Dave Featherstone, University of Glasgow
Former editor of the RGS-IBG book series (2014-2020), author of Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global Networks and co-editor of Spatial Politics: Essays For Doreen Massey
Recalling the mass meeting held at St Pancras Town Hall in December 1959 to launch New Left Review, Raymond Williams notes that E.P. Thompson ‘had spoken in the perspective of a new popular movement that would completely transform or replace the existing Labour Party’. His own position was more cautious, observing that while ‘one hoped for that […] I would be very satisfied if in ten years’ time we have twenty or thirty good socialist books about Britain’ (Williams, 1980: 363). Williams’s comments draw attention to the significance with which books can be freighted, the labour of producing them and obliquely indicates the ways in which they are imagined through particular geographies.
As Williams’s wry comment indicates books, even academic ones, can be imbued with significance and hopes. They hold the potential promise of shaping agendas, making things possible, offering rigorous critique and reworking and challenging dominant understandings. In this respect the series offers a precious space within disciplinary geography because it offers the chance to really develop rigorous theoretical arguments and empirical work in a sustained way and without a strong commercial imperative. This is important given that the ability to do so is at times constrained by some of the dominant forms of writing in contemporary geography. Making arguments over the course of a monograph also comes with pressures. An intervention that might appear strong over the course of an academic paper, can become much more exposed over the course of a book.
During my time as editor I worked with authors whose commitment to their texts and rigorous scholarship enabled them to make significant interventions in a number of ways. They used their work to reconfigure existing geographical scholarship and to intervene and shape various debates in productive ways. That some of these interventions speak powerfully to current political issues and concerns emphasises how sustained theoretical and empirical engagement with particular concerns and problematics can shed significant light on emergent processes and situations.
During the bleak times of the COVID 19 pandemic Steve Hinchliffe et al’s compelling arguments in Pathological Lives about the contested spatialities through which diseases are diagrammed and re-diagrammed through the interventions of biosecurity and forms of biopolitics have only gained in resonance. In related terms the arguments of Katie Walsh’s book Transnational Geographies of the Heart with its focus on the spatially stretched and fraught construction of intimacy has significant resonances with the emotionally charged ways these relations are being refigured in different contexts in the current moment.
I also worked with the authors of a number of texts which have sought to stretch the boundaries of geographical debate and the spatial confines of the discipline. Thus both Sarah Hall and Kean Fan Lim’s monographs offered significant takes on aspects of the cultural and political economy of China using explicitly spatial perspectives. Through a detailed focus on the role of London’s financial centre as a central site in the Chinese project of internationalisation of the renminbi, Sarah Hall’s Respatialising Finance offers a key lens on shifting geopolitics of finance. Kean Fan Lim’s use of ideas of state rescaling to engage with the dynamics of Chinese regional development in On Shifting Foundations, emphasises the extent to which such work does far more than just add to existing understandings of these processes. The text demonstrates how doing so can help reconfigure the terms on which these concepts are understood and envisioned.
While these books indicate some of the shifting geographies through which the intellectual spaces of the discipline are being reconfigured in generative ways, these questions raise issues which can also remain fraught and difficult. A key question here is the difficulty of providing works in translation between diverse languages something which is needed to really deliver on some of the demands to foreground different voices and traditions in the discipline. Publishing translations of geographical texts into English remains, for example, something which is not easily facilitated by the existing structures of mainstream academic publishing, despite some notable attempts to offer different models. (See for example the Antipode translation project, Translation and Outreach - Call for Proposals - Antipode Online, and Espacios Criticos a book series edited by Abel Albet and Núria Benach which seeks to translate key texts by critical spatial thinkers into Spanish.)
There are, however, histories of the circulation of critical geographical texts which are significant reminders of the important possibilities that might be shaped in this regard. Thus The Geography of Hunger, by the influential Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro, with its bold challenge to environmental determinism, Malthusianism and versions of ‘development’ that blamed the global South for its poverty was published in an English translation by the left-leaning publisher Victor Gollancz in 1952 (see also Davis, 2019, Ferretti, 2021). Matheus Cardoso-da-Silva’s recent work on the Left Book Club which was associated with Gollancz emphasises how it shaped and generated transnational circulations of ideas and networks.
This helps to situate The Geography of Hunger as part of what Priya Gopal terms ‘reverse tutelage’ whereby the work of scholars and political activists involved in anti-colonial movements and politics unsettled and expanded the worldviews of leftists in contexts like Britain. This raises important questions around how geographical books can further contribute to forms of transnational circulations and on more equal terms. This is a key challenge for the future and an emerging role for books in the discipline. It also poses questions that the book series will no doubt continue to engage with and confront under its current and future editors.