of industrial location.

Department of Geography

NICOLA HIGGINS University of Cambridge Hybridity, or the cultural logic of globalization. By Marwan M. Kraidy. Philadelphia. Temple University Press. 2005. xiv'/226 pp. £52 cloth; £14.95 paper. ISBN cloth; 1 59213 144 1 paper. 'Hybridity' is a notoriously slippery term that the author of this short book, Marwan Kraidy, does little to demystify, himself describing it by turns as 'maddeningly elastic' (p. 3) and 'conceptually unstable ' (p. 47). Rather than trying to define hybridity Á perhaps the closest he gets is when he says hybridity 'entails that traces of other cultures exist in every culture' (p. 148) Á Kraidy's twofold aim is to trace its history and to give it a new spin from his particular vantage point as a scholar of media and communications. Kraidy makes three main arguments. First, he insists on giving hybridity in all its incarnations 'historical, geographical' grounding, noting its 'dubious usefulness if employed as a broad conceptual umbrella' (p. x). Second, he believes that a focus specifically on the role of the mass media in shaping cultures can give the concept of hybridity renewed potency. And third, he says we need to consider both 'structure' (by which he essentially means political economy) and 'agency' (individual entanglements with the media) in any empirical examination of what hybridity means and how it materializes.

Kraidy is clearly well-versed in the literatures he cites, and I found his dissection of the debates on 'cultural imperialism' and 'cultural globalization' (Chapter 2), for example, a real strong point. But the book is weighed down, to my mind, by several important limitations. First, despite claims to the contrary (and fancy new phrases Á Kraidy styles his approach 'critical transculturalism'), there is really little novel in what he is saying. Numerous others have examined the implication of the media in constituting complex cultural identities, have done so in great historical and geographical detail and with explicit consideration of both 'structure' and 'agency', and have offered far more convincing narratives than we find here;

Reviews in brief


Keywords:

published or not. The documents may come

Lila Abu-Lughod's Dramas of nationhood (University of Chicago Press, 2005) is one very good example. Second, the book is unbalanced, with the empirics too limited and too scattered to support the theory; and, at times, structurally confusing (Chapter 1 seems to offer merely a condensed and redundant version of what follows in Chapters 2 and 3).

Third, and most important, the two case studies Á an analysis of a Mexican children's television programme, and interviews with a group of young Maronite Lebanese who engage both Arab and Western world-views and media products Á do not directly buttress the macro-arguments. Kraidy says, for example, we should always integrate audience reception of media texts into the analysis of cultural hybridity, but signally fails to do just that in discussing Mexico's Tele Chobis (a copycat version of Teletubbies ). He also says that the 'hybridity of media texts is explained by the media's transnational economy ' (p. 114); in other words, that producers, with global markets increasingly accessible, make media texts (films, television programmes and so on) that will appeal to as many people as possible internationally in order to maximize distribution and profitability. Fine (and already widely discussed): but to support this argument, why choose, in Tele Chobis, a program conceived and produced solely with domestic exploitation in mind?

In sum, Hybridity fails by some margin to live up to the grandiose billing promised by the subtitle and its surely deliberate allusion to Fredric Jameson's influential Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991).

School of Geography and Environmental Science

BRETT CHRISTOPHERS University of Auckland The title Disposable cities draws attention to two different matters. The first is the manner in which the cities of Sub-Saharan Africa have come to be discarded or disregarded, and hence underrepresented in urban studies. The second is the issue of waste management in the context of sustainable development: garbage is an underresearched aspect of urban planning.

The first chapter introduces the rapidly growing African city. The author then outlines four basic themes used to structure the argument, economic, environmental, political and cultural in orientation, which he elaborates as neoliberalism, sustainable development, good governance and the politics of cultural difference. Woven together with garbage disposal, these themes constitute the perspective of 'political ecology'. Chapter 2 outlines the United Nations Sustainable Cities Programme and sets it in the African context. The remainder of the chapter examines the problems of aid donor dependence, and the combative and exclusive character of the local urban settings of implementation.

The next three chapters present the case studies of the cities of Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and Lusaka. These are based on interviews, fieldwork, documentary analysis and the research of other (often local) scholars. After an introduction to the city in question and its sustainability programme, each chapter is organized around the book's four themes. All three cities share a history of stark inequalities of British colonialism and experiments with socialism, before facing the rigours of the present era of neoliberalism with its harsh consequences for the poor and their environments. Intricately detailed, the case studies describe the complexity of environmental (mis)management against a backdrop of shifting economic and political circumstances and cultural conflict.

A brief concluding chapter explains the author's doubts about the sustainable cities initiative, while a postscript locates the book within postcolonial studies.

A volume in the Re-Materialising Cultural Geography series, this book has much to commend it to anyone interested in the kind of cities in which a growing proportion of the world's urban population lives. Like the work of AbdouMaliq Simone (For the city yet to come , Duke University Press, 2004), in whose footsteps Garth Myers claims to follow, this is a demonstration of the value of carefully constructed case studies of the changing African city, from which urban studies in general has much to gain. Since the early 1990s, a new generation of Latina/o studies scholars have taken up Edward Soja's challenge to emphasize the locality of power, and the particularity of its performance, through a new attention to geography. The new wave of Latina/o spatial studies scholars Á Juan Flores and Rau ´l Homero Villa, to name only two Á collectively provide a provocative re-centring of social theory at the site of the barrio, whether it be in East LA or in Manhattan. But despite this profound grounding of new historical subjects, most spatial studies work continues to frustrate precisely because of its unavoidable fetish on a particular locality as the principal site for the performance of insurgent subjectivities. The local always emerges as an axis mundi even despite Walter Mignolo's articulation of the local and the global a decade earlier.

Department of

Mary Pat Brady's intervention into spatial studies theory and practice, ironically, benefits precisely from her archaeologies of the interstitial spaces in different places, from cities to small towns, border crossings and, of course, the pages of a book. Indeed, her work, grounded in Chicana lesbian and straight feminist authors Patricia Preciado Martin, Gina Valde ´s, Gloria Anzaldu ´a, Terri de la Pen ˜a, Sandra Cisneros and Cherrı ´e Moraga, is less concerned with privileging any particular geographical place for the performance of Chicana identity and empowerment than with exploring various power

  Disposable cities: garbage, governance and sustainable development in urban Africa. By Garth Andrew Myers. Aldershot and Burlington. Ashgate. 2005. xv'/187 pp. cloth; ISBN 0 7546 4374 3.

  Geography DAVID M. SMITH Queen Mary, University of London Extinct lands, temporal geographies: Chicana literature and the urgency of space. By Mary Pat Brady. Durham, NY. Duke University Press. 2002. 274 pp. ISBN 0 8223 2974 3.

Reviews in brief


The next three chapters present the case studies of the cities of Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and Lusaka. These are based on interviews, fieldwork, documentary analysis and the research of other (often local) scholars. After an introduction to the city in question and its sustainability programme, each chapter is organized around the book's four themes. All three cities share a history of stark inequalities of British colonialism and experiments with socialism, before facing the rigours of the present era of neoliberalism with its harsh consequences for the poor and their environments. Intricately detailed, the case studies describe the complexity of environmental (mis)management against a backdrop of shifting economic and political circumstances and cultural conflict.

A brief concluding chapter explains the author's doubts about the sustainable cities initiative, while a postscript locates the book within postcolonial studies.

A volume in the Re-Materialising Cultural Geography series, this book has much to commend it to anyone interested in the kind of cities in which a growing proportion of the world's urban population lives. Like the work of AbdouMaliq Simone (For the city yet to come , Duke University Press, 2004), in whose footsteps Garth Myers claims to follow, this is a demonstration of the value of carefully constructed case studies of the changing African city, from which urban studies in general has much to gain. Since the early 1990s, a new generation of Latina/o studies scholars have taken up Edward Soja's challenge to emphasize the locality of power, and the particularity of its performance, through a new attention to geography. The new wave of Latina/o spatial studies scholars Á Juan Flores and Rau ´l Homero Villa, to name only two Á collectively provide a provocative re-centring of social theory at the site of the barrio, whether it be in East LA or in Manhattan. But despite this profound grounding of new historical subjects, most spatial studies work continues to frustrate precisely because of its unavoidable fetish on a particular locality as the principal site for the performance of insurgent subjectivities. The local always emerges as an axis mundi even despite Walter Mignolo's articulation of the local and the global a decade earlier.

Department of

Mary Pat Brady's intervention into spatial studies theory and practice, ironically, benefits precisely from her archaeologies of the interstitial spaces in different places, from cities to small towns, border crossings and, of course, the pages of a book. Indeed, her work, grounded in Chicana lesbian and straight feminist authors Patricia Preciado Martin, Gina Valde ´s, Gloria Anzaldu ´a, Terri de la Pen ˜a, Sandra Cisneros and Cherrı ´e Moraga, is less concerned with privileging any particular geographical place for the performance of Chicana identity and empowerment than with exploring various power negotiations themselves. Her readings of Chicana literature offer a Foucauldian model of power as fluid and always already in negotiation, but without going over the postmodern edge of arguing that power never can, or already has been, subverted. Her third chapter, 'Intermarginalia: Chicana/spatiality and sexuality in the work of Gloria Anzaldu ´a and Terri de la Pen ˜a', is exemplary for its explications of the symbiotic relationship between statutory and cultural regulations of space and Chicana subversions of these norms.

Brady's study is laudable for adding more depth and range to the spatial studies canon also because the interstitial spaces she studies are inter-geopolitical as well. She notes how the US Á Mexico border is anchored in the 'materiality of national borders' even as it has become a wildly loose floating metaphor in social theory, especially after Valde ´s's and Anzaldu ´a's testimonial works. This obvious but refreshingly critical reassessment both arrests the overextension of a metaphor and still allows for its usage. In this way, she succeeds in freeing spatial studies from its lingering fetish on localities like Los Angeles or Manhattan, or specific places in between or beyond, as the primary battleground in the articulation of subjects-in-struggle. After all, for women, especially lesbians, the battle is not confined anywhere, but always already exists at the site of their bodies, which Chicana authors locate everywhere. Over the years, the Public Space Research Group, housed at the City University of New York and headed by Setha Low, has received a series of commissions to analyse the use and meaning of large urban public spaces such as landscape parks, historic sites and beaches. To meet the goals of the commissions, members of the PSRG utilized what they call Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Procedures (REAP) Á in essence a programme of observation, interviews with park users and 'experts', and the analysis of whatever documents can be brought readily to hand, all conducted in a very short time frame. Rethinking urban parks reports the results of these studies. Examining two urban beaches, two historic sites and one landscape park, the authors find that different cultural groups (e.g. Puerto Ricans, Italian Americans, youth, the elderly) like to use parks in different ways. Some like to play dominoes, others like to play drums. Some like to hike in the wooded areas behind the beachfront, others like to lie in the sand and talk. Some like to barbecue and picnic, others like to play soccer or softball. They also find that within cultural groups, not everybody thinks alike. They find that historical sites, like Independence Mall in Philadelphia, do not always serve as destinations for different cultural groups. In this latter case the authors attribute this fact, no doubt correctly, to the way history is presented in the park (as a heroic narrative of

Department of English University of Texas at San Antonio

  Geography DAVID M. SMITH Queen Mary, University of London Extinct lands, temporal geographies: Chicana literature and the urgency of space. By Mary Pat Brady. Durham, NY. Duke University Press. 2002. 274 pp. ISBN 0 8223 2974 3.

  : public space and cultural diversity. By Setha Low, Dana Taplin and Suzanne Scheld. Austin. University of Texas Press. 2005. xii'/226 pp. £14.95 paper; ISBN: 0292712545.

Reviews in brief