Full Issue PDF Volume 6, Issue 4

The AAG Review of Books

ISSN: (Print) 2325-548X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrob20

Full Issue PDF Volume 6, Issue 4 To cite this article: (2018) Full Issue PDF Volume 6, Issue 4, The AAG Review of Books, 6:4, 231-306, DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2018.1514913 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2018.1514913

Published online: 12 Oct 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrob20

The AAG Review OF BOOKS

VOLUME 6, ISSUE 4 FALL, 2018

Gerry Kearns’ book review essay

Ireland’s Brexit Problem

Gerard Toal’s

Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest Over Ukraine and the Caucasus Ashley Dawson’s

Extinction:

Reviewed by Alexander B. Murphy, John Agnew, Klaus Dodds, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Jeremy Tasch, and Gerard Toal

A Radical History Reviewed by Christopher R. Cox, John G. Hintz, Jody Emel, Justin McBrien, and Ashley Dawson

Richard L. Nostrand’s

The Making of America’s Culture Regions Reviewed by Jeffrey S. Smith

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Kent Mathewson Louisiana State University Associate Editors Paul F. Starrs, University of Nevada Karen E. Till, National University of Ireland Maynooth Editorial Staff

Editorial Office

Jennifer Cassidento, Publications Director and Managing Editor, AAG Therese M. Arceneaux, Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief

American Association of Geographers 1710 16th St. NW, Washington, DC 20009 phone: (202) 234-1450, fax: (202) 234-2744 [email protected], http://www.aag.org

Editorial Board John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles Stanley Brunn, University of Kentucky Judith Carney, University of California, Los Angeles Anne Chin, University of Colorado Denver Altha Cravey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Bill Crowley, Sonoma State University J. Michael Daniels, University of Denver Dydia DeLyser, California State University, Fullerton Mona Domosh, Dartmouth College Federico Ferretti, University College Dublin Ken Foote, University of Connecticut John Gillis, Rutgers University Anne Godlewska, Queen’s University Lesley Head, University of Wollongong Sally P. Horn, University of Tennessee Robert Kates, Independent Scholar Cindi Katz, CUNY Graduate Center Audrey Kobayashi, Queen’s University David Ley, University of British Columbia David Lowenthal, University College London Charles Mann, Independent Scholar Katharyne Mitchell, University of California, Santa Cruz Mark Monmonier, Maxwell School of Syracuse University Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University

William Moseley, Macalester College Peter Muller, University of Miami Alec Murphy, University of Oregon Heidi J. Nast, DePaul University Bimal Paul, Kansas State University Richard Peet, Clark University John Pickles, University of North Carolina Marie Price, George Washington University Laura Pulido, University of Oregon Susan M. Roberts, University of Kentucky Joseph L. Scarpaci, Center for the Study of Cuban Culture + Economy Jörn Seemann, Ball State University Matthew Sparke, University of California, Santa Cruz Simon Springer, University of Victoria B. L. Turner II, Arizona State University James Tyner, Kent State University Bret Wallach, The University of Oklahoma Elizabeth A. Wentz, Arizona State University John P. Wilson, University of Southern California Jennifer Wolch, University of California, Berkeley Joseph Wood, University of Baltimore Dawn Wright, ESRI Leo Zonn, University of Texas at Austin

THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF GEOGRAPHERS President

Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 Executive Director Douglas Richardson 1710 Sixteenth Street NW Washington, DC 20009 Vice President David B. Kaplan Kent State University Kent, OH 44242

Secretary Cathleen McAnneny University of Maine Farmington Farmington, ME 04938 Treasurer Deborah S. K. Thomas University of Colorado Denver Denver, CO 80217

Publications Committee Chair Sriram Khé Western Oregon University Monmouth, OR 97361 Past President Derek Alderman University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996

The AAG Review of Books began publication in 2013 as a quarterly online journal of the American Association of Geographers. The AAG Review of Books (The AAG Review) was created to hold scholarly book reviews as formerly published in the AAG’s flagship journals, Annals of the American Association of Geographers and The Professional Geographer, along with reviews of significant current books related more broadly to geography and public policy and/or international affairs. Submissions. Book reviews should be written or submitted on invitation only from the editorial office. Contributors will be provided with complete review guidelines and submission instructions when their review is commissioned. Books for review. Please direct all books for review to Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, The AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 227 Howe-Russell, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. Contact. Please direct suggestions for content and any questions regarding The AAG Review of Books to Editor-in-Chief Kent Mathewson at [email protected]. The AAG Review of Books (Online ISSN: 2325-548X) is published online quarterly for a total of 4 issues per year by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Annual Subscription, Volume 6, 2018. Online ISSN – 2325-548X. Online subscription to The AAG Review of Books includes a subscription to six issues of Annals of the American Association of Geographers, four issues of The Professional Geographer, and two issues of GeoHumanities. For information and subscription rates please email [email protected] or visit www.tandfonline. com/pricing/journal/rrob This journal is available via a traditional institutional subscription (either print with online access, or online only at a discount) or as part of our libraries, subject collections or archives. For more information on our sales packages please visit www.tandfonline. com/page/librarians All current institutional subscriptions include online access for any number of concurrent users across a local area network to a selected backfile and articles posted online ahead of publication. Subscriptions purchased at the personal rate may not include online access and are strictly for personal, non-commercial use only. The reselling of personal subscriptions is prohibited. Personal subscriptions must be purchased with a personal check or credit card. Proof of personal status may be requested. Production and Advertising Office: 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel - 215-625-8900, Fax - 215-207-0047. Production Editor: Lea Cutler. Subscription offices: USA/North America: Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 215-625-8900, Fax: 215-207-0050. UK/Europe: Taylor & Francis Customer Service, Sheepen Place, Colchester, Essex Co3 3LP, UK. Tel.: +44 (0) 20 7017 5544; Fax: +44-(0)-20-7017-5198. For a complete guide to Taylor & Francis Group’s journal and book publishing programs, visit our website: www.taylorandfrancis.com. Copyright © 2018 American Association of Geographers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, transmitted, or disseminated in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. grants authorization for individuals to photocopy copyright material for private research use on the sole basis that requests for such use are referred directly to the requester’s local Reproduction Rights Organization (RRO), such as the Copyright Clearance Center (www.copyright.com) in the USA or the Copyright Licensing Agency (www.cla.co.uk) in the UK. This authorization does not extend to any other kind of copying by any means, in any form, and for any purpose other than private research use. The publisher assumes no responsibility for any statements of fact or opinion expressed in the published papers. The appearance of advertising in this journal does not constitute an endorsement or approval by the publisher, the editor, or the editorial board of the quality or value of the product advertised or of the claims made for it by its manufacturer. Disclaimer. The American Association of Geographers and the editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this journal; the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the American Association of Geographers and the editors. Permissions. For further information, please visit http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/permissions.html

The AAG Review OF BOOKS Volume 6, Issue 4, Fall 2018

Contents 231 Divided: Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls, by Tim Marshall Ron Johnston 234 Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba,by Luis Martínez-Fernández Joseph L. Scarpaci 238 Into the Ocean: Vikings, Irish, and Environmental Change in Iceland and the North,by Kristján Ahronson Russell Fielding 241 Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement,by Thomas Carter Richard Francaviglia 245 Ethnic Landscapes of America,by John A. Cross William Wyckoff 248 The Making of America’s Culture Regions,by Richard L. Nostrand Jeffrey S. Smith 251 Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad,by Jeanine Michna-Bales Laura Pulido 254 Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond, by Lisa Funnell and Klaus Dodds Robert A. Saunders 257 The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place,edited by Rueben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch 260 Transitional Justice and the Politics of Inscription: Memory, Space and Narrative in Northern Ireland, by Joseph S. Robinson Sara McDowell 263 Celestial Mechanics: A Tale for a Mid-Winter Night, by William Least Heat-Moon David J. Nemeth

X

267 The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers,by Martin Doyle Ellen Wohl 270 Lake Bonneville: A Scientific Update,edited by Charles G. Oviatt and J. F. Shroder, Jr. J. Michael Daniels 273 Spatial Analysis of Coastal Environments,by Sarah M. Hamylton Mayra A. Román-Rivera

REVIEW ESSAY 275 Ireland’s Brexit Problem. After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present,by Declan Kiberd; Atlas of the Irish Revolution,edited by John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil, and Mike Murphy; Beckett’s Political Imagination,by Emilie Morin; Commemoration, by Helen Laird; Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland, by Declan Long Gerry Kearns BOOK REVIEW FORA 282 Extinction: A Radical History,by Ashley Dawson Christopher R. Cox, John G. Hintz, Jody Emel, Justin McBrien, and Ashley Dawson 293 Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest Over Ukraine and the Caucasus,by Gerard Toal Alexander B. Murphy, John Agnew, Klaus Dodds, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Jeremy Tasch, and Gerard Toal 306 Editor’s Note,by Kent Mathewson

David J. Nemeth on

Ethnic Landscapes of America by John A. Cross

p. 245

Celestial Mechanics: A Tale for a Mid-Winter Night p. 263

X


Divided: Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls Tim Marshall. London, UK: Elliot and Thompson, 2018. 272 pp., maps, bibliography, index. $22.38 cloth (ISBN 978-1-783963430). Reviewed by Ron Johnston, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. Recent decades have witnessed the development of an important geographical paradox. Even as politicians, economists, influential commentators, and others having been pressing the case for globalization and a range of international treaties has been entered into permitting the free movement of people and goods, alongside that of information that is more difficult to constrain, there have been counter moves to limit that trend. These have been supported by many voters and implemented by politicians responding to, and in some cases fomenting, their pressure—think Brexit and Donald Trump. Contemporary landscapes, at all spatial scales, reflect this paradox. Modern societies have always been characterized by their spatial structuring into worlds of containers, ranging from the smallest scale (e.g., rooms in a dwelling) to the largest (e.g., state boundaries), some of which are more porous than others. Most of those boundaries are clearly demarcated, on plans and maps, on the ground, or both, and movement through them is limited. As capitalism grew in its power and extent, more such boundaries were created: agricultural productivity was significantly advanced by allowing individuals to claim land ownership and to bound their fields with walls or fences, for example.

The creation of, perceived necessity for, and impact of those boundaries is the subject of Marshall’s latest book. The subtitle implies that it is about boundary walls, but at the outset he indicates that he uses that term as a shorthand for all barriers, including fences, and although he claims that divisions shape modern political life at every level, from the personal and the local to the national and international, his focus is very largely on national boundaries, claiming that thousands of miles of fences and walls have been built in the present century by at least sixty-five countries. These barriers, at every scale, promote “us and them” mentalities and are erected in many cases to protect “us” in some way from “them” (think Trump again). They are important to the creation, sustenance, and promotion of senses of national identity. The book has no coherent story running through it, no central argument other than that we are erecting more barriers. It comprises a series of eight short chapters on specific areas, ranging in scale from whole continents (Africa and Europe) to individual countries (the United Kingdom) and even smaller areas (Israel–Palestine). Within them are case studies that “best illustrate the challenges of identity in a globalized world” (p. 5), focusing on one or more of migration, nationalism, and religion, and not always saying much about walls. This criticism applies very clearly to the first two chapters, on China and the United States. The former begins with a several-page discussion of the Great Wall, but the bulk of the chapter is a general discussion of modern China and its governance, which includes some discussion of the Great Firewall of China. Similarly, the chapter on the United States begins with a discussion of the Mexican

The AAG Review of Books 6(4) 2018, pp. 231–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2018.1508175. ©2018 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

border, the barriers already there, and Trump’s proposal to build a wall, but with nothing on how other borders, including that with Canada, are policed. This is followed by discussion of ethnic and religious inequalities within the U.S. population: it talks of the country’s “divided house” and the growth of “identity politics” but of barriers there is virtually nothing. The chapter on Israel–Palestine concentrates on the wall (or separation barrier) recently erected between the two. Many might be unaware that only 3 percent of this barrier is a high wall, with the rest a barbed-wire fence; the wall makes better pictures and a concrete topic for debate. Again, though, most of the discussion is not of the barrier itself, but rather of the nature of the states and societies on either side. This is followed by a discussion of the Indian subcontinent, where the existence of extensive fences separating India from both Bangladesh and Pakistan is probably less well-known to the general reader—or indeed to many academic audiences—than such barriers elsewhere in the world. There is interesting material on the rationale for the Indo-Bangladesh fence, which is restricting migration. Again, alongside it is material, on the Indian caste system, for example, that has little apparent relevance to the book’s explicit focus. A major discussion point in the chapter on Africa is the imposition of colonial boundaries that paid no heed to the preceding pattern of tribal occupancy, a geography that postcolonial states are having to cope with in the face of various movements to redraw the continent’s containers. The chapter also contains interesting material on the ancient walled city of Benin and on the gated communities that are proliferating not only in the more exclusive suburbs of many African cities, but in many other parts of the world—a subject that could have had a chapter of its own. As with so much of the book, there is interesting esoteric material but the whole never resembles more than the sum of the parts. The chapter on Europe focuses initially on the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall and then turns to a discussion of the European Union and the barriers erected by some countries to counter recent substantial migration flows from Asia and Africa, reflecting the growth of “nativist” politics. Finally, the chapter on the United Kingdom begins with a discussion of Hadrian’s Wall, moves to consider the “national divisions” within the United Kingdom, and then addresses the particular case of Northern Ireland and the Belfast walls. These topics are followed by several pages on how class continues to dominate British society, joined by religion and culture as a result of the ex-

232

tensive immigration of recent decades: the subject matter is of social divides but not divided spaces. The short conclusion adds little. Walls are inevitable in a world characterized by competition for resources, lacking a “universal brotherhood of man,” and where sociocultural divisions exacerbated by migration will stimulate nastier politics. Tim Marshall is a British journalist who has covered events in many parts of the world over more than two decades and is clearly enthralled by geography, as vernacularly understood, and maps. His previous book, Prisoners of Geography (Marshall 2015) has been an international best seller. Some academics think their colleagues and students should steer clear of anything written by journalists (I recently had a paper rejected with a reviewer castigating me strongly for citing two books by journalists!). Some of them, though, are well-researched: they can, like Bishop’s (2008) The Big Sort, produce hypotheses worthy of careful academic evaluation. Others, like Daley’s (2016) Ratf**ked on gerrymandering, provide the detail on individual case studies of a process that academic studies overlook. Marshall’s Divided does not join them, however: its esoterica might stimulate further exploration of interesting material, but the snippets on barriers and identity are unlikely to enliven an academic seminar or paper. This is a shame, because the general theme is one that some scholars have addressed but Marshall has not. Journalists rarely pay much attention to, let alone cite, academic work, however relevant it might be to their interests. Marshall does acknowledge a small number of academics, including Stuart Elden—though there is no clear evidence that he has drawn much from his major work (Elden 2009, 2013), let alone Sack’s (1986) earlier thesis on territoriality and its use as a projection of power. Students of walls and barriers would be well advised to consult such sources to provide theoretical frameworks within which to set an appreciation of why we have a world of containers, alongside Taylor’s (1994, 1995) excellent pair of essays on the tensions between territoriality and globalization. References Bishop, B., with R. G. Cushing. 2008. The big sort: Why the clustering of like-minded Americans is tearing us apart. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Daley, D. 2016. Ratf**ked: The true story behind the secret plan to steal America’s democracy. New York, NY: Liveright.

THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS

Elden, S. 2009. Terror and territoriality: The spatial extent of sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2013. The birth of territory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marshall, T. 2015. Prisoners of geography: Ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global geopolitics. London, UK: Elliott and Thomson.

Sack, R. D. 1986. Human territoriality: Its theory and history. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, P. J. 1994. The state as container: Territoriality in the modern world-system. Progress in Human Geography 18: 151–62. ———. 1995. Beyond containers: Internationality, interstateness and interterritoriality. Progress in Human Geography 19: 1–15.

FALL 2018 233


Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba Luis Martínez-Fernández. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2018. xiv and 219 pp., maps, diagrams, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $74.95 cloth (ISBN 978– 1-683-40032-5). Reviewed by Joseph L. Scarpaci, Center for the Study of Cuban Culture + Economy, Blacksburg, VA. The rich historiography of colonial Peru, Mexico, and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean contrast with the paucity of monographs about pre-eighteenth-century Cuba. This book aims to remedy that dearth by employing what geographers might recognize as chorology, the long-shunned intellectual stepchild of geography because of its descriptive and atheoretical approach to the study of regions and places. Once upon a time, long before the quantitative revolution of the 1960s and GIScience decades later, human geographers frequently read widely and deeply in its sister disciplines of history, ethnography, and anthropology. Despite the abilities of these allied sciences to shed light on human– environment interactions, qualitative arguments that attempted to identify the causal relations between physical and human-geographical phenomena operating in a particular region were often dismissed because of their reductionistic tendency to treat all places as unique. Schaefer (1953) and Hartshorne (1939) sparked those and related debates. Over the past fifty years or so, nongeographers such as Diamond (1997, 2012), Gould (2001), and Mann (2005) filled this intellectual lacuna and readily circumvented this disciplinary dispute. It is in this relative positioning of Key to the New World that historian Luis Martínez-Fernández culls materials

and ideas for what Sauer (1956) might call an indulgence in “ancient geography.” Martínez-Fernández claims that his book is the result of systematic and intentional weaving together of factual information, narrative, interpretation, and discussions of useful concepts. It provides essential information on Cuba’s geography, its pre-Columbian inhabitants, and the first two centuries of colonial life and at the same time looks at numerous theoretical frameworks that shed light on [Cuba’s] complex history. (p. 2)

Three fundamental themes surface in eight chapters that are loosely chronological. One is the author’s bifurcation into what he calls two Cubas that consist of Havana and its hinterland, and a frontier, rural Cuba. The former anchored its power in mercantile, military, and religious institutions that endowed the city with military fortresses and a cosmopolitan flare. Its counterpart was a lightly populated, transgressive, and rebellious world whose tobacco, ginger, hides, and jerked meat were ripe for contraband trade. Sugar’s prominence would not emerge until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a primary commodity export. A second theme harkens back indirectly to Frederick Turner Jackson’s thinking about frontiers and how their attendant lifestyles forge a society. Cuba’s social fabric is indelibly marked by ethnic, racial, and social conflict that deepened because of the colony’s clinging to slavery, the sugar monocrop, and the ways that regional strongmen (caudillos) enlisted vice, violence, and corruption to keep this fabric from unraveling. As we read through this work, it becomes clear that early colonial Cuba laid the foundation for a vibrant multiethnic society that encouraged hypercreativity, gregariousness, and an iconoclasm that infuses everyday humor (choteo), literature, and the arts.


Its third and most manifest theme is that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European transformations, and not just those confined to the Habsburg and Bourbon monarchies, forged global empires in ways that a small island reflects in remarkable ways. Indeed, although nineteenthand twentieth-century works on Cuba garner the lion’s share of scholarly attention, a return to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries proves rewarding. Geographers will appreciate Martínez-Fernández’s attention to how Native Americans and Europeans created habitats among disparate insular environments. All readers will appreciate the refreshing and illustrative way the author uses selected historical figures, most of whom were not famous in the traditional sense, to highlight the complexity of the early colonial period. He offers vignettes to illustrate the cultural inputs of Africans, Europeans, and Amerindians who reflect ajiaco (ethnic blending, or literally, a “Cuban stew”) and transculturation. One profile is of a nameless African who lived in an indigenous settlement. Another highlights Melchor Sardo de Arana, who was a gluttonous commander of the Spanish military post and an avid cross-dresser. One of his crimes was that he purchased a fried plantain from a street vendor, the food of a “low person” (p. 118). Wearing a negligee in the market in one instance and imitating a prostitute in another tarnished the colonial image of proper officer comportment. A third historical character is a slave, Paula de Eguiluz, whose ability to charm men and gain their affections was achieved through concoctions, spells, and talismans. A fourth profile delves into the creation of the island’s patron saint, the Virgin of the Charity of Cuba, but the approach describes the black boy (Juan Moreno) and two indigenous brothers (Rodrigo and Juan de Hoyos) who navigated through a tempest on Nipe Bay, and whose experiences and accounts lay way for this iconic virgin. Their tale supported many in the pantheon of Yoruba (African) deities, Taino representations of Atabey (originally derived from the Orinoco basin in South America and venerated by the island’s Taino Amerindian population), and other spirits worshiped by slaves from Congo-Bantu origins. Finally, Micaela Ginés was a free black musician whose band of sisters toured the island and helped diffuse many of the nonmaterial inputs to the “Cuban stew.” In a discussion apart from the Ginés’s account, we learn that manumission records from the sixteenth century show that a majority of the free blacks were women, presumably because they were more able than men to earn higher wages in domestic settings, and thus purchase their freedom (p. 105). These lively vignettes are clear lenses into

issues of race, empire, hierarchy, gender, and an economic geography whose mark endures. Breaking away from chorology and idiographic work, the author revives several theoretical debates for the reader’s perusal. One entails O’Gorman’s “thesis of intervention” versus Cosby’s notion of “Columbian exchange.” The latter emphasizes the more conflict-free focus on the transmission of plants, people, minerals, animals, and ideas between the Old and New Worlds (diffusionist geographers beware!). The former discredits the so-called discovery of the Americas by Columbus because it relies on the absurd assumption and ontological view that historical events are defined by unchangeable quantities and fixed entities, a belief largely dismissed in both the natural and socialbehavioral sciences. Despite Columbus’s son’s best efforts to the contrary, father and Admiral Christopher set out to discover Asia; at the time of his death, he still believed Cuba might be the island of Cipango (Japan). There is also discussion of the important theoretical argument of Uruguayan writer and philosopher, Angel Rama (2012), who reminds us that Latin American creole writers tied their fortunes and ideas mostly to other ideas and literatures, and not those of their Iberian (Portuguese and Spanish) ancestors; the latter rejected any virtues of indiginismo and opted to portray the black or Amerindian as slothful and feeble. The clichés of first “European decadence” and then “North American decadence” would gradually form the philosophical and intellectual touchstone of Latin American writers, and with only modest influence from the Enlightenment. The lens readers use to interpret the history of early colonial Cuba matters. The author drives home the argument that was originally made by Ortiz (1995) in his classic work, Cuban Counterpoint: Sugar, that “brutal” and “sweet malefactor” plant, caused the island’s greatest moral, social, economic, and political calamities because of slavery and other forms of inhumane coercion. In so doing, the book emphasizes anthropologist Mintz’s focus on how free blacks and slaves sought to reconstitute the peasant practices of West Africa across Cuba and the Caribbean. For instance, when two Taino (e.g., Amerindians of Cuba) chiefs eyed images of the Virgin Mary, they interpreted them as TainoChristian talismans. When sixteenth-century slaves from Angola arrived on the island, their transcultural interpretations of the Virgin Mary connected them with their deity, Kianda. Likewise, whereas Catholic Cuba venerated the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre (the Charity Virgin of El Cobre, the place name of a copper [cobre] mine), Ochún from Africa entered the pantheon of the syncretic religion of Santería (which fused African animism with

FALL 2018 235

Roman Catholicism; pp. 122–24). Although these associations are well articulated in multiple literatures, the author provides an ample yet relative context to tease out the ingredients of this Cuban stew. How might these early colonial imprints have persisted half a millennium after Spanish conquest? The question is particularly germane in light of the island’s transition into a post-Castro era and near doubling in the number of international visitors. Examples abound through the book. Cuba’s ajiaco surfaces in each of the eight chapters. Recalling that 1492 is the year of both the first Columbus voyage and the defeat of the Moorish caliphate in southern Spain meant that Andalusian Christians, Jews, and Muslims from Seville and Cádiz would populate the island for centuries, and blend forcibly or otherwise, with equatorial Africans. Southern Spaniards preferred frying their foods in olive oil, introduced tambourines and castanets, and had a proclivity for verbosity, hyperbole, and exaggerated concepts of honor. These traits date back to early Spanish settlers. We are reminded in terms of the built environment how Moorish-inspired (mudéjar) architecture of the southern Iberian Peninsula left its mark across the island. Blueglazed tiles of the sort found in Seville, Triana, Granada, and other southern Spanish cities are prominent in Cuba. Moorish influences also surface in the presence of exterior balconies, covered entryways into homes (zaguanes), detailed wooden ceilings (alfarjes), and other striking details. We are reminded, too, how the shipbuilding industry (ship hulls) worked in tandem with the residential construction trades (whose roofs were often inverted ship frames). Casual observers including tourists, the curious reader, or Spanish audiophile will quickly note that the challenging Spanish they hear (and throughout the Spanish-speaking Caribbean basin) differs from what they might have learned in high school or university courses. The islanders’ tendency to employ loose consonant pronunciations by dropping of the s, the use of ustedes versus vosotros (formal and informal plural pronoun forms of you) and using the ao sound in instead of ado (as in encantao compared to encantado [delighted]) both befuddle and delight sojourners. The island’s maritime inclination, too, helps us understand Cuban vocabulary and slang. Drawing on Moreno Fraginals (1978), Martínez-Fernández reminds us of Cuba’s navigation and sailing traditions: Singar (nominally refers to copulation) initially meant to row a boat with a single oar; atarazanas (shipyards) became a nickname for brothels; botar (coming from the word bote, or boat) means to throw away; and verga (ship’s central mast)

236

became argot for penis. Echoing poet Morejón (p. 117), we appreciate that the cadenced Spanish of Cubans derives from the syncopation of African rhythms coupled with the ability to create unanticipated metaphors (Morejón 2005). These linguistic tidbits are a few morsels that grace this work. Key to the New World enlists a “total history” approach, one that stems from the Annales school of twentieth-century French historical inquiry. This approach emphasizes the long, social-historical views of regions and places in its historiographies (Hexter 1972). Such a perspective will no doubt irk the metanarratives of postmodern inquiry and the class analysis of Marxist historiographers. The book portrays Havana as mercantilist, official, and urban, whereas the rest of Cuba—largely to the east—exudes a more rebellious, relaxed, and yet remote space. It leads the reader back to these elements of the Cuban ajiaco in engaging and inviting tones, but not in the melting pot or “tossed salad” framing of acculturation in the United States. Cuba’s ethnic blend was rife with conflict and overlapping hierarchies by Amerindians, African slaves, whites, and free men and women of many hues. The book also offers up topics for budding scholars and seasoned ones alike to expand research on the strong colonial presence of mulatto and black women, who provided a strong service sector that undergirded the colonial economy. Martínez Fernández deftly challenges the genre of “Taino revival” scholarship in vogue among Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans, who have organized themselves in tribes to embrace their heritage. Geographic topics of absolute and relative location, such as port and hinterland and distance from Santiago de Cuba in the east, and San Cristóbal de La Habana, in the west, help us understand why privateers, buccaneers, pirates, and other mercenaries cunningly maneuvered Spanish authorities to interact with contraband runners throughout the island’s vast hinterland; all to the delight of Dutch, French, and British empires. Unlike many historical works, units of measurement (e.g., currency, acreage, distance [linear and maritime]) are not buried in footnotes but are prominently noted in the front material. More than 200 chapter endnotes guide the reader to sources and related readings. It is refreshing to find a subject index (admittedly, a labor of love) that is detailed and extensive with nested key words. These attributes are only mildly diluted by a few distractions. Geographers might jaw-gnash when the famous Cuban scholar Leví Marrero (p. 7) and the originator of continental drift (Alfred Wegner) are not referred to as geographers (historian and meteorologist are, respectively, actu-


ally correct). One might quibble that some of the images are not specific to Cuba and are therefore only marginally complementary to the text. A few word-processing errors of missing prepositions and articles interrupt what is, otherwise, a well-written tome. The richness of the Annales school of historical inquiry is fully evident in Key to the New World. Geographers who embrace the multidisciplinary “renaissance” approach to critical inquiry will revel in this conceptual and methodological method. As Hexter (1972) reminded us, the long social-historical perspective can “enrich the study of history and continuously confront the social sciences not only with the existence of History as a discipline but with its importance both intellectual and institutional for them” (481). That is why curious travelers as well as scholars from historical geography and allied disciplines interested in slavery, empire, and the Europeanization of the world will find much to savor in this new recipe about historical Cuba. References Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, germs and steel: The fates of human societies. New York, NY: Norton. ———. 2012. The world until yesterday: What we can learn from traditional societies. New York, NY: Viking.

Gould. S. J. 2001. The structure of evolutionary theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartshorne, R. 1939. The nature of geography: A critical survey of current thought in the light of the past. Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers. Hexter, J. H. 1972. Fernand Braudel and the monde Braudellien. . . . The Journal of Modern History 44 (4): 480–539. Mann, C. C. 2005. 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus created. New York, NY: Vintage. Morejón, N. 2005. Cuba and its deep Africanity. Callaloo 28 (4): 933–50. Moreno Fraginals, M. 1978. Cuba/España, España/Cuba: Historia común [Cuba/Spain, Spain/Cuba: Common history] Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Crítica. Ortiz, F. 1995. Cuban counterpoint: Sugar and tobacco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rama, A. 2012. Writing across cultures: Narrative transculturation in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sauer, C. 1956. The education of a geographer. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 46 (3): 287–99. Schaefer, F. K. 1953. Exceptionalism in geography: A methodological examination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 43 (3): 226–49.

FALL 2018 237


Into the Ocean: Vikings, Irish, and Environmental Change in Iceland and the North Kristján Ahronson. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2015. xvi and 245 pp., maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography. $61.50 cloth (ISBN 978–1442646179). Reviewed by Russell Fielding, Department of Earth and Environmental Systems, University of the South, Sewanee, TN. Kristján Ahronson asks a simple research question: What is the provenance of a series of crosses carved into the walls of a set of artificial caves in southern Iceland? His path toward an answer, however, is anything but simplistic. The seven chapters of his book, Into the Ocean, approach this question from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including those of the linguist, the archaeologist, the geographer, and the environmental historian. Although each chapter could easily stand on its own as a complete study put forth by a specialist in the field, Ahronson links them to one another with a fluid sense of interdisciplinarity that recalls an old liberal arts ideal that is all too elusive in today’s academy. Amply peppered with epigraphs from scholars both international and interdisciplinary—and showing clear favoritism for the philosopher Karl Popper—Into the Ocean begins by setting the stage: early medieval Christian monasticism in the North Atlantic; revisions to alreadyrevised histories; and new questions regarding the spread of people, their beliefs, and their environmental impacts across the ocean. Geographers familiar with Sauer (1968) will feel as though they are rereading Northern Mists as they tuck into Chapter 1. Both books entertain the idea of seafaring Irish preceding the Vikings across the

North Atlantic, eventually entering the St. Lawrence and settling in North America. The association between this book and Sauer’s will break soon, though, as Ahronson dismisses Írland et mikla—Greater Ireland or White Man’s Land—as but an example of “the mortality of our ideas.” He lets us down easily, though. If the Irish didn’t make it to North America, could they have at least reached some of the North Atlantic islands? Here, Ahronson’s narrative suggests a bit more confidence. He introduces Dicuil, a ninth-century Gaelic cleric whose description of Christian monastics in the Faroe Islands is generally accepted as believable and who, Ahronson contends, described a similar settlement in the south of Iceland. Going further west than this in a study of medieval European Christian expansion, in Ahronson’s words, is to go “too far.” So our westward exploration shall stop in Iceland. After a tangent—perhaps a necessary one, but a tangent nonetheless—into the Popperian philosophies of science, knowledge, and certainty in Chapter 2, Ahronson delves into the question at hand: Where did those crosses in the caves come from? His first method of inquiry—narrated in Chapter 3—is linguistics, specifically, a study of toponyms. Although the association of the pap- place names (e.g., Papey, “priest island”; Papafjörður, “priest fjord”) with Christian monastics is well attested, Ahronson shows that the standard linkage might be overly simplistic. He cites as examples dozens of pap- names found throughout Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the Shetlands, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides. These place names, however, were bestowed by the Norse and might not always have referred to an actual previous habitation of these places by Christians. Some could, in fact, have been given explicitly to connect late Viking Age Christians with an imaginary,


but very much desired, continuity with a Christian past in places where none but pagans had lived before. Others might indeed have been given to places where “priests” lived. Ahronson’s conclusion on the study of toponyms is that pap- place names are suggestive of Christian associations in places named by the Norse, but not conclusive. Chapter 4 turns to archaeology. If one cannot trust place names to accurately inform us about a place’s previous inhabitants, perhaps the physical evidence will be less ambiguous. That artificial or, human-made, caves exist in southern Iceland is not disputable. These caves, centered around a region known as Seljaland but spreading along Iceland’s south coast and occasionally appearing elsewhere around the island, have been inadequately studied and almost entirely unprotected for centuries. To wit: This reviewer visited a few of the caves in 2017 and was permitted by the landowner to touch the walls, to climb a ladder into a hewn loft, and to take flash photography. Although I appreciated the access, and especially the learning opportunity for the students who accompanied me, I cannot help but wish the sites were off-limits to visitors like myself. To the Icelandic government, the caves do not seem to merit national protection. To Ahronson, they are central to our understanding of Iceland’s pre-Viking history, if such a history indeed exists. Because human alteration of the natural environment occurred in Iceland later than in almost any other large landmass on earth, our understanding of the first human settlers—those who first felled the birch forests, first introduced the domesticated animals, first exploited the native fauna, and first initiated large-scale soil destabilization—is crucial. The archaeologist in Iceland is aided by the country’s volcanos. Tephrachronology, the use of ash layers deposited by known volcanic eruptions for establishing chronological stratigraphy, is more readily and widely employed in Iceland than nearly anywhere else. Starting with the socalled Landnám Tephra, deposited in about CE 870 and conveniently serving to separate Iceland’s prehistoric sequence from deposits made since settlement, Iceland’s soil profile is regularly interrupted by ash layers associated with known and dated eruptions. Artifacts found between two layers must have been deposited at a time between the associated eruptions. After the previous chapter’s introduction of the application of archaeological methods to the dating of the caves, Chapter 5—appropriated titled “Dating the Cave”—describes the process. Using ash layers from twelve known eruptions that occurred between CE 870 and 1947, Ahronson conjures a scene in which all one must do is dig until artifacts are found, taking note of each ash layer encountered, and establish the date

based on the layers between which the item was found. It doesn’t work out this easily. His goal was to find the debris created when the caves were first excavated and he did indeed find a cache of interesting pebbles about ten centimeters below the Landnám Tephra. This would indicate, with certainty, that this debris was deposited before the accepted date of Norse settlement. Distinguishing the pebbles, based on the angularity of their edges and possible tool markings on their surfaces, from the surrounding geology proved difficult to do with confidence. There just wasn’t enough evidence to be certain that this debris was created when the caves were first hewn. You can tell that Ahronson wants to believe. He presents all the data he has on the pebbles, including those produced through geochemical and micromorphological analysis. It is a tribute to his integrity as a scholar that Ahronson resists making a conclusive statement on the matter. The remaining chapters of the book—6, 7, and 8—have the feeling of a Geography 101 field trip trying to make use of extra time forced by bad weather or a closed museum. Since the cave question cannot—at this time—be answered definitively, Ahronson ventures into other areas where questions can be answered by his methods. He discusses the deforestation of Iceland and introduces a novel method of excavation that involves the removal of entire soil layers to expose previous land surfaces and allow three-dimensional analysis. Trunk casts indicate the presence of forests that no longer stand in Iceland. The comparison to Pompeii is apt. Returning one last time to the cave crosses, Ahronson takes his reader on a tour of the North Atlantic, visiting sites where similar Christian art is to be found. The stylistic comparisons with other carved crosses—particularly those in Scotland—are compelling. The crosses in Iceland certainly look like those made elsewhere by early Gaelic Christian monastics. “But the tephra . . ..” Driven perhaps by Ahronson’s complete dedication to scientific skepticism, the reader hesitates to draw any conclusions that the author himself will not. This is perhaps the greatest strength of Into the Ocean, outside of its appeal to a specialist audience interested in the settlement of Iceland. The book represents an example of scientific integrity at its finest. Many a researcher would have allowed themselves to be convinced by inconclusive markings on the pebbles found in a debris pile. Others, as Ahronson showed, were convinced by narratives spun generations ago that led to the same conclusion: that of an Irish monastic migration across the eastern Atlantic to Iceland and—maybe—beyond. Sauer seemed to want Greater Ireland to exist. Kristján Ahronson obviously wants the cave crosses in Seljaland

FALL 2018 239

to have been carved by those same Irish. Although the circumstantial evidence is intriguing, neither case can yet be proven.

photographic series that contains images of what must be every cave cross found in Iceland, as to lose the reader in sheer volume.

My critiques of this monograph are few and should in no way detract from its value as an exemplary example of the rigor of science. Still, a thorough review must include the positives and the negatives. As such, I should point out that Ahronson assumes too much linguistic ability on the part of his reader. French epigraphs go untranslated, which remains frustratingly common in scholarly writing even as U.S. doctoral programs have largely done away with their language requirements. Worse, geographic features are sometimes named only in Icelandic in situations where the place name conveys vital information about the landform itself (e.g., “along a line defined by the Hofsá” in which á means “river”). In other cases he helpfully explains the meaning of terms for landforms, like foss for waterfall. Some images are frustratingly small or lack crucial detail. Others are so repetitive, such as the

Despite these very minor shortcomings, Into the Ocean is a valuable book, both for the specialist focused on the environmental and human history of the North Atlantic, and the general reader interested in the philosophy of science. It teaches a valuable lesson: why scientists, good ones at least, are so hesitant to say that they know anything for sure.

240

ORCID Russell Fielding

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5401-2141

Reference Sauer, C. O. 1968. Northern mists. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.



Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement Thomas Carter. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. xxxi and 330 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, illustrations, notes, index. $37.50 paper (ISBN 978-0-8166-8957--6). Reviewed by Richard Francaviglia, Department of History, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX. Not long after their uniquely American faith was founded (ca. 1830), Mormons began creating buildings and settlements that were distinctive enough to draw comments from astute non-Mormon observers. In a presentation to the Association of American Geographers in 1970 based on my doctoral dissertation (Francaviglia 1970), I noted that a combination of ten visible elements characterized the heart of what had been branded as “Mormon country” by Stegner (1942) and the “Mormon culture region” by Meinig (1965). An underlying premise of my dissertation and subsequent book (Francaviglia 1978) is that the Mormons created a distinctive landscape that reflected their beliefs. Since then, geographers and others have added to our knowledge of the Mormon landscape, but have reached remarkably different interpretations about what it means. Although all would agree with the author of the book under review here that “landscape is powerfully bonded to world view” (p. xxxi), the rub comes in determining how a particular religion’s worldview is reflected in the landscape. Scriptural and other written passages can help, as they sometimes link belief with the landscape itself. The much-heralded “City of Zion” plan by Mormon founder Joseph Smith (1833) is an example of how the Latter-Day Saints envisioned their faith being manifested in the landscape. Although no city was ever built exactly according to this plan, elements of it have been used in

many Mormon communities, the most famous example being Salt Lake City’s impressively wide streets. Mormon leaders played an especially active role in ensuring that “the Saints” built and maintained communities that, as Brigham Young put it, would be fit for the angels to visit. In numerous sermons and missives, these leaders gave specifics pertaining to the building of houses, chapels, and other structures, as well as the planting of gardens and the creation of irrigation works that would make the desert “blossom as the rose.” Although religious landscapes are rare in the United States, it should be recalled that the Mormons were not building just any place, but rather the holy place they called “Zion.” In the mid-1800s, they even proposed the state of Deseret (sic) in the West, a portion of which ultimately (1896) became today’s Utah. The premise that the Mormon landscape reflects an underlying religious ideology seemed straightforward to me in the late 1960s, but has proven controversial. Since then, it has been accepted and challenged many times by scholars, some of them Mormons, others not. Fifty years later, I remain steadfast in my belief that the Mormon landscape represented the faith of its followers—something that rank-and-file Mormons believe as well. For the record, I am not a Mormon, nor is the author of the book I am about to review here. Although my book The Mormon Landscape (Francaviglia 1978) tackled the subject region-wide (viz., covered the U.S. West), there is also considerable merit in the approach that Thomas Carter uses in Building Zion, namely, studying a small area much more intensively. Carter, a well-recognized architectural historian who has spent much of his professional career studying Utah’s built environment, proved up to that task. The area that he selected—Utah’s serene and sequestered Sanpete Val-


ley—was the perfect choice. It was, and remains, a treasure trove of historical architecture. Sanpete impressed me as the quintessential Mormon landscape in the late 1960s and still does, although time has not been kind, as many buildings and other features (houses, barns, fences, etc.) have disappeared. Although Carter was not the first scholar to study Sanpete’s landscapes in detail—that credit goes to Mormon geographers Peterson and Bennion (1987), who published Sanpete Scenes: A Guide to Utah’s Heart—his book is by far the most detailed, meticulously documented, and comprehensive study to date of that locale. To tell this story, Carter first introduces earlier Mormon buildings and communities in the eastern United States where Mormonism originated and initially flourished despite its many detractors. For their part, Mormons held many unconventional beliefs about religious revelation (which they believe can and does occur in the present), marriage (e.g., polygamy), Jesus’s ministry (Mormons believe he visited the New World after his resurrection), and the building of impressive temples (which are off limits to non-Mormons after consecration). Yet, from the outset, Mormons considered themselves to be true Americans who believed (and still do) that the U.S. Constitution was divinely inspired. Another core value is individual responsibility. Even though early Mormons flirted with utopian socialism, capitalism won out and is staunchly believed in today. As Carter astutely notes, Mormons ultimately proved to be consummate Republicans who never successfully developed the communitarian or utopian order originally envisioned by Joseph Smith. In Mormonism, hard work and private enterprise have long been valued; some got rich (and benefitted the Church with their large tithes), whereas others scraped by, but all ideally tithed and believed that their lot was a result of God’s grace. Those unable to work were provided for by other Mormons. As a consequence, Mormon identity is remarkably cohesive. Moreover, even today their religion is simultaneously ethereal as well as materialistic; the latter is evident in the Mormon belief that you can (and will) literally “take it with you.” Mormon communities do indeed reflect a society shaping its built environment to foreshadow the afterlife. As a Mormon farmer in Ephraim told me in 1969, “My ancestors helped make this [Sanpete] valley as close to Heaven on earth as you can get.” Building Zion is about equal measure architectural history and historical geography. Well researched, thoughtfully written, and beautifully produced, it has a decidedly “retro” feel. It is printed in black and white throughout, is full of fine photographs (many historic), and features nu-

242

merous architectural plans and drawings. The evolution of architecture and community is its main focus. Carter claims that Mormon architecture and design evolved through several stages, namely from a Theoretical Zion (1830–1841) to an Experimental Zion (1841–1847), to an Experiential Zion (1847–1870), and to an Enduring Zion (1870–1890; pp. 8–17). A theme that runs throughout this book is Carter’s premise that through time Mormons created what he calls a landscape of “difference, [but] not otherness” (p. 17). By this he means Mormon settlers tended to build in forms and styles that were derived from mainstream culture (e.g., house types) but positioned and used differently according to their needs and perceptions. Carter is especially interested in forces that affected Mormon settlement. For example, he interprets the coming of the Transcontinental Railroad (ca. 1869–1870) as a major threat to Mormon solidarity. Unmentioned, however, is another side of the story: Brigham Young himself was an advocate for (and big shareholder in) the Union Pacific Railroad, helped work forces of Mormon track graders, and facilitated the building of many regional branch lines—including the narrow gauge line into the Sanpete Valley! Why? Young correctly believed that improving the transportation network would encourage more Saints from outside the region and the United States to join “The Gathering” of Latter-Day Saints in Zion. In addition to growing through U.S. conversions and encouraging large families, the LDS Church has always flourished through immigration. Specifically, in the Sanpete Valley, Scandinavian (especially Danish) Mormon converts introduced many Old World elements that contribute to the character of place. Carter nicely documents many of these, including houses and barns. Although most of Carter’s conclusions about architectural influences are sound, I think that he downplays the religious reasons why Mormon building heavily relied on tried-and-true solutions, tended to eschew fads, and had a “familiar” look from place to place. Notably, Carter disagrees with the conclusions of Pitman (1973), who emphasized the homogeneity of Mormon architecture region-wide. Like many others, including this reviewer, Pitman was impressed with the Mormons’ adherence to traditional styles. Although acknowledging that Mormon houses “may been a bit retardaire,” Carter attributes this to distance: “They [Mormons] simply lived too far away to stay abreast of current trends” (p. 122). In The Mormon Landscape and other publications, however, I have cited examples of Mormon leaders urging the Saints to deliberately avoid adopting outside architectural influences, “and thus be independent of the Gentiles,” as non-Mormons are called. Although it is true that Mormon architecture


(especially housing) was not monolithic, it differed from non-Mormon architecture for many reasons, some practical and others religious. Well into the late nineteenth century, many Mormons opted to build houses in traditional symmetrical Georgian/Federal style rather than in the Victorian style increasingly prevalent in what they called “Babylon.” In that same vein, Carter interprets a diagnostic trait throughout the nineteenth-century U.S. West—the Mormon tendency to build homes out of brick and stone—as a practical decision. It should be noted, however, that the City of Zion plan literally called for homes to be built of brick and stone, and this might help explain the surprisingly frequent use of masonry (including both fired and adobe brick) in nineteenth-century Utah Mormon communities. In 1969, I confirmed this connection in the historical records of communities in other parts of the Mormon culture region, and in Sanpete as well (e.g., Fountain Green). Reflecting on fifty-plus years of interacting with Mormons (and their landscapes), I remain intrigued by how differently well-qualified scholars can interpret much the same source material. I think the underlying issue might relate to how one conceptualizes Mormon material culture itself—as either the tangible manifestation of a truly distinctive U.S. religion, or as the mere instantiation of practical U.S. norms. It should be recalled that even the compass-oriented grid layout of Mormon towns was and is considered by many Latter-Day Saints to be the result of sacred guidance ultimately derived from the Book of Revelation (as in the City of Zion plan)—but convincing a skeptic that it is anything other than a mere imitation of a common U.S. archetype might prove nigh impossible. Differences in interpretation aside, Building Zion is a very important contribution to the literature. It is well organized and covers many facets of the built environment, including homes, barns, places of actual worship, and ancillary buildings such as tithing offices, relief society buildings, and the like. Even Main Street commercial architecture is nicely covered, and again provides an example of Mormons borrowing from the mainstream. As I noted in Main Street Revisited (Francaviglia 1996), however, Mormon towns tend to have fewer bars and liquor stores (in many cases none), and very few lodges or halls of fraternal orders (never the Masons, but even Odd Fellows, etc., are rare indeed). Of alcohol, Carter notes that some was sold in the nineteenth-century Mormon towns, but—it should be noted—was increasingly sanctioned on religious grounds. In addition to offering some penetrating insights into the construction of Mormon buildings such as Endowment Houses, tithing halls, and relief society offices, Building Zion breaks new ground in several

areas. For example, it sheds some new light on how polygamy affected residential architecture. On a related note, its examination of gender in relation to the design and use of some buildings is also eye-opening. Although patriarchy ruled, Carter shows that women had more freedom and power than is widely recognized. Especially informative is Carter’s discussion of the design and positioning of the Manti Temple, a crown jewel in the Sanpete Valley that he metaphorically calls a “mansion on the hill.” In discussions about the ways in which Mormons compartmentalize levels of spiritual endeavors, Carter also makes good use of LDS anthropologist Olsen’s (2002) insightful study, The Mormon Ideology of Space. Olsen’s methodology helped Carter frame the work of the Saints and give coherence to this book, and proved helpful to me when I wrote The Mapmakers of New Zion: A Cartographic History of Mormonism (Francaviglia 2015). On the subject of cartography, I should note that Building Zion contains some excellent, specially drawn maps and bird’s-eye views showing how the landscape was spatially differentiated (e.g., by land fertility, wealth of owners, and ethnicity) at various periods in time. Building Zion is a very fine and remarkably comprehensive book, but I would be remiss if I did not mention a couple of omissions. Ironically, the book’s title and subtitle do not mention that Sanpete Valley, Utah, is its strong geographic focus. Next, in the study area itself, cemeteries are neglected—even though a rich imagery of LDS temples and other distinctively Mormon motifs can be found on grave markers, and is worthy of comment. Finally, although this book’s endnotes are comprehensive, its lack of a bibliography is a bit surprising. Nevertheless, despite these minor shortcomings—and any disagreements I might have with the author’s interpretations—I highly recommend Building Zion as essential reading for anyone interested in historical geography, architectural history, the geography of religion, and the Mormon landscape. References Francaviglia, R. 1970. The Mormon landscape. PhD dissertation, Department of Geography, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. ———. 1978. The Mormon landscape: Existence, creation and perception of a unique region in the American West. New York, NY: AMS Press. ———. 1996. Main Street revisited: Time, space, and image building in small-town America. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. ———. 2015. The mapmakers of New Zion: A cartographic history of Mormonism. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press.

FALL 2018 243

Meinig, D. W. 1965. The Mormon culture region: Strategies and patterns in the geography of the American West, 1847–1964. Annals of the Association of American Geography 55 (2): 191–220. Olsen, S. 2002. The Mormon ideology of space: Cosmic symbolism of the city of Zion, 1830–1846. Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for LDS History. Peterson, G., and L. C. Bennion 1987. Sanpete scenes: A guide to Utah’s heart. Sanpete County, UT: Basin/ Plateau Press.

244

Pitman, L. 1973. A survey of nineteenth-century folk housing in the Mormon culture region. PhD dissertation, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA. Stegner, W. 1942. Mormon country. New York, NY: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.



Ethnic Landscapes of America John A. Cross. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2017. xiv and 411 pp., maps, photos, illustrations, references. $199.99 cloth (ISBN 978-3-319-54008-5); $149.00 electronic (ISBN 978-3-31954009-2). Reviewed by William Wyckoff, Department of Earth Sciences, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT. One of my favorite places in North America is Pueblo Bonito, an amazing set of ruins preserved in the dry and windy vastness of northwest New Mexico. The sprawling Puebloan structure (occupied between AD 850–1140)—now part of Chaco Culture National Historical Park—contains hundreds of rooms and it might once have been home to 1,000 residents, making it one of the world’s largest apartment houses until a larger one was erected in New York City in the 1880s. Pueblo Bonito is only one of hundreds of North American cultural landscapes examined by John A. Cross in his impressive new book entitled Ethnic Landscapes of America. The book is a comprehensive, richly illustrated volume (using more than 300 of the author’s own full-color photographs and maps) that traces how diverse ethnic groups have settled and then shaped the U.S. landscape. According to Cross, the book grew out of a course he has taught (Ethnic Landscapes of America) for many years at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh and it reflects his own attempt to offer students—and now his readers—a wide-ranging overview of the nation’s cultural diversity as it is manifest on the material landscape. Indeed, one can see the volume as a kind of high-end field guide that

would be a terrific accompaniment on the road as you explored the nation’s ethnic diversity. It is a visual feast filled with images of barns, houses, churches, storefronts, cemeteries, monuments, fences, maypoles, Amish buggies, and much more. Ultimately, it reflects the author’s own personal, lifelong, and immensely insightful encounter with America’s ethnic landscapes. Readers looking for an in-depth exploration into the complex meanings of these landscapes, their impact on place identity, or a deeply theorized exegesis of the contested nature of concepts such as ethnicity or race or even cultural landscape might be disappointed, but clearly Cross intends to see his contribution as primarily a richly descriptive account of: (1) the origins and distributions of the various ethnic groups in the United States, (2) their evolving historical geographies, and (3) the salient, diagnostic cultural landscape features that express their visual persistence on the everyday scene. The volume’s opening chapter defines how the author uses basic terms such as ethnicity and landscape, and offers a short, useful review of earlier work on these topics published by geographers. This is followed by a more specific introduction to some of the especially important material landscapes covered in the book, including religious structures and housing. There is also a useful discussion about general parameters that can be used in assessing the story of any arriving ethnic group, whether they were nineteenth-century Italians or twenty-first-century Syrians. Cross reminds us that we need to examine the selective nature of each ethnic migrant stream and assess how representative they are of the larger source country or region. He also notes that the timing of arrival and the size of the ethnic group are critical parts of the story because these variables shape


how much influence they might have across the North American landscape (thus British immigrants have more impact than Polish immigrants). I also enjoyed the author’s discussion—building on the use of the term by Zelinsky—of a “generic” U.S. landscape. Cross ponders the powerfully homogenizing impress of landscape elements such as the federal township-and-range system as well as the national impact of technologies such as the railroad and automobile. Still, as the author reminds us, ethnicity matters, and Cross spends much of the rest of the book exploring the impact of individual ethnic groups. Typically, Cross offers an overview of the group’s history, arrival, and spatial distribution in the United States as well as an assortment of representative examples of their impact on the cultural landscape. He takes a roughly chronological approach: Early chapters tackle Native American imprints and later chapters assess more recent Asian ethnic signatures. Every chapter includes a profusion of color illustrations with useful captions to guide readers through the relevant visual information being offered in the photograph. Each chapter also contains a variety of interesting maps (e.g., “Number of Farms with African American Operators, 2012,” “Amish Church Districts in the United States, 2013,” “People of Finnish Ancestry,” or “Largest Detailed Asian Group by State, 2010”). Cross makes use of a good deal of earlier work on each group and cites these studies in every chapter (which creates a valuable list of readings and references at the chapter’s end). One missing component in the volume is an overall index, which might have been useful for readers interested in particular terminology or in examples where groups are cross-referenced in different chapters. Three chapters focus on various expressions of Native American landscapes, including coverage of “Eastern,” “Plains and Northwest Coast,” and “Southwest” regions. Many of the examples detail historical sites, mounds, ruins, and reconstructed and preserved landscape elements (often located in National Historic Parks or on Indian reservations), but Cross also integrates more contemporary features such as rural housing and gaming casinos into his narrative. These chapters are followed by assessments of Hispanic landscapes, both in the western and eastern United States, as well as a review of French and African-American landscapes (including a brief section on “Recent Immigration from Africa”). I particularly liked the author’s more detailed examples chosen from the Hispano Homeland of northern New Mexico as well as his discussion of the shotgun house found across large portions of the South.

246

In many ways, Chapters 9 through 14—which highlight various European ethnic signatures—form the strongest and most detailed portions of the book because they reflect the author’s home area, research strengths, and his thorough knowledge of the larger academic literature on these groups. In one of the book’s longer chapters, his coverage of “British Landscapes” includes separate treatment for the English, Irish, Scots-Irish, Welsh, and Cornish ethnic groups. The author also has a chapter fully devoted to “Dutch, Belgian, and Luxemburger Landscapes,” complete with windmills (Dutch), roadside chapels (Belgian), and limestone barns (Luxemburger). There is also excellent coverage of German, Scandinavian, Slavic, and Italian ethnic signatures in which, not surprisingly, Cross focuses on examples from the Middle Atlantic region to the Midwest and portions of the Great Plains. The book’s final chapters are especially diverse, emphasizing “Arab-American and Other Middle Eastern Landscapes,” “East Asians in America,” and “Native Hawaiian Landscapes.” These quick overviews are followed by a thoughtful final chapter (Chapter 18) that probes “The Future Ethnic Landscape of America.” For students and scholars alike, this section poses some captivating questions as we ponder how U.S. ethnic landscapes will look in 2050 and beyond. Cross suggests we consider the globally dispersed source regions of future immigrants (including drivers of migration such as political instability and climate change), the evolving notions we have about “preservation” of surviving ethnic landscape features (and what should be selected or erased), the growing commodification of ethnic landscapes through tourism and place marketing, and the persistence and resistance of certain ethnic groups (e.g., Hutterites and Hasidic Jews) to global change and national cultural convergence. Even amid its many attractions, any book has its drawbacks. Hopefully, later editions will correct minor errors and typos such as the title of the map covering Asian ancestry (p. 356) or the assertion that Shannon County, South Dakota is only 9 percent Indian (p. 48). I also wonder about the description of the largest barrio in Southern California that “extends south from downtown” (p. 118). More important, although I enjoyed the African-American Landscape chapter, all seventeen images came from the South, leaving this reader to want more guidance about black ethnic landscape signatures in settings such as Watts, Oakland, Detroit, or Syracuse. My choice for a chapter that I would have wanted to see the author expand would be in his treatment of Asian ethnic landscapes. The images of urban Chinatowns are all useful, but how about more subtle expressions of


Chinese influence in suburbs or the flowering of South Asian communities in so many diverse localities around the country? Overall, however, even with these modest shortcomings, the images alone make this a required purchase for librarians, scholars interested in the ethnic and cultural geography of the United States, and anyone fascinated by the diversity of our national landscape. For instructors considering its use in the classroom, the publisher

also makes available a less costly electronic version as well as an ability to purchase individual chapters. It could be a valuable supplement in a North American regional course, in a course on the cultural or historical geography of the United States, or in a class—like the one designed by Cross—specifically focused on ethnic landscapes of America. Cross has produced a beautiful book, a volume of enduring value, and a personal testament to the author’s own fascination with the cultural landscapes he has encountered.

FALL 2018 247


The Making of America’s Culture Regions Richard L. Nostrand. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. xix and 315 pp., maps, photos, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $70.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-53810396-8). Reviewed by Jeffrey S. Smith, Department of Geography, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS. The regional approach has a long and storied tradition within modern geography dating back to the influential works of Ratzel, Hettner, Vidal de La Blache, and Sauer. According to these early luminaries of the discipline, chorology (the study of regions and their interrelated characteristics) provides a means to organize the world and an opportunity to seek a greater understanding of the spatial distribution of natural and cultural phenomena. Some geographers (e.g., Hartshorne and Pattison) have made compelling arguments that the study of regions, along with the character of places, lies at the core of geography. Since the 1950s the regional approach has waxed and waned, with its peak popularity occurring between the 1970s and 1990s. Critics of the regional approach assert that it is far too descriptive and overly simplistic. Yet, the regional approach continues to hold considerable appeal among geographers as well as the general public. Furthermore, it is one of the most effective tools in getting university students in geography’s door. The Making of America’s Culture Regions is a quintessential example of the regional approach. With three main convictions (the material should be organized regionally, the book should be well illustrated, and some of the field’s notable scholars should be iden-

tified) Richard L. Nostrand sets out to capture the formative character of sixteen regions in what would eventually become the United States (and a bit of southeastern Canada). Chronologically, the book’s focus is on major events that unfolded between 1600 and 1900. According to Nostrand, 1600 is the year when European colonization of the present-day United States began and 1900 is the year when frontier settlement ended and most large tracts of good-quality agricultural lands were claimed. It should be noted that, where deemed appropriate, the discussion is brought forward to the 1990s. The Making of America’s Culture Regions is divided into three main parts and in typical Nostrand fashion the writing is crisp, clear, and precise. Each short, pithy chapter has four sections and is structured around three main themes. The book is generously illustrated with sixty-one figures and tables as well as eighty-five large, tricolor maps. Peppered throughout the volume are vignettes showcasing some of historical geography’s most recognized practitioners. The conversational writing style makes for easy, fast reading (each chapter takes only about thirty minutes to complete). In the opening chapter Nostrand lays the foundation for the rest of the book by presenting key terms and concepts, discussing the natural U.S. landscape, and providing an overview of the indigenous population’s culture regions. The book’s first part (“Colonial America”) is where Nostrand’s work shines. Drawing on his decades of scholarly expertise, Chapter 2 chronicles the arrival of the Spanish in what would become the U.S. Southwest and Florida. This is followed by chapters on the colonial invasion of the French and the British. The subsequent three chapters round out the founding of the original American


colonies and trace the initial westward movement toward the interior of the continent. The second part of the book (“The Humid East”) tackles the vast area extending from Appalachia and the Lowland South to western Minnesota and eastern Texas. Within all seven of the regions Nostrand discusses the main crops grown, the steady diffusion west, cadastral patterns, and the characteristics of the built environment in places where precipitation is plentiful. Within each of the seven chapters Nostrand features a lesser known quality of the region being discussed. Two of my favorite include an explanation of the Western Reserve (an area in present-day Ohio claimed by Connecticut until 1786) and classic Greek and Roman place names in the present-day Great Lakes region. More experienced geographers will probably find many of the regionally unique stories a good reminder of information they have heard before. In the third and final part of the book (“The Dry West”), Nostrand returns to many of his stomping grounds and the prose reflects a greater level of confidence. Readers are treated to numerous personal stories that exemplify various topics at hand. The section begins with another discussion of the upper Rio Grande and then turns sequentially to the Oregon Country (Chapter 16), the Great Basin (Chapter 17), California (Chapter 18), and the Great Plains (Chapter 19). Once again topics of discussion include each region’s economic base, settlement patterns, and some unique aspect of the region’s cultural landscape. The final chapter of the section is a bit incongruous because instead of terminating the discussion at 1900 like all previous chapters, Chapter 20 features topics that are particularly relevant to U.S. life in the final years of the twentieth century. Within all three parts of the book each chapter is broken down into three consistent subparts (cultural ecology, cultural diffusion, and cultural landscape). The topics discussed under cultural ecology focus on man–land (human–environment) interactions, mainly agricultural practices. A majority of the chapters feature discussions on land tenure practices and the topic of long lots appears in many chapters. Under cultural diffusion the main focus is on westward expansion and settlement types. My favorite subpart in each chapter is the cultural landscape. Many of the topics discussed harken back to the good old cultural geography I first learned about as a budding geographer. One of the most intriguing aspects of the book is the spotlight that Nostrand shines on twenty-one notable scholars (including Sauer, Kniffen, Meinig, Lewis, and

Zelinsky) who have shaped the field. There are some notable omissions, but for geography students new to the game, this is a wonderful resource on some of historical geography’s luminaries. Experienced historical geographers will also find the nearly two dozen vignettes captivating because they are so much more than a summary of each individual’s research contributions; we actually get to know a little bit about the person through Nostrand’s eyes. Unfortunately, the same informal, personal side that Nostrand shares about others is not provided about Nostrand himself. Written mainly as a textbook for an introductory historical geography class, the book’s strength is in its simplicity. Whereas Meinig’s (1986a, 1986b, 1986c, 2004) four-volume tomes (The Shaping of America) are beyond the reach of most readers, Nostrand’s single volume is highly accessible. It is truly a comprehensive look at the historical geography of the United States between two covers. Yet, at the same time the detailed bibliography is well-suited for anyone needing a primer on the major historical regions in the United States. Although I never attended one of Nostrand’s lectures, as I read the book there were numerous times when I could picture myself sitting in one of his classes. Nostrand’s attention to detail and keen insight are revealed in every chapter of the book; he is a master at blending history and geography. It is clear that this book was a labor of love. Despite the book’s overwhelming success, I do have some minor concerns. First, Nostrand makes a strong argument for framing the book around the regional approach. It would have been helpful, however, if he had provided some additional information and context about regions. When and where did the regional approach originate? What are the different types of regions (e.g., formal, functional, vernacular, voluntary, synthetic) and how do they relate to the historical regions of the United States? Second, the book states that “to have state boundaries define a culture region is, admittedly, a bit of a stretch. But for California, like Texas, state boundaries define an especially distinctive people and culture” (p. 249). Yet, I would argue that the influence of these two states transcends their political boundaries. For example, California’s ecology, diffusion, and built environment have had a significant impact on at least three of its neighboring states (Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon). The same can be said of Texas. In his book Imperial Texas, Meinig (1969) fully explained how Texas’s cultural ecology, cultural diffusion, and cultural landscape have influenced many states in the southern Great Plains, especially New Mexico and Oklahoma. Third, some of the examples

FALL 2018 249

are showing their age. Because this book is structured to serve as an undergraduate textbook, it would have been beneficial if the examples were more relevant to the lives of today’s students. I wonder how many millennials are intimately familiar with the work of Laura Ingalls Wilder or have watched Little House on the Prairie. Finally, we might quibble over some of the key terms used (e.g., is it the Ogalala Aquifer or the High Plains Aquifer), but the bottom line is that this book is an outstanding example of regional geography. As geospatial techniques have become the tail wagging the dog, it is refreshing to see an example of solid regional geography. Nostrand is to be commended.

250

References Meinig, D. W. 1969. Imperial Texas: An interpretive essay in cultural geography. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. ———. 1986a. The shaping of America: Atlantic America, 1492–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1986b. The shaping of America: Continental America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1986c. The shaping of America: Transcontinental America, 1820–1915. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2004. The shaping of America: A geographic perspective on 500 years of history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.



Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad Jeanine Michna-Bales. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017. 191 pp., maps, photos, notes, bibliography. $40.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-61689-565-5). Reviewed by Laura Pulido, Departments of Ethnic Studies & Geography, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR.

This is a beautiful, powerful, and deeply original book that brings together photography, history, geography, white supremacy, and antiracist struggle. The book is divided into two parts. Part I, “The Underground Railway,” features three short essays. Historian Fergus Bordewich recounts the history of the Underground Railroad in “Bound for Freedom.” In “Let Freedom Ring,” historian Eric Jackson brings the railroad alive with vignettes of the “passengers’” journeys, including that of Frederick Douglass. In “The Spirituals,” media scholar Robert Darden invokes the role of music in “powering” the railroad. In his foreword, Ambassador Andrew J. Young points to the legacy of the Underground Railroad and ongoing struggles for freedom and justice. Part II of Through Darkness to Light is an extended photo essay documenting a 1,400-mile journey of one strand of the Underground Railroad, from Louisiana to Ontario, Canada. The author, photographer Jeanine Michna-Bales, learned about the Underground Railroad as a child and realized that it crossed very close to her home in the Midwest. Eventually, she began piecing together the actual path that slaves crossed in their journey to freedom. She explains that although she undertook exhaustive research, not all sites or segments of the journey could be fully verified. Such a precise lack of knowledge, she notes, parallels the actual experience of the runaways—their path was far from certain. After assembling the route, she then went and photographed points along the way. The photos are arranged spatially, from the south to the north in the order in which a runaway would have encountered the landscape. The author

is very clear in her intent: “The goal of this photographic series is to evoke a sense of one journey out of bondage; to capture what it may have felt like to run in fear for roughly three months in pursuit of freedom” (p. 38). She has succeeded in her goal. The result is a haunting and visceral take on slavery, landscape, and place. Each photo contains a brief caption and location, which serves to narrate the journey. This narration documents numerous aspects of the journey, including directions, landscape, survival, and emotions. Examples of captions that describe the physical landscape include, “Dirt Road, outside Coldwater Michigan,” (p. 161); “Downed Tree, Wayne County, Tennessee” (p. 89); and “The River Jordan, first view of a free state, crossing the Ohio River to Indiana” (p. 117). Other captions convey the physical experience and logistics of running away, such as, “Catching a Breath, LaSalle Parish, Louisiana” (p. 49), or “Gathering Provisions, Outskirts of the Myrtle Grove Plantation” (p. 57). Still others explicitly convey the geography and directions of the railroad: “On the way to the Harkin House Station, San Jacinto, Indiana” (p. 126); and “Follow the Tracks to the First Creek, Just Outside Richland, a Free Black Community . . . Indiana” (p. 127). The final category of captions hints at the emotions and


terror that runaways must have experienced: “Fleeing the Torches, Warren County Kentucky” (p. 103); and “A Safe Place to Regroup, House of Levi Coffin . . . Fountain City Indiana” (p. 144). Finally, the caption on the last image reads, “Freedom, Canadian soil, Sarnia Ontario” (p. 180). The photographs are placed on the right side of each page spread, with many of the facing pages featuring a quote on the underground road, slavery, and abolition. For instance, the page facing the image of Levi Coffin’s house (“A Safe Place to Regroup”) has the following quote from Coffin, considered the unofficial president of the Underground Railroad: “The dictates of humanity came in opposition to the law of the land, and we ignored the law” (p. 144). Other quotes are rooted in vernacular culture, such as lyrics from the spiritual, “Following the Drinking Gourd,” which is about the Big Dipper and escaping to freedom: “For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom/If you follow the drinking gourd” (p. 128). Others are relatively unknown, such as this account of Reverend Jacob Cummings, an escaped slave: “A local grocer heard that the Smiths were mistreating their slaves. He showed Cummings a map of Lake Erie, spoke with him about Ohio and Indiana, taught him to find the North Star and determine direction by moss on the tree, and encouraged him to make a run for it. In July 1839, Cummings fled” (p. 66). The collective power of the quotes is their ability to illuminate the multiple texts, traditions, individuals, and organizations who actively opposed slavery. The first thing that struck me as I opened the book was how dark it was. The cover is black, the images are very dark, with the exception of the final two—which depict Canada—and most of the pages are black. I found this frustrating at first. Having vision problems, I need lots of light when reading. Then it dawned on me, though, that she was photographing the landscape as runaways would have experienced it, at night. Moreover, the photo essay is arranged diurnally, beginning in the evening and ending in the morning. Accordingly, the photographs at the point of departure—the plantation—are quite dark, but they become lighter as the trail shifts to Canada, symbolizing both the dawn as well as freedom. The centrality of darkness is also marked by its opposite, the many references to light. Numerous images and captions refer to the night sky, the north star, the moon, lanterns, and the like. This is a subtle but powerful move that foregrounds the difficulties, knowledge, and skills required to traverse 1,400 miles at night in a preindustrial age. Although many scholarly works have been written on the Underground Railroad and it has been depicted in story,

252

song, and film, no one that I know of has attempted to portray its extensive landscape. Several things immediately stand out about the depicted landscapes. First, they are overwhelmingly nonurban landscapes. Indeed, the author writes, “Shooting at night, listening to all the natural sounds, I was overwhelmed with a sense of how vast, strange, and forbidding these remote places must have felt to those making the journey to freedom: the cicadas, the wind rustling through the trees, water trickling in a stream, coyotes howling in the distance, bullfrogs singing” (p. 12). Images range from open, “natural” landscapes, such as bogs and forests, to abandoned buildings, farms, creeks, and rivers. This is not an urbanized journey—either then or now. This, in turn, brings up a whole series of questions regarding the evolution of place: How similar is the contemporary landscape to what the fugitives encountered? To what extent, if any, can the landscape bring us closer to understanding the experience of both captivity and flight? As I was studying the photographs, I wondered how the slaves must have perceived the landscape. Some scholarship suggests that African Americans have a limited engagement with wilderness and the “great outdoors” precisely because of the plantation, bondage, and the dehumanization associated with it. Although there is certainly a compelling case to be made for this position, there is also evidence to the contrary, as seen in a rich history of gardening and hunting, the reverse migration to the South, and deep place attachments. Was it possible for slaves to see beauty in the southern landscape given the fact that it was saturated with their blood? How might their perception of the landscape have changed as they journeyed north? Certainly, there are many accounts that convey slaves’ joy on reaching and crossing the Ohio River. This, of course, brings up fundamental questions of positionality and how power relations shape our relationship to nature and place. We are living at a moment when numerous individuals and organizations are attempting to reckon with the deep history of racial violence and white supremacy in the United States. This can be seen in widespread activism over Confederate monuments, in the Equal Justice Initiative’s effort to memorialize lynching sites in the southeastern United States (they have counted 4,000 to date) and its newly opened Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Earlier projects included Without Sanctuary, originally published in 2000, which consists of postcards and photographs of lynchings. Although all of these projects are enormously important and help a nation unable to acknowledge and process the centrality of racial violence to its very existence, few have systematically considered landscape and place. Of course, as geographers,


we know how central place and landscape were to slavery, abolition efforts, and its demise. Although Through Darkness to Light contains maps and is based on careful archival research to piece the trail together, Michna-Bales gives us much more than a spatial representation of the Underground Railroad. By using her photographs of landscapes, she strikes a deep emotional chord, as she forces us to contend with these spectral places of racial brutality. Through Darkness to Light is a wonderful example of what the geohumanities might aspire to. Focusing on the railroad also portrays a distinct spatiality of slavery. Certainly, within geography as well as cognate fields, the most frequently studied slavery sites are plantations in the South. Geographers have conducted extensive field work on former plantations as sites of cultural memory, analyzing specifically how they represent slavery. One of the limitations of plantation studies, though, is that they contribute to a spatially limited understanding

of slavery: Slavery was not a southern institution—it was a U.S. one—although we find great comfort in locating it in the South. Not only did it exist throughout much of the United States for over two centuries, but even when it was confined to the South, it still functioned as a national institution, as seen in trade, laws (e.g., the Fugitive Slave Act), culture, and the national racial formation. By depicting the path from Louisiana to Canada, not does Michna-Bales provide a much fuller and accurate geography of slavery, but she also shows the mobility of slaves, the fluidity of radical consciousness, and the degree to which abolitionists operated in broad daylight, so to speak. By focusing on the landscape of the Underground Railroad, and specifically the fact that it existed above ground, one can begin to appreciate not only the tremendous courage and conviction of all those who participated in it, but also the extent to which such consciousness and action contributed to dismantling an entrenched system of human bondage.

FALL 2018 253


Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond Lisa Funnell and Klaus Dodds. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xii and 242 pp., photos, notes, bibliography, index. $109.99 cloth (ISBN 978-1-13757023-9); $84.99 electronic (ISBN 978-1-137-57024-6). Reviewed by Robert A. Saunders, Department of History, Politics and Geography, State University of New York, Farmingdale, NY. Adopting an interdisciplinary lens to interrogate Britain’s world-famous fictional spy 007, Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond provides imminently readable and profound contemplation on the importance of popular culture in shaping everyday understandings of place in space in through “colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War contexts” (p. 12). Written via a long-distance collaboration between Lisa Funnell, Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma, and Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics provides a fresh interpretation of an iconic hero through the conceptual triad of haptics, kinesics, and proxemics. Through its larger aim of excavating the film series’ intervention in geopolitics, the text targets embodiment and emotion as the indispensable lenses through which to filter 007 and the world he inhabits, recognizing that geography, gender, and geopolitics are central to the “activities and ambiance” of one of the longest running franchises in film history (p. 221). In elevating the everyday, little things that combine to form the greater assemblage that we call geopolitics—in this case, the “agents, objects, and structures imperilling Britain and its allies” (p. 15)—the book

serves as a model for timely, meaningful, and innovative scholarship, despite occasionally drifting toward the perilous territory of scholarly fandom. Organized into seven chapters, the work is a cohesive text, also functioning as a collection of essays that can be read independently of one another (a trait that it shares with other recent monographs by Palgrave Macmillan). Excepting the introduction, the book can be divided into two equal halves: the first, penultimate, and final chapter scrutinize Bond’s role as a geopolitical actor, focusing on his body (Chapter 1), mastery of resources (Chapter 6), and ability to negotiate various spaces, places, and social practices (Chapter 7). The other chapters examine representations of Great Britain vis-à-vis three constitutive “others”: the United States (Chapter 3), the Soviet Union/Russia (Chapter 4), and East Asia (Cchapter 5). Funnell and Dodds are careful to balance their analysis across the twenty-four Bond films, beginning with Dr. No (1962) and ending with Spectre (2015), thus providing the reader with temporal as well as spatial analysis of the United Kingdom’s changing relationship with the rest of the world. This is summed up nicely via the Skyfall (2012) quote, “Our enemies are no longer known to us,” flagging up the fact that the “cartographies of global terrorism bear no resemblance to those late Cold War-era mappings” (p. 104). Although it should be pointed out that the Bond franchise frequently eschewed direct engagement with real-world geopolitics, instead opting for fantastical imaginings of transnational, corporate-terrorist (nongovernmental) organizations. Groups such as Spectre, Quantum, and the Janus Syndicate, being bent on sowing global discord, somewhat accurately predicted the increasingly complex post-1989 realm where the “good” West no longer faced off against a “bad” East in a game where certain rules always applied.


Given Bond’s notorious womanizing over the past halfcentury and changing social attitudes in the United Kingdom, it is not surprising that the authors take a critical view of the franchise’s gendering of geopolitics. Employing the concept of “hegemonic masculinity” (p. 1), Funnell and Dodds link Bond’s own identity to Britain’s fluid geopolitical self-conceptualization in the wake of loss of empire, efficaciously situating a manly Britain against a series of feminized friends and foes including ruthless Russian lesbians, ditzy U.S. blondes, and ethically compromised women of color. Temporally speaking, Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics presents a complex historiography of British ideas about gender relations, from the days of Sean Connery when women were little more than “vulnerable or even disposable” arm candy (p. 14) to the 1990s when Dame Judi Dench qua the new (female) M tells 007 (Pierce Brosnan) that he is a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” (p. 41) to the Daniel Craig era, which has seen a substantive overhaul of the series’ gender dynamics (not least of which saw the star appearing in character and in drag to commemorate International Women’s Day in 2011). Although, as the authors are quick to point out, even with the introduction of a female M, the Bond franchise “hardwires” the gendering of security, positioning a woman at home and sending a man abroad (p. 18). When it comes to gender, sex, and all that goes with these intertwined concepts, Bond—like Britain—is protean; however, no matter how the world changes, “he remains relatively the same and in a time of crisis we need a hero who embodies traditional British values and practices to save us” (p. 42). This naturally begs the question, though: “From what?”

As the reader learns, there are few places in world where Bond has not uncovered some plot against the Crown or been called into action to protect his country from the Soviet agents, extremists, or transnational criminal enterprises. In Bond’s righteous, usually unquestioning loyalty to the “mission,” it is clear that the series remains committed to the notion that the “British still have the right to police the world” (p. 132). This manifests most strongly in the chapter on the “Anglo-American Connection,” which examines the ways in which Bond functions as a rather wistful pop-culture salve for Britain’s demotion to a second-tier power after World War II.

Funnell and Dodds do a commendable job of sketching out the various threats to the United Kingdom over the history of cinematic Bond (occasionally even delving into Ian Fleming’s original source material; i.e., the novels and short stories published between 1953 and 1965). From Afro-Caribbean gangsters to North Korean terrorists to evil geniuses from Albania, the Bond films have mapped a world of insecurity that challenges Britain from every angle, especially from within as exemplified in the turncoat Agent 006 Alek Trevelyan (Sean Bean) in GoldenEye (1995). It is not just enemy peoples, though, but also places and spaces that threaten London’s interests, from the “banal and mundane” geographies of 1960s Istanbul (p. 80) to the technologically developed, “fluorescent,” and “electric” city of contemporary Shanghai (p. 126). Adapting their earlier work on the haptic power of Bond (Funnell and Dodds 2015), the authors skillfully navigate the globe as presented in the two dozen films, detailing how Bond employs his body to protect the body politic.

With regard to weaknesses, the narrations of popular cultural artefacts generally assumed precedence over a problematization or reconceptualization of geopolitics. Although the authors tapped into key questions in the field and effectively engaged with existing Bond scholarship, the integration of geographic and geopolitical literature often seemed a bit forced or somewhat of an afterthought. Moreover, there were countless missed opportunities to tie the analysis to ongoing debates in popular geopolitics, especially associated with affective landscapes as shapers of geopolitical codes, retconning iconic national heroes, and the vernacularization of popular Cold War geopolitics outside of the Anglophone West. Focusing less on plotlines and cinematic details and more on how popular culture and world politics are mutually constitutive would have deepened the text’s overall contribution to the literature. A key example of this is the book’s failure to explicitly link the villainous media baron Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) to then-News Corporation

Overall, the most interesting frame of analysis employed in the book is Funnell and Dodds’s contextualization of Bond as an elementary force, using the classical elements (fire, water, air, earth), as well as gold, diamonds, and oil as mediums of power. In “Resourceful Bond,” the focus turns to what lies beneath the earth, presenting the Bond films as a sophisticated treatment of the “geo,” and not just a commentary on the politics of empire and the (post-) Cold War. Combining interpellation and extrapolation, Funnell and Dodds march into some very interesting territory here, reminding the reader of the franchise’s exploration of geographic themes such as weaponization of the environment, space exploration, petroleum transhipment, water wars, and natural resource exploitation. By putting Britain (via Bond) in a position to control the elements, the authors argue that such power serves to enhance “Britain’s virility and vitality,” even during times of political, social, and economic decline (p. 161).

FALL 2018 255

Chairman Rupert Murdoch, despite the fact that many reviewers and fans of the film did so. Surprisingly, there was no mention of the Austin Powers films (1997–2002), which spoofed 007 to great comic effect. Although juvenile, even prurient, the franchise’s parody of 1960s misogyny, farcical depictions of “exotic” locales, and satirical renderings of the United Kingdom– United States “special relationship” have a lot to say about the Bondian Weltanschauung. Counterposing the two British secret agents (Bond and Powers) would have been an interesting way to investigate how geopolitical visions can be intertextually engaged, even as they move across different genres. This critique can be extended to include a reticence to correlate the geopolitics of Bond to that found in other films dealing with similar themes, such as Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Blade Runner (1982), the Mission: Impossible (1996–2018) and X-Men (2000–2014) franchises, and various cinematic adaptations of John Le Carré’s novels. Finally, the reader would have been better served to learn a bit more about the geopolitical fundaments of Bond given his role in shaping everyday understandings of the geopolitics of decolonization, the Cold War, and the post9/11 milieu. Ostensibly based on Britain’s first “super spy” Sidney Reilly—né Shlomo Rosenblum, a Russian-born Jew who returned to his homeland in 1918 in an attempt to install a pro-British regime, later being executed by the OGPU (Unified State Political Directorate) on Sta-

256

lin’s orders (Cook 2011)—Ian Fleming’s 007 was steeped in his creator’s own experiences in naval intelligence (Lycett 1996). Connecting this intellectual archaeology to the geopolitical stylings of Bond on the silver screen would have markedly enhanced the impact of the text as a treatment of geographies, genders, and geopolitics of the franchise. Despite these minor oversights, Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of popular geopolitics, and one that deftly links the realms of world politics and popular culture. Clearly written, cogently argued, and confidently presented, this collaboration exemplifies good research in a field that’s time has come, particularly given that a former reality television host now commands the U.S. nuclear arsenal. This text is suitable for undergraduates at all levels but will certainly not disappoint even the most seasoned specialist. Given its readability, probing analysis, and comprehensive examination of the world of Bond, it will also be of interest to serious fans of the film franchise. References Cook, A. 2011. Ace of spies: The true story of Sidney Reilly. Stroud, UK: The History Press. Funnell, L., and K. Dodds. 2015. The man with the Midas touch: The haptic geographies of James Bond’s body. Journal of Popular Film and Television 43 (3): 121–35. Lycett, A. 1996. Ian Fleming: The man behind James Bond. Nashville, TN: Turner.



The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place Rueben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. xxii and 334 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. $140.00 cloth (ISBN 9781472475091), $54.95 electronic (ISBN 9781315554464). Reviewed by Myriam HoussayHolzschuch, Institut d’Urbanisme et de Géographie alpine and UMR 5194 PACTE, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France. I am writing this from the French city of Grenoble, said to have renamed itself under the French Revolution as Grelibre, eagerly exchanging the phonetics of aristocracy for those of freedom. This oft-repeated story is unverified, which is irrelevant as long as it tells us something about place names, place naming, and their relationship to political claims. Whatever the true story might be, Grenoble/Grelibre remains an interesting place in which to read this collection, The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes. In this book, some of the most distinguished proponents of critical toponymy cover a field that has dramatically changed over the last couple of decades. Indeed, critical geographers, and other researchers, have been offering new answers to the classic “What’s in a name?” question. The purpose of this collection is to pause and reflect on the state of critical toponymy in the urban context of street names and, in so doing, to create a solid platform from which to engage with urban studies. Such a dialogue is timely: The field of critical toponymy has matured and has much to contribute to urban research, of which it could become an integral part. To this end, the col-

lection gathers classic articles dating back to the opening of the research field in the early 1990s and revisited by their various authors, for example, Palonen’s (1993) “Reading Street Names Politically: A Second Reading” and Yeoh’s (1992) “Colonial Urban Order, Cultural Politics, and the Naming of Streets in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Singapore.” Other important, but recent, pieces have been reprinted and new, insightful texts added to the very coherent and stimulating mix. In line with the pluridisciplinary nature of both urban studies and toponomy, the collection also brings together contributions from various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities—history, linguistics, political science, and geography. The richness, variety, and potential of critical toponymy also appear in the collection’s diversity of theoretical frameworks and methodologies. Its methods, for instance, range from expanding classic in-depth case study and archival work to ethnography, critical geographic information systems (GIS; as in Sotoudehnia’s piece on Dubai), and quantitative methods. It is difficult to do justice to such a rich and diverse collection. I thus engage with only two of the many themes that run through this volume: the theoretical strengths of critical toponymy and why other subfields or disciplines should be engaged with it, as well as the question of temporalities. By retracing the history of the genre, Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu’s remarkable introduction reminds us that place name studies tended to be rather encyclopedic and seemingly apolitical for a long time before critical toponymy thoroughly revived and transformed them. One of the key moves was shifting the focus from place names to place naming, studying the process of choosing a new name, or replacing an old one: This move revealed


the centrality of politics in toponymy. Gill (2005) provided a key summary: Functionally, place names enable people to locate themselves within a landscape and avoid getting lost. Intellectually, place names that are linked to the symbolic universe of the community help to locate people spiritually by linking geographical location and space with the legitimating structures of that community and its regime. Location is thereby defined in terms of the regime itself; location and direction obtain from regime symbolism. In this way, commemorative place names help to legitimate existing power structures by linking the regime’s view of itself, its past, and the world, with the seemingly mundane settings of everyday life; the regime’s legitimating symbols are interwoven with daily life in a routinized, almost unnoticed, fashion through place names. (480–81)

This tension between the everyday and the ideological, also called the “urban streetscape as a political technology of infrastructural power” (p. 1) constitutes the core of this book. The introduction weaves this main argument finely with strands of critical and new cultural geography, and identifies the three main types of street names’ critical analysis in the literature. The first one takes place within the city-text frame and engages with urban semiotics; the second understands street names as a cultural arena where the racialization and gendering of urban space are showcased and contested; the last one sees naming as a speech act à la Austin, thus recognizing the urban, named space as a performative space. This third type is therefore interested in how street names are perceived. Street naming literature also has a specific geography, which the cases studied in this collection reflect: First, colonial and postcolonial contexts are particularly fruitful sites to understand how naming is ordering—as shown in Yeoh’s Singapore; Bigon and Njoh’s Dakar and Yaoundé; and Adebanwi’s or Duminy’s South Africa. Second, socialist and postsocialist countries and cities demonstrated the force of ideological naming as a political technology to manufacture control when they went from communism to nationalism (Azaryahu’s or Vuoltenenaho and Puzey’s East Berlin; Palonen’s Budapest; Marin’s Leningrad/St. Petersburg; Drozdzewski’s Krakow; Sakaja and Stanic’s Zagreb; Palmberger’s Mostar; and Duncan and Young’s Romania). Third, the race, gender, and class divisions reflected, sustained, and contested through street naming have mostly drawn from U.S. cities (as in Alderman and Inwood’s or Rose-Redwood’s work). The empirical analyses of street names presented in this collection engage with a variety of theories, thus demonstrating critical toponymy’s capacity to contribute to wider theoretical debates in urban studies and, in turn,

258

the necessity of incorporating a toponymic analysis when studying various aspects of urban life. Examples are linguistics and semiotics as practiced by Austin, Todorov, and the Moscow/Tartu School, and even the Aristotelian concepts of rhetoric shed much light on how the city-text is written. Simultaneously, incorporating Massey’s notion of place prevents the discourse analysis from reducing the city to text. Social theory is also called on: Adebanwi suggests that naming should be seen as a Foucauldian conduct of conducts cum dispositif, whereas Rose-Redwood uses Bourdieu’s symbolic capital to understand how certain names are deemed “appropriate” for specific areas, depending on their racial and social characteristics. Finally, Gramscian Marxism is an especially relevant theoretical framework, not only in its later iterations by Laclau and Mouffe, but at a time when geographers consistently engage with Gramsci, Vuolteenaho and Puzey’s analysis of “Gramsci as critical toponymist” (p. 77) is highly welcome. They return to one of his early, as yet not translated texts (La Citta futura. 1917–1918. A cura di Sergio Caprioglio; Gramsci 1982) on the changes in Turin’s street names. The young Gramsci deplored the erasure of “the traditional names of popular Turin” and, therefore, “the memory of a moment of collective life,” constituting a “common patrimony of memories, of affection, binding individuals together more strongly with the ties of solidarity through memory” (p. 78). These organic names are replaced by what Gramsci disparagingly called “medal names.” Vuolteenaho and Puzey enrich this binary analysis by integrating the later Gramsci notion of hegemony. They point to the need “to address the complexity of toponymic power related to the reciprocal relationship between the rulers (elite) and the ruled (civil society [sic]),” therefore looking at “covert strategies to affect people’s sensibilities” (p. 79). In so doing, and in line with many of the collection’s authors and editors, they direct us toward the question of urban residents’ reception of place names. Possible links with contemporary debates in urban studies appear progressively throughout all the case studies. An examination of the neoliberal city and urban financialization processes should not overlook the strategic importance of naming and renaming in urban marketing, whether at the municipal level, when selling naming rights to attract private investors, or as one of the amenities promoted in real estate development. Suburbs indeed offer a fascinating field of bucolic, flowery, often pseudoTuscan, and highly standardized street names, ranging from Los Angeles to Cape Town to the French suburbs. Street names’ mundane character intersects neatly with a Lefebvrian analysis of everyday life and Robinson’s postcolonial calls to examine cities’ ordinariness. The study


of public spaces, social movements, and the right to the city has much to do with toponymic activism: Naming and renaming is not only “symbolic.” Adebanwi reminds us that the furor that renaming attempts engender, as well as the constant aggressions of navigating a city named for, according to the then South African president, Thabo Mbeki, white “land-grabbing murderers” (quoted by Adebanwi, p. 226), apartheid architects, and Nazi sympathizers, cannot be underestimated. In their turn, Alderman and Inwood remind us that naming also speaks to issues of spatial justice, regarding distribution, recognition, and procedure. This book teaches us that looking at street names also provides very concrete insights into the way space and time interact. A first level is obviously that street names are a spatial feature of everyday urban life. There is much more to it, though: Street names often have a commemorative character, thus bringing the past into the present. Here again, critical toponymy builds on Massey’s theorization of space as the simultaneity of stories so far. Indeed, the toponymic streetscape works as space–time. More to the point, when a particular street has changed name several times, as happened in many of the postsocialist cases studied in this collection, multiple pasts are brought to the present, depending on which street name is used. Each one evokes at least two different pasts: the period of time during which it was officially used and the period it referenced and commemorated. Moreover, a particular selection of street names evokes a set of norms and values, tells us who we should be, and, in so doing, invokes the future. Street names do spatialize multiple temporalities. Third, renamings themselves have a specific temporality: They often occur in “post-” (socialist, colonial, apartheid, etc. ) situations, in moments of new beginnings and foundations for which the toponymic past has to be cleansed. According to Marin, name changes function as a temporal boundary making. Major political cycles are inscribed in street names, but, as many authors show, minor cycles are, too, because there are different phases of naming

within a naming period. Fourth, the use of specific street names is closely linked to questions of memory, of urban nostalgia or of place making. Finally, Duncan and Young remind us not to focus solely on changes, but also on toponymic continuity, what they call “‘left-over’ toponymic landscapes” (p. 186), and on that which produced them. Toponymy has always offered precise case studies brimming with empirical richness, and critical toponymy, as once again demonstrated in this book, has retained this endearing quality. The rigorous and innovative engagement with theory practiced by critical toponymy, its attention to power relationships, and the many avenues of research it keeps opening make it a worthy interlocutor for urban studies, especially for urban politics. In addition, The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes offers the pedagogical exemplarity of precise cases and offers its reader moments of sheer delight in an outrageous naming story such as when the white residents of East 5th Street in Greenville, North Carolina, refused to rename their street in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for racist reasons, citing the heritage value of a numbered street name! Then there is the story of Tel Aviv’s shady mayor naming an alley after his lover’s surname. Engaging and thought-provoking place-naming studies make for great geographical storytelling by weaving together urban residents’ embodied experiences, the tactics of artful protagonists, (often) extreme political situations, territorial mythologies, fruitful engagement with social theory, and strong researcher reflexivity. If, as Camus said, “to misname things is to add to the misery of the world,” thinking carefully about naming, which this book does, is a requirement for all of us. Reference Gill, G. 2005. Changing symbols: The renovation of Moscow place names. The Russian Review 64: 480–503. Gramsci, A. 1982. La Citta futura. 1917–1918. A cura di Sergio Caprioglio. Turin, IT: G. Einaudi.

FALL 2018 259


Transitional Justice and the Politics of Inscription: Memory, Space and Narrative in Northern Ireland Joseph S. Robinson. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. xviii and 224 pp., figures, glossary, bibliography, index. $140.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-138-29151-5). Reviewed by Sara McDowell, School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Ulster University, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK.

In April 2018, Northern Ireland marked the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement that sought to bring an end to decades of violent conflict and ethnonationalist division. The anniversary of such a watershed moment in the region’s past has invited widespread reflection. Robinson’s timely book explores one of the most problematic and challenging questions facing every transitional society: How might deeply divided communities, grappling with traumatic and unresolved histories, deal with the past? Legacy issues continue to pose almost insurmountable problems in Northern Ireland. Battles for hegemonic victimhood, demands for historical inquiries, and disagreements over if, where, and how to commemorate the dead continue to punctuate a volatile political landscape. Robinson attempts to address some of these issues, using Northern Ireland as a case study to comment on much broader debates occurring within the field of transitional justice. His argument is simple: It is only by carefully decoding and understanding the minutiae of the complex ways in which memory shapes, molds, and frames narratives of the past in the minds of communities and individuals that we can truly understand the

dynamics of transitional space. Tapping into marginalized and silenced voices, namely those in society who are often hidden behind what he argues is the “antagonistic politics of fear and division,” is at the crux of transitional justice mechanisms. Robinson urges for a more subtle appraisal of the rhetoric of “national reconciliation” and asks the reader to instead consider the significance of a politics of public memory that might engage a multiplicity of voices in a more vibrant debate over the ways in which a difficult past could, or should, be remembered. This book could conceivably resonate with a wide readership. It begins by briefly sketching the contextual landscape, offering a potted history of the development of the conflict on the island of Ireland, and introducing the genesis of divergent territorial and religious identities for readers who are unfamiliar with the context of the Northern Ireland conflict. Here Robinson helpfully provides an insight into some of the nuances of identity politics and the complexities and sensitivities surrounding discourse. There is also a welcome discussion of the ways in which practitioners and policymakers in Northern Ireland attempted to set the tone for transitional justice in the wake of the conflict. This helps the reader understand some of the dissonant narratives, resistance, and challenges. What follows are six conceptually and empirically rich chapters that would be of interest not simply to scholars of transitional justice and peace building, but to those interested in the practices and processes of memory (and their spatial dynamics) more generally. There is an accessibility here, too, that will undoubtedly resonate with victims and survivors of conflict and to those interested


in measuring the relative “success” of a peace process in a deeply divided society. In unraveling the ways in which those killed, injured, and traumatized are either included or excluded from transitional justice processes, Robinson places testimony firmly at the crux of his own narrative. His arguments are drawn from a set of in-depth interviews with fifty-two “memory curators” that deal with the complex concepts of victimhood, memory, and place in Northern Ireland. These curators are individuals who experienced the conflict directly. Some lost, sacrificed, fought, or defended. Many experienced trauma or were injured. These stories, testimonies, and perspectives chart the practices and processes of remembering across scale, time, and place. Offering an insight into the realities of warfare, loss, trauma, and sacrifice, they are powerful reminders of the devastating and lasting impact of violence. They are also indicative of the myriad ways in which a society fractured by violence and ethnonationalist tensions attempts to make sense of its past. Robinson strongly suggests that although there are continued disputes over a hierarchy of victimhood in many transitional societies, there is no hierarchy of testimony. One testimony or perspective is not any “better” or convincing than the other. He refutes the idea that remembering the dead is simply about zerosum point scoring, or as he puts it, “ethnocommunarian one-upmanship.” The testimonies are embedded within a detailed and expansive discussion of secondary literatures and multidisciplinary perspectives. The conceptual framework is inspired in part by Verdery’s (1999) seminal work on the political lives of dead bodies, which invites the reader to think more broadly about the ways in which bodies are used in the aftermath of conflict to order the present and construct particular frames for postconflict space. The dead, as Robinson expands, can be used to challenge and disrupt the structures and narratives that “justified” their killing in the first place. Victims, he suggests, are part of a complex morphology with multiple understandings. Robinson covers vast ground in this book, reviewing the burgeoning literature on the construction of social memory, the relationship between memory and place, the politics of inscription, and the idea of social hauntings. One of the book’s strongest contributions is, perhaps, the application of Agamben’s (2005) thoughts on a state of exception to transitional justice frameworks. In the context of war and conflict, a state of exception is often at the crux of efforts to legitimize acts of violence perpetrated against the “other” through the process of dehumanization. Agamben employed the term to illustrate

how individuals or entities have the power to suspend the law at a time of “real or supposed political crisis.” The reader is invited to reexamine acts of violence through the lens of combatants. Robinson argues that combatant organizations in Northern Ireland operated within a state of exception to justify their campaigns of violence. This involved dehumanizing the bodies of either their enemies or other “collateral” bodies caught up in fighting. This chapter is particularly powerful and strikingly captures how individuals with lives, emotions, and identities can become almost invisible within conflict situations. It begins with a discussion of the relationship between the daughter of a member of the British Conservative Party, who was killed by an Irish Republican Army bomb in Brighton in 1984, and one of the men responsible for his death. They first appeared in a documentary, The Forgiveness Project, in 2001, talking about their respective experiences. In the documentary the daughter “forgives” the combatant for her narrative to be “heard,” and the combatant acknowledges her loss but stresses that the actions of his organization were justified. Republicans, like those involved in the Brighton bombing, operated under the “just war paradigm,” defending the Catholic, Nationalist, Republican community against British oppressors in Ireland who, in their eyes, were there illegally. British security services were then legitimate targets for Republicans, as were those who worked for them in some context. There is also an interesting, if potentially contentious, discussion about how communities sometimes facilitated the dehumanization of specific killings while they pushed back against some others. In the postceasefire years, Republicans have contributed to emphasize the threat and render the bodies of their victims invisible. The Loyalist narrative follows a similar process. Justifications for a plethora of atrocities committed against Catholics, Nationalists, and Republicans are, as Robinson states, “only intelligible in the state of exception, which in turn depends on the widespread and at least tacit acceptance of an existential threat . . . against ‘working-class Protestantism.’” This feeds the idea that Loyalism was persistently under siege throughout the conflict. For members of the British security forces, violence in Northern Ireland was a conflict between two disputant factions (Republicanism and Loyalism). They represented themselves as a neutral arbitrator and refused to see the conflict as a war, a representation consistently challenged by many. Robinson suggests that British policy bears a “significant responsibility for catalysing the Republican state of exception.” They, too, were guilty of operating a state of exception, most notably through a policy of internment

FALL 2018 261

that was orchestrated principally against young Catholic men suspected of being involved with Republican paramilitaries (and then extended to Protestants who were suspected of being involved with Loyalist paramilitaries). Robinson suggests that there was a “casual racism” evident in some of the testimonies collected by soldiers stationed in Northern Ireland in the Troubles, which is not uncommon, he argues, in war zones where there is a need to dehumanize the enemy. This material is, by its very nature, difficult to navigate, but Robinson manages to do with care and sensitivity. Memory, Robinson writes, is dissonant by nature. This dissonance emerges at various points of the discussion, not least in the analysis of the human toll of appropriating dead bodies for political ends. This part of the book draws on difficult and emotive testimony from individuals who lost loved ones. Chapter 7, the poignantly titled “It Should Never Be Lost,” strongly pushes back against the state of exception and works to rehumanize individuals killed in conflict. There is a vibrancy to these narratives

262

that moves away from the one-dimensional representations of victims of conflict. The dead are made visible and given a voice and identity, beyond what has been stripped away by their killing. There are lessons here that reverberate far beyond the case study of Northern Ireland. In sum, this book has much to offer. It is well written and engaging and despite the heaviness of much of the testimony manages to find light and hope in the splintering of memory. In urging scholars working in transitional societies and on transitional justice issues to critically reappraise the nuances of remembering, Robinson paves the way for new forms of resistance. References Agamben, G. 2005. State of exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Verdery, K. 1999. The political lives of dead bodies: Reburial and postsocialist change. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.



Celestial Mechanics: A Tale for a Mid-Winter Night William Least Heat-Moon. New York, NY: Three Rooms Press, 2018. 385 pp., map, illustrations. $19.95 paper (ISBN 978-1941110-58-4). Reviewed by David J. Nemeth, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH. Don’t let the stars get in your eyes, Don’t let the moon break your heart. —Slim Willet and the Brush Cutters (1952)

I am reviewing here the 2018 paperback edition of William Least Heat-Moon’s latest book, Celestial Mechanics: A Tale for a Mid-Winter Night. It is a darkly ethereal psychogeographical thriller, and a deceptive, delicious, page-turning treat. I most highly recommend it to old-school U.S. cultural landscape geographers who might also be Stephen King fans. On the book’s cover, the famous author’s unconventional surname, William Least Heat-Moon, deservedly looms large in bold, white-hot type against a starlit midnight sky. Just below, the jagged silhouette of distant mountain range, crowned by an ethereal glow, stretches from left to right. This might be a fata morgana. In the foreground is a murky, reflective shallow sea the color of stardust. It looks like a desert playa, just following a deluge. The mountain chain bifurcates the cover design into top and bottom halves. They are near mirror images. The top half seems real, and the bottom half appears surreal. This cover image, all considered, reminds me of the desert landscape facing eastward at daybreak from the safe confines of Phoenix, Arizona, and toward the foreboding Superstition Mountains.

This cover art is an effective moodsetter for this particular edition of this particular book: chilling and ominous. It is an apt forewarning to prospective readers of the paperback edition of Celestial Mechanics that the story that unfolds between the covers is going to be dark, and that they are in for an unusual and unexpected Heat-Moon reading experience. William Least Heat-Moon is the nom de plume of William Lewis Trogdon. He is perhaps the most successful and renowned founder of the distinctive literary genre that comprises the body of late twentieth-century, nonfiction, U.S. road stories. Classic works in the Heat-Moon canon are his beloved Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982), the aforementioned PrairyErth: A Deep Mapping (1991); River-Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America (1999); Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (2009); and Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories from the Road (2013). Heat-Moon’s literary cohort includes those talented few gifted writers who early on in the post-Korean Conflict era mastered this unquestionably geographical road-story genre: Kerouac, Steinbeck, Wolfe, and Pirsig are notable examples. Surprisingly, given their shared subject matter, not one among them earned an academic degree in geography. I once asked Heat-Moon if he had ever taken a geography class in college. He replied, “I’ve not had a class in geography since the fifth grade—but then it was my favorite subject.” To this, he added, “My most geographical book is PrairyErth: A Deep Mapping.” Indeed, Heat-Moon’s bestselling classics invariably feature maps at their cores— this one included. Maps included are the quintessential litmus test for any “real” geographer, and so Heat-Moon


is a real geographer to the extent that he consistently structures the narratives for his most successful published books around maps. The combined legacy in print of Heat-Moon and his fellow doyens of the road story literary genre is now huge in both volume and impact. It has left a unique Jurassic-sized footprint in the annals of U.S. literature. Heat-Moon, the last living member of his cohort, could probably choose to exploit the nostalgia of his baby boomer fan base by continuing to extend the legacy of the “authentic” road story genre far into the future, yet he does not. Instead, he downshifts his fast-moving nonfiction career while it is still running at high RPMs (readers per minute) to risk publishing Celestial Mechanics, his experimental debut in writing a dark, satirical fiction. When Wolf (2014), a professional journalist, interviewed Heat-Moon at home in the summer of 2014, he asked, “What are you writing now?” Heat-Moon responded: I’ve just finished a novel. [T]he story is built upon the ancient and absolutely crucial struggle to control dominance of self in order to embrace an existence massively larger than our own tiny assemblage of fourteen-billionyears-old atoms. If that sounds highfalutin, let me tone it down by adding that it’s a story of ghosts, fata morganas, witchery, disappearances, a maleficent ravine, deep sinkholes, everything hung on the question of what on earth is really happening. (italics added)

“What on earth is really happening” to Salas Fortunato, the protagonist of Celestial Mechanics, was first revealed to the world when the independent publisher Three Rooms Press released the book in its initial hardcover edition, in 2017. The book then mysteriously morphed into an unusual “twice-told tale” in 2018, when Three Rooms Press boldly released a dramatically redesigned paperback edition. Strangely, and perhaps fortuitously, the redesigned paperback enables the same Heat-Moon story—word for word—to become wide open to alternative contrasting interpretations. There is the “high falutin” philosophical story that Heat-Moon in part introduced earlier, and there is the toned-down and darker version of the story, the details of which I have italicized. It is this darker story that my interpretive review here in particular highly favors and recommends. In this darker story, Silas “It’s all about Othering” Fortunato is the main protagonist. He seems a blend of Henry David Thoreau, Ichabod Crane, and Carl Sagan. Although altruistic, erudite, and contemplative, Silas is also overzealous, sanctimonious, and hubristic.

264

He arrives a stranger to small town located in a southcentral Midwest state. He is an eligible bachelor, an aspiring playwright, and—most significantly—an amateur astronomer. He has inherited 100 acres of land known by locals as Old Sachem Hill. He perceives this piece of real estate, with its tall Italianate villa farmhouse overlooking a deep pond, as his personal Walden. He refers to the property as “the Hundred,” meaning “his Hundred,” and so savors his pride of new ownership. Silas no sooner anchors himself on his Hundred than he launches a lofty, cockamamie plan. It involves building a stairway atop his minimansion leading to his own personal stargazing platform. Viewing the celestial vault in darkness and quietude from that privileged station will enable him to become one with the heavens, while unlocking its secrets. Moving ahead, he proceeds to court, in sequence, the attentions of three attractive, strong-minded young women. He shares with them infatuating stories of his hopes and dreams, meanwhile leading them to assume that he is listening closely and sympathetically when they share with him their own beliefs and aspirations. These comely sounding boards are (1) Evelyn Dolores Dominique “It’s all about Me!” Heppermann, (2) Celeste “God’s Will be Done” (also a Heppermann), and (3) the singular “It is what it is, does what it does” Kyzmyt. Dominique is an ambitious, assertive, scheming, self-centered sociopath and real estate agent. Her antipode is the gentle Celeste, Dominique’s (understandably) estranged sister. Celeste is a wavering novitiate who has resigned herself to a Dominican nunnery. She enters the orbit of Silas and becomes a frequent visitor to Old Sachem Hill after he marries her sister. Once married, Silas and Dominique move onto Old Sachem Hill and discover the hard way about settling down with a haunted landscape so close at hand. It is a place where Walpurgis Night soon begins to come around every night (and day), to their everlasting distress. Celeste then witnesses—and her close proximity helps expedite—the slow implosion of the marriage. Then Dominique suddenly, mysteriously, disappears. The shock of her unknown whereabouts, and the slow revelation of her hidden calculated deceits and betrayals, drive Silas into depressions and deliriums, at which point Kyzmyt also appears and “become there” for Silas.


Oddly, Silas alone in Celestial Mechanics encounters and converses with Kyzmyt. He surmises she is a Wiccan of Caddoan ancestry, a furtive recluse, and secure in the company of a few grimalkins. Her hideaway is a rundown rental property located at the far fringes of his hundred acres, adjacent to ancient Indian burial grounds. According to a grizzled, old brush cutter named Pogue, the Widow Delarunes, a white witch, was the previous occupant—until the day he discovered her dead body inside those premises. Kyzmyt claims to Silas that the Widow was her mother. If Silas is Ulysses in Celestial Mechanics, then Kyzmyt is his Circe. Silas fancies that if he can lure one or all of these lovelies up onto the stargazing platform that he has built atop his house, he can win their hearts and minds and convert them to sharing his own convictions. Dominique, for one, stubbornly refuses to humor Silas or climb on his ladder. In contrast, Celeste innocently acquiesces, and clambers up the rungs to succumb. And Kyzmyt? Unlike Silas, who only reckons he is wise, Kyzmyt is wise (although ironically otherworldly), and wise enough to not to risk alienating herself from Nature on Old Sachem Hill by ascending Silas’s self-delusional stairway to the stars. Figure 1 is the mental map Silas draws of his Hundred to impress Dominique during their courtship (p. 48). This is the only map in CM and occupies the heart of its narrative. Silas’s map (Figure 1) can effectively guide Heat-Moon’s readers along the tortuous path of his narrative as it unfolds like a crime scene on the Hundred, then temporarily journeys Out West and off the map to become a noir detective thriller. Out West, the mystery of Dominique’s disappearance builds rapidly, moving beyond the Superstition Mountains: to Phoenix, to Las Vegas, and to Area 51! From there Heat-Moon’s narrative path circles back to Old Sachem Hill, where it achieves a discombobulated, disconcerting denouement. For prospective readers of Celestial Mechanics who are cultural landscape geographers yet unfamiliar with postmodern psychogeographical storytelling and mapping, I recommend Shade (1985). The topographic detail included on Silas’s map implies that he has systematically come to “know” the orderly extent of his inherited estate, including the locations of its key contents, but only superficially and as real property. At the same time, Silas refuses to acknowledge that there

Figure 1. Silas’s mental map of his Hundred (reproduced with permission).

could be any disorderly supernatural and haunted subjects lurking about on his inherited estate. These wraiths and such constitute nonobservable aspects of Old Sachem Hill that Silas mentally bans from his rigorous, rationally empirical worldview—and thus that go missing from the perceptual map he draws of his property. Supernatural beings and every other aspect of the occult have entirely escaped the purviews of Silas’s mental map. This raises the question of whether or not Silas Fortunato is a “rightful and appropriate” heir to Old Sachem Hill. Silas owns the property, but his obsession with stargazing has blinded him to its spiritual and supernatural worth. Kyzmyt counsels Silas, “To believe what you see before you is everything that’s before you is to live in blindness” (p. 223). Unfortunately, he does not catch the drift of her sage advice. Silas’s map features an old icehouse located dead center on his property. Its dark history is a key contributor to the

FALL 2018 265

local rumor that Old Sachem Hill is haunted. Is there a poltergeist lurking therein? If so, does it have the agency to do Silas harm? Heat-Moon gives readers whose minds are open to the occult a lot to ponder. A cosmic question inspired in my own mind by the centrality of the icehouse in this book’s storyline—and its centrality on Silas’s mental map—is “Can one person’s propitious axis mundi can be another person’s ill-fated black hole?” A major mystery in Celestial Mechanics is who among Silas’s three sirens most deserves the attentions and ardor of this lost and rudderless Ulysses. Even more important, which one of the three lovelies finally gets to take him “home” (p. 385). Heat-Moon’s satirical novel is full of spooky, magical realism. Sentient readers are free to focus their mind’s eye between the lines in the book to visualize and validate to those myriad supernatural beings crowding the sinister paths of the Hundred, all searching and hungering for Silas’s recognition and respect. Frustration mobilizes their agitation. They feed on the crisis that brews between Silas and Dominique, and the plot boils over with the disappearance of Dominique. Then all hell breaks loose, with the entire phantasmal population of Old Sachem Hill—which grows to include Silas himself—stumbling about day and night in zombiefied noctambulation. “Old school” cultural landscape geographers might have once agreed with Salter (2001) when he famously opined that there is “no bad landscape” (105). Salter made this truth claim before the full flowering of a plethora of “anything goes” postmodern cultural geographies, however, including, for example, that Venusian flytrap called “dark tourism.” Is not Auschwitz a prime example of a “bad” landscape? These days a Silas Fortunato as a geography teacher could successfully organize self-supporting student field trips (marketed as “experiential learning” for credit). Alter-

266

natively, as an entrepreneurial Silas Fortunato, he could organize profitable guided bus tours and haul Generations X, Y, and Z thrill-seekers to haunted Old Sachem Hill to wallow in its dark supernatural landscape. His tour brochure might tell this story: “Here is Old Sachem Hill. It is a veritable brownfield of bad vibes. While the witches and wraiths that haunt this special place are very different from the sort of screamers that populate, for example, a Brocken Mountain in Germany, they did once rise up in silent retribution to complain about the disrespectful behavior of their new, negligent, steward and landlord, a feckless insentient stranger named Silas Fortunato, now deceased.” ORCID David J. Nemeth

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7188-4451

References Least Heat-Moon, W. 1982. Blue highways: A journey into America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. ———. 1991. PrairyErth: (a deep map). Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin. ———. 1999. River-horse: The logbook of a boat across America. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin. ———. 2009. Roads to Quoz: An American mosey. New York, NY: Little, Brown. ———. 2013. Here, there, elsewhere: Stories from the road. New York, NY: Little, Brown. Salter, C. L. No bad landscape. Geographical Review 91 (1–2): 105–12. Shade, L. R. 1985. On mental maps. UCLA Map Library Newsletter 5 (2): 5–16. Willet, S. 1952. Don’t let the stars (get in your eyes). Recorded by Slim Willet with the Bush Cutters. [1952; 78 rpm, vinyl]. Hollywood, CA: 4 Star Records. Wolf, R. 2014. A conversation with William Least HeatMoon. Stay Thirsty Magazine. https://www.staythirsty media.com/201407–085/html/201407-wolf-williamleast-heat-moon.html (last accessed 15 April 2018).



The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers Martin Doyle. New York, NY: Norton, 2018. 349 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, illustrations, notes, index. $26.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-393-24235-5). Reviewed by Ellen Wohl, Department of Geosciences, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO. Martin Doyle’s new book The Source is a well-written and unique account of the history of engineering rivers within the continental United States. Although other books have discussed at least aspects of this subject, The Source is distinctive in placing river engineering within the broadest perspective of environmental and economic history. Doyle effectively situates river engineering in the context of contemporary societal attitudes and science and engineering knowledge, as might be expected, but then he goes beyond this and delves into how contemporary politics, government, and finance influenced river engineering during different periods of U.S. history. Perhaps most impressively, Doyle weaves together these disparate aspects of understanding river engineering in a compelling narrative that includes both specific, technical details and historical anecdotes. As an example of the latter, I have read many accounts of the development of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, but none of these included the human side of the story that Doyle tells in describing how Herbert Hoover, who oversaw the negotiations, strictly limited the number of commissioners involved in the negotiations and sequestered them at a remote guest ranch in New Mexico to make sure the job got done. This accounting of the human stories behind river engineering is unusual in books that provide the level of engineering and technological detail of The

Source. Doyle also enlivens the narrative by interspersing interviews with people representing diverse aspects of contemporary river science and management and accounts of the personalities behind important historical turning points in river engineering. Another particularly attractive aspect of The Source is the highly engaging writing. Those of us who write for peer-reviewed journals learn to write in a very specific manner that, although clear and concise, might not be very entertaining. Once mastered, this style is difficult to break out of, but Doyle succeeds beautifully. I read this book much faster than I expected to because it held my interest by opening an entirely new perspective on the history of rivers in the United States and by presenting material in clear and graceful prose. The five parts of the book recount successive historical developments relevant to river engineering. “Federalism” describes early alterations of rivers associated with navigation and flood control. This section lays the foundation for understanding changes through time in attitudes regarding the respective roles of local communities, states, and the federal government in engineering rivers. “Sovereignty and Property” describes how water came to be valued as a commodity that could be purchased, but that could also give rise to contentious disputes among private individuals, corporations, and different levels of government. “Taxation” discusses the history of river pollution and water treatment largely within the context of technology and government. “Regulation” describes the history of dams and “Conservation” summarizes the development of river restoration techniques. These five sections do not represent a strict temporal progression. In each section, the discussion can range back to the co-


lonial era or the early years of the republic to describe issues relevant to the focus of the section, but the general effect of the five sections is to move from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. This structure works very well in developing a coherent story of river engineering in the United States. For the reasons just outlined, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in rivers, the history of environmental alteration and natural resources in the United States, and the economic and technological contexts in which river engineering occurs. I must admit, however, that by the end of the book I was disappointed that this environmental history of river engineering missed what I consider a fundamental component of thinking about rivers. At various points in The Source, there is some attention given to why different forms of river engineering caused unanticipated problems, from reliance on artificial levees for flood control that led to accelerated development in flood-prone areas, to the blithe assumption that rivers could continually self-purify that led to grotesque levels of raw sewage being dumped into rivers. What I missed in the book is a clear and thorough explanation of rivers as ecosystems, which I think would have made The Source even more effective. I think understanding a river as an ecosystem is critical for at least one reason: interconnectedness. By the early twenty-first century, anyone with even rudimentary claims to environmental literacy has heard over and over that the individual components of ecosystems are intricately and inextricably intertwined. This is relevant to rivers because it implies that if you want to “produce” more fish, for example, you cannot do this in anything resembling a natural manner (as opposed to hatcheries) without attention to every aspect of the river ecosystem that supports the fish. This means not just installing a few habitat structures, but understanding and managing for the land cover and water, sediment, and nutrient yields across the watershed; the flow regime and water chemistry; the channel morphology, substrate, and stability of the active channel; the connectivity of the channel with the floodplain and the underlying hyporheic zone; the food subsidies between adjacent riparian environments and the channel (e.g., emergent aquatic insects feeding not just fish but also riparian birds and spiders, and litterfall from the riparian zone providing the base of the stream food web); the predators and prey of the fish and competition from introduced species; the ability of the fish to move upstream and downstream during different periods of the year and different stages of their life cycle; and so on. The unwieldy length of the preceding sentence

268

reflects the complexity of the exchanges that sustain a fully functional river ecosystem. The number of clauses also reflects the enormous difficulty of attempting to manage rivers as ecosystems. It is likely not enough to put in a habitat structure or reconfigure a few meanders if the other components of the watershed have been fundamentally altered by human activities. I stress this point because I think that comprehending the true implications of the ubiquity and intensiveness of river engineering in the United States is necessary to understand why contemporary efforts to manage rivers in a more environmentally sustainable manner are so ineffective. The Source largely ignores the environmental effects of river engineering until the fifth and final part of the book, and then the book largely skims the surface of the topic. Dam removal is discussed, for example, without having fully explained why dams fundamentally alter rivers in ways beyond blocking fish migration, and river restoration is introduced without developing a compelling argument for why effective river restoration is vitally needed. So much recent science could be brought to bear here, from the extraordinarily high extinction rates of freshwater fauna in the United States relative to terrestrial organisms, to the enormous problems with nitrate levels in freshwater and near-shore environments, or the progressive drying of the U.S. landscape as a result of wetland loss and reduced groundwater recharge, which has led to exacerbated flooding, reduced water quality, declining aquifers, and loss of habitat and biodiversity. By not creating this context for understanding rivers as ecosystems, The Source misses the opportunity to explore one of the most important societal and scientific issues surrounding contemporary river restoration—namely, that most of it does not restore river ecosystems. For more than a decade now, the river science community has been increasingly vocal in calling attention to the fact that much river restoration as currently practiced is more or less a form of green-washing: a contemporary version of river engineering that, although intended to produce ecosystem services such as improved water quality, commonly fails to do so. National-scale compilations such as those by Emily Bernhardt and Margaret Palmer clearly indicate that the majority of U.S. river restoration efforts are heavily influenced by an engineering mentality that continues to emphasize control of form and function via intensively designed structures. In the case of river restoration, the structure is typically the channel morphology, which is treated as analogous to a bridge or a dam in that it is a detailed configuration that is carefully designed and then fixed in place. These newly reengi-


neered rivers do not function like natural rivers because natural rivers have physical complexity, connectivity, and what Graf described as physical integrity—the ability to adjust and change in response to changing inputs of water and sediment. The Source is wonderfully effective at integrating economics into understanding the history of U.S. river engineering. The book is less effective at looking beyond economics—which might deserve to be called the dismal science because it reduces everything to commodities and money—and I think this omission is dangerous. The latest twist in commodifying rivers is the idea of stream mitigation banking, in which a specified length of a river can be degraded if another length of river elsewhere is restored. This feel-good strategy ignores the fact that restoration seldom returns a river to a fully functional state, thus allowing the continued net loss of river ecosystems. Although some of the most egregious mistakes of historical river engineering in the United States might be excused on the grounds of ignorance of how river ecosystems operate, success in contemporary river restoration is not limited by a lack of scientific understanding. Instead, improving the most widely used approaches to engineer-

ing and restoring rivers requires overcoming the more difficult barrier of changing societal attitudes toward rivers. On balance, I highly recommend The Source. The book largely delivers on the promise of the subtitle, explaining how rivers made the United States and the technologies and rationale people used to remake U.S. rivers. I learned a great deal about rivers in the context of U.S. history and the book was mostly a pleasure to read. Understand, though, that The Source does not transcend the traditional engineering hubris that a river ecosystem can be shaped as we choose without unpredictable and potentially devastating consequences. Because of this, I suggest a companion book, Fausch’s (2015) For the Love of Rivers: A Scientist’s Journey. An eminent fish ecologist, Fausch explained in clear and accessible prose exactly why rivers should be thought of as ecosystems. Think of The Source and For the Love of Rivers as a good wine and food pairing: Understanding and enjoyment are enhanced by each component of the pair. Reference Fausch, K. 2015. For the love of rivers. A scientist’s journey. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press.

FALL 2018 269


Lake Bonneville: A Scientific Update Charles G. Oviatt and J. F. Shroder, Jr., eds. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier, 2016. xxxvi and 659 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, bibliography, index. $175.00 (ISBN 978-0444635907). Reviewed by J. Michael Daniels, Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Denver, Denver, CO.

Lake Bonneville, the Pleistocene precursor to contemporary Great Salt Lake, represents an iconic locality in the history of earth science. First identified by G. K. Gilbert in 1872, documented in the 1875 Wheeler Survey report, and later examined in detail in Gilbert’s Lake Bonneville (1890), this North American paleolake has continued to generate sustained scientific interest over the past century and a half. The volume under review here, Lake Bonneville: A Scientific Update, attempts a comprehensive synthesis of this vast literature, including the most recent advances and developments. As a synthesis and update, the volume is a resounding success. The breadth of research accumulated in its 659 pages is as impressive as the depth of analysis in each of its twenty-three chapters. Beyond synthesis, though, the book accomplishes something even more remarkable for an edited volume: It serves as a model for truly comprehensive, interdisciplinary earth science scholarship. By updating the story of Lake Bonneville, the editors and authors have exemplified how the scientific understanding of Earth’s biophysical environments (past and present) is best achieved through patient, robust, collaborative, and ongoing research that continues to revise and refine its conclusions through careful analysis of the field-based empirical record itself. As Vic Baker describes in the volume’s foreword, this is a proj-

ect that fulfills the “critical role of the Earth sciences to let the Earth tell us,” “[r]ather than us telling, through our assumption-based model[s], how the Earth will be” (p. xxxiii). Toward the end of the Pleistocene, Lake Bonneville was the largest pluvial lake in western North America: At its maximum extent it covered over 50,000 km2 and stood about 1560 m above modern sea level (~280 m higher than Great Salt Lake today). Among the most conspicuous clues to its existence are the paleoshorelines exposed along the Wasatch front and elsewhere throughout northwestern Utah, eastern Nevada, and southern Idaho. These are the features that first attracted Gilbert’s attention, and their updated analysis represents the cornerstone of five individual chapters from this volume. Shoreline elevations and distributions have been used primarily to reconstruct the chronology of lake level fluctuations and to interpret paleoclimatic and paleohydrologic causes of these changes. The Bonneville shoreline is the highest of several regionally identifiable shorelines, and the chapter by Oviatt and Jewell examines its geomorphologic, sedimentologic, and stratigraphic characteristics in detail. The chapter argues in favor of Gilbert’s original interpretation that it represents a short-lived maximum elevation shoreline formed just as the lake overtopped and rapidly incised its drainage divide about 18 ka. Other chapters focus on Pilot Valley and Provo shorelines, lower elevation assemblages of features (beach ridges, spits, tombolos, deltas, marl deposits) that represent longer duration episodes of relative lake-level stability, both predating and succeeding formation of the Bonneville shoreline (Miller and Phelps; Miller). Two further shoreline-related chapters include one examining isostatic adjustments using detailed digital elevation models (DEMs), geochronology, and modeling of differ-


ential rebound (Adams and Bills), and another focusing on recent (1986–1987) fluctuations of Great Salt Lake on the order of about 3 m (Atwood et al.). Both chapters demonstrate how increasingly precise measurements of shoreline elevations can refine estimates of paleolake fluctuations, water balance, and paleohydrological variability. The unifying consensus among all five shorelinespecific chapters is that most of Gilbert’s original hypotheses have been supported, a few revised or refuted, and that an increasingly precise chronology has developed throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as radiometric dating and other analytical methods have become available. Whereas shoreline features provide direct evidence for Lake Bonneville’s elevation and extent, numerous related geomorphologic phenomena provide critical clues that enable a more complete interpretation of its significance. Foremost among these are the flood features and deposits associated with the cataclysmic lowering of Lake Bonneville by about 115 m c. 18 ka. O’Connor’s chapter on the Bonneville flood (appropriately placed between chapters on the Bonneville and Provo shorelines) represents a fascinating blend of empirical analysis and thoughtful historical appraisal of changing hypotheses and conclusions since Gilbert’s initial work. The chapter documents evidence for the magnitude and hydraulic characteristics of the flood itself (total volume about 5,000 km3 with peak discharge about 1 million m3 sec–1) and explains how an increasingly detailed understanding of its causes and effects has both resolved questions related to lakelevel fluctuations and contributed to broader geomorphologic theory concerning the role of catastrophic events in modifying landscape form. An important feature of this chapter, in many ways characteristic of the volume as a whole, is its articulation of how interpretations of physical evidence and the development of a robust chronology have changed through time. The author’s own earlier work on the Bonneville flood (e.g., O’Connor 1993) examined hydraulic characteristics of the flood and established its age at about 14.5 ka. As new chronometric data have become available, the flood’s age has been revised to 18 ka. This estimate also aligns with the many complementary strands of evidence concerning lake levels and paleoclimate. The chapter illustrates and explains how revision of the Lake Bonneville chronology is an ongoing, collaborative process that demands a willingness to refine assumptions and previous conclusions in the face of new evidence. Additional geomorphology-themed chapters include one focused on the paleohydrology of the Bear River (Pederson et al.) and another focused on the glacial geology of mountains surrounding the Bonneville Basin

(Laabs and Munroe). Both chapters are rich with implications for understanding regional hydrologic balance and paleoclimate. They are also quite comprehensive, at thirty-one and forty-one pages, respectively, containing detailed compilations and syntheses of essentially all relevant published data on their subjects. This thoroughness, of data, analysis, and historical development of ideas, is characteristic of many chapters throughout the volume. To place Lake Bonneville’s story within its appropriate environmental context, it is necessary to evaluate proxy evidence for changes in climate, vegetation, and regional hydrology. The volume accomplishes this by incorporating six chapters that focus on paleoclimate, biogeography, and paleoecology. Two chapters employ palynological reconstruction, from sediment cores and packrat middens, to characterize regional variations in species composition and help interpret changes in regional climate derived from lake-level records (Thompson et al.; Rhode). Three other chapters focus on past and present fish, mammal, and bird assemblages to understand changing ecological dynamics of habitat and resource availability through space and time (Broughton and Smith; Schmitt and Lupo; Wolfe and Broughton). A speleothem-based chapter provides independent, high-resolution proxy evidence for fluctuations in regional climate (Lachinet). Many of the analytical approaches presented in these paleoclimate-related chapters were not yet developed or in their infancy during Gilbert’s time; they represent a broadening of perspective in the developing narrative of environmental changes in the Lake Bonneville region throughout the late Quaternary. Additional chapters that round out the volume’s truly expansive range include topics such as archaeology, geophysics, remote sensing, planetary geology, and geoheritage. Although these diverge from the dominant Quaternary science perspective found throughout the remainder of the volume, they neither distract from nor detract from the cohesiveness of Lake Bonneville’s story as it unfolds through the individual contributions. The chapter on early human occupation documents independent archaeological records that corroborate lake-level reconstructions and paleohydrological interpretations (Madsen). It also helps frame the human significance of environmental changes documented elsewhere. From the time of the earliest human settlement in the region (c. 13 ka) to the present, “the lake’s impact on the people of the Bonneville Basin has never entirely disappeared” (p. 504). A chapter on geological heritage in the urban landscape provides a reminder of the contemporary societal relevance of Lake Bonneville and its associated features. The

FALL 2018 271

impacts of ongoing urban development in greater Salt Lake City on Lake Bonneville’s unique geological legacy highlight the importance of environmentally conscious land-use planning and management. The global geoheritage movement has raised public awareness of past environmental changes and their impact on landscapes. This awareness could enable proactive land conservation of unique geological features that still have lessons to teach us about Earth’s ever-changing environments, both in the Salt Lake region and elsewhere throughout the world. The volume’s twenty-three chapters were authored by a total of fifty-one authors, with disciplinary affiliations including anthropology, biology, geography, geology (the substantial majority of authors), planetary science, paleoclimatology, and zoology. University of Utah and Brigham Young University authors feature prominently, and contributors from other universities, the U.S. Geological Survey, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and elsewhere comprise the remainder of the authorship. Most of the authors are considered among the world’s leading experts on the subjects of their individual chapters. This depth of expertise, combined with the thoroughness and care most have dedicated to the preparation of their work, will ensure that the volume remains an authoritative reference for years and decades to come. The volume is dedicated to geographer Donald R. Currey, whose publications and commitment to unraveling the Lake Bonneville story have directly or indirectly inspired most of the volume’s contributors. The overall presentation and quality of the finished product are worth commending. It is hardbound with a wonderful cover image of Gilbert’s (1890) original map of Lake Bonneville that depicts his routes of travel, a useful reminder of the field-based data collection necessary to initiate and sustain such research. The volume contains excellent figure reproduction, including many detailed maps that reflect a commitment to effective cartographic design. It also includes comprehensive tables that compile a remarkable quantity of previously published and novel empirical data. Chapters are organized in an intuitive and creative manner, using a combination of chronological and disciplinary approaches. The volume maintains

272

consistent organization, style, and voice throughout, an admirable editorial accomplishment that enhances the volume’s unifying theme. Lake Bonneville: A Scientific Update is a monumental contribution. Its subject first attracted the attention of one of the most venerated geologists of all time: Gilbert’s research on Lake Bonneville stands among his best work. Beginning with Gilbert’s observations, analyses, and hypotheses, many scientists from varying disciplinary backgrounds have worked independently and collectively to test and retest these ideas, continue to gather novel empirical data, and continue to employ increasingly sophisticated techniques. This volume will appeal most directly to Quaternary scientists of any stripe: Lake Bonneville’s iconic status within the history of earth science makes this an instantly classic work. Other strands of geologists, geographers, and ecologists will find much to enjoy here as well. Certainly the volume will have a strong regional audience, as Lake Bonneville’s features are immediately recognizable to Salt Lake City’s million-plus inhabitants. Few will pick up and engage with this volume for a coverto-cover read. Nevertheless, it maintains something of a narrative quality, which is a feature common to much outstanding scholarship in the earth sciences (Frodeman 2003; Phillips 2012). The cast of supporting characters includes both the landscape features that have been so systematically analyzed here, and the people whose work has provided coherence to their understanding. The protagonist and hero, however, remains Lake Bonneville itself, the story of which continues to have much to teach us about Earth’s ever-changing and dynamic landscapes. References Frodeman, R. 2003. Geo-logic: Breaking ground between philosophy and the earth sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Gilbert, G. K. 1890. Lake Bonneville. United States Geological Survey, Monographs: Vol. 1. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. O’Connor, J. E. 1993. Hydrology, hydraulics, and geomorphology of the Bonneville Flood. Special Paper 274, Geological Society of America, Boulder, CO. Phillips, J. D. 2012. Storytelling in earth sciences: The eight basic plots. Earth Science Reviews 115: 153–62.



Spatial Analysis of Coastal Environments Sarah M. Hamylton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xiii and 290 pp., maps, illustrations, tables, photos, references, index. $54.99 cloth (ISBN 9781107070479); $44.00 e-book (ISBN 1107070473). Reviewed by Mayra A. Román-Rivera, Department of Geography, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. Coastal environments, such as mangroves, coral reefs, wetlands, and dunes, are recognized as some of the most fragile and dynamic ecosystems on the planet. These environments face many challenges including land use development and sea-level rise. Sarah M. Hamylton’s new book, Spatial Analysis of Coastal Environments, applies her expertise in geospatial technology to coastal environments to provide detailed examples of ways to map, model, and monitor these systems. She presents geographical approaches to model, analyze, and predict changes in coastal features. The book aims to both raise awareness and inspire action to help protect and monitor coastal systems while also introducing and developing the readers’ technical means to apply geospatial tools. Hence, this book not only summarizes how to conduct spatial analysis in coastal environments, but why it is important to do so. For example, Hamylton introduces readers to basic analyses of coastal environments such as point pattern analysis, network analysis, exploratory spatial data analysis, and trend surface analysis. In Chapter 3 the author also presents fundamental operations that can be conducted with spatial data that include distance, area, proximity, buffers, distance decay, overlay, and applications of conceptual operators. These basic geometric operations

are also analyzed for understanding patterns of distribution and characteristics of coastal features. Hamylton also introduces basic geographic information systems (GIS) tools to work with multivariate data sets like spatial and attribute joins. The author also addresses how data can be displayed to aid visualization and analysis of patterns. There are several methods explained in this chapter including how point pattern analysis is used for determining whether arrangements of points are statistically significant (e.g., clustered, random, or dispersed). The example provided by the author of barnacle distribution is a clear and wellexplained introduction to pattern analysis. Hamylton uses this example throughout the sections to show how different methods of point pattern analyses can influence results and therefore interpretation of data. The second case study presented in this section examines clusters of shark attacks in California and Florida, highlighting how pattern analysis can also be practically applied to prevent future attacks. Coastal scientists are aware of the importance of monitoring dynamic coastal environments, and the book does an excellent job at conveying that information to readers. Adaptation is at the center of any attempts to manage or mitigate coastal change and depends greatly on the ability to monitor these systems. Hamylton does a good job explaining the challenges of monitoring coastal environments, which include the collection and analysis prior to establishing an equilibrium profile of the system as well as the continuous, systematic observational records over short- and long-term periods of time (depending on the study) to determine how the systems are changing. The book also introduces remote sensing change detection techniques, which are, according to Hamylton, the most common application of remote sensing for coastal man-


agement. She proceeds to explain the advantages and disadvantages of employing raster- or vector-based approaches for change detection. Figure 5.1 (p. 128) handily summarizes a typical workflow to detect change over time with multitemporal data sets. This book provides readers with a comprehensive summary of the available sources to from which to acquire historical information to create baselines of the study area. It summarizes the capabilities of available data sets (i.e., Table 5.1, Satellite Sensor Attribute, p. 131) and the importance of taking into consideration the spatial and spectral resolutions of the sensors when searching for data for change detection. Hamylton includes a summary from E. Green, Mumby, and Clark (1996) enumerating the limitations associated with using remote sensing for any form of change detection analysis. By including this, the author is once again giving the readers a chance to evaluate the pros and cons of the analysis and therefore allowing them to make more informed and prepared decisions in the future. This section is followed by a review of techniques available for measuring change over time. A complete summary is offered of methods like univariate image differencing, image regression, and image rations index differencing, among others. Hamylton not only demonstrates for her readers the benefits of spatial analysis, but also summarizes some of the “pitfalls” or limitations inevitably encountered. For instance, coastal scientists should be cautions as to assumptions of the magnitude of observed coastal changes, and critically assess observed versus real change in terms of measurement error or uncertainty and change detection data and methods. A further caution is also beneficially noted, to be aware of the spatial and temporal scales at which the change quantification takes place and to include an estimation of the magnitude of error and uncertainty in the results. Both perspectives have important implications for coastal science and management, yet are seldom covered in an accessible, demonstrative way in a book. Spatial Analysis of Coastal Environments offers a muchneeded synthesis on current GIS and remote sensing methods and techniques, combined with geostatistical tools, used to study our coasts. Most books on this topic focus more on marine ecosystems and dynamics, often disregarding or minimizing the role of spatial analysis of coastal systems, or they are less current as to literature and data. There are a couple of exceptions to this statement (D. Green and King 2003; Hardin et al. 2014), but these examples do not provide a complete summary of the current methods used when studying coastal environments.

274

Using case studies as examples of research conducted all over the world offers a broad yet concise overview of spatial analysis of coastal environments and helps communicate complex ideas useful to undergraduate students and full-fledged scientists as well. Hamylton is preparing university students or new professionals to the field with an empirical introduction to coastal environments while also providing a comprehensive overview of the available spatial statistics tools to study coastal features. One minor drawback has to do with organization, specifically how the case studies are presented within chapters. Case studies lack a degree of consistency in how they are presented. Sometimes they were presented as their own section, in many cases followed by sections that continued the exploration of different methods or techniques presented in the chapter. In other instances they were presented as subsections immediately after the appropriate section. Although the case studies are relevant, these inconsistencies of presentation sometimes disrupt the flow and organization of chapters. One remedy could be presenting the cases either at the end of the chapter or as a subsection of the data or analytical section they exemplify. Overall, I strongly recommend this book not only to its intended audience of undergraduate students, but to all coastal scientists seeking a comprehensive view of geospatial analysis techniques. Hamylton does an excellent job summarizing modern methods and techniques to study coastal environments. In general, the chapters are well written and usefully illustrated, with detailed and relevant examples of applications of the methods and techniques described here. In addition, for faculty or students desiring hands-on application experiences for presented case studies, a set of companion laboratory exercises using ArcGIS or other software are available on the publisher’s Web site. New generations of coastal scientists will benefit incredibly from this book, which was long overdue in the field. References Green, D., and S. King. 2003. Coastal and marine geo-information systems: Applying the technology to the environment. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Green, E., P. E. Mumby, and C. Clark. 1996. A review of remote sensing for the assessment and management of tropical coastal resources. Coastal Management 24: 1–40. Hardin, E., H. Mitasova, L. Tateosian, and M. Overton. 2014. GIS-based analysis of coastal LiDAR time-series. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.



REVIEW ESSAY

Ireland’s Brexit Problem After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present. Declan Kiberd. London, UK: Head of Zeus, 2017. 512 pp., notes, index. $33.15 cloth (ISBN 978-1-7866-9322-8); $13.36 paper (ISBN 978-1-7866-9323-5). Atlas of the Irish Revolution. John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil, and Mike Murphy, eds. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2017. xx and 964 pp., maps, photos, illustrations, notes, index. $68.81 cloth (ISBN 978-17820-5117-6). Beckett’s Political Imagination. Emilie Morin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. $39.00 cloth (ISBN 978-11084-1799-0). Commemoration. Helen Laird. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2018. viii and 128 pp., photos, notes, index. $11.60 paper (ISBN 978-1-7820-5256-2). Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland. Declan Long. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017. xi and 225 pp., photos, bibliography, index. $99.46 cloth (ISBN 9781-7849-9144-9). Reviewed by Gerry Kearns, Department of Geography, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland. In February 1922, Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for the Colonies, apologized to the House of Commons, for intruding “upon their patience on Irish matters” before moving the Second

Reading of the Irish Free State (Agreement) Bill (HC Deb 16 Feburary 1922, c. 1261). The consequent Act would implement the Treaty that was recently concluded between Irish rebels and the


British Crown. Churchill accepted that there were still matters to be finalized, notably “all this trouble in regard to the boundaries . . . of [the counties of] Fermanagh and Tyrone” (c. 1270). In 1914, the attempt to devise an exclusion of Ulster from Irish Home Rule had foundered on this same issue for, even though the dispute had been “narrowed down” to very small areas within these two counties, “the problem appeared to be as insuperable as ever, and neither side would agree to reach any conclusion” (c. 1270). Churchill was clearly exasperated that a great imperial power should be stalled in this manner. After the failure to reach agreement in 1914, the World War of 1914 to 1918 supervened, and much that seemed fixed was thereby loosed: The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. (c. 1270)

Continually, the Irish question had forced itself upon British minds. For Churchill, “It says a great deal for the power which Ireland has . . . to lay their hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics, and to hold, dominate, and convulse, year after year, generation after generation, the politics of this powerful country” (cc. 1270– 71). The contradictions are evident. Churchill thought the Irish question was primarily an Irish dispute and yet it somehow preoccupied British politicians. This Irish question was about a seemingly trivial matter but the Irish refused to compromise with each other. In language less elegant but no less contemptuous, the current British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, also finds himself called on to talk about the border. As the United Kingdom negotiates its withdrawal from the European Union (EU), it is hamstrung by the promises it made as part of the negotiation of a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Northern Ireland. On 6 June 2018, Johnson said that the issue of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland was being taken far too seriously: “It’s so small and there are so few firms that actually use that border regularly, it’s just beyond belief that we’re allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way. We’re allowing the whole of our agenda to be dictated by this folly” (Spence 2018). Again, the issue is understood as external to Great Britain, as trivial, and as pressed unreasonably by Irish people. Why did Britain have an Irish problem? Well, that would be a colonial question, Mr. Churchill. Why does it still have

276

an Irish problem? That, in turn, would be a postcolonial question, Mr. Johnson. I have argued elsewhere that taking up the theoretical categories of Giorgio Agamben, colonial rule in Ireland might be understood as creating a colonial space of exception (Kearns 2006). The British saw themselves as broadly liberal, gifting the Irish a rule by law. Yet, in Ireland they were forced time and again to suspend elements of that law because they did not get consent to their rule. The British could not coerce the Irish into fealty; they could not rule by law. Time and again, the English, and later British, authorities reinvaded Ireland, establishing a new landed elite. For much of the eighteenth century, Ireland had some measure of self-government, but when, fired by the republicanism of revolutionary France, the United Irishmen recruited French support for a rebellion (1798), the British government decided on more direct rule. From 1801, Ireland was a part of a United Kingdom and its representatives sat as a minority part of the Imperial House of Commons. This became one way that the Irish remained able “to lay their hands upon the vital strings” of British politics. For example, in the general election of 1910, the Liberal Party got 272 seats, one more than the Conservatives, but shy of the 335 needed to form a majority government. From Ireland, 103 members of Parliament were returned, of whom seventy-three were in the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), whose primary purpose was to get home rule for Ireland. Together with the IPP, the Liberals could form a majority coalition government but the price was explicit. From 1912 home rule legislation was debated in the British Parliament, sending Churchill and the Cabinet to examine maps of Tyrone and Fermanagh in hope of tracing out the limits of Ulster’s exclusion from self-governing Ireland. The roots and nature of Ulster’s identity remain contentious issues in Irish historiography. In the Atlas of the Irish Revolution, Smyth highlights the importance of 1798. Faced with the insurgency of the United Irishmen, the Protestant Orange Order was “deliberately mobilised by the British ruling elite,” marking “the first time that active collusion with a defensive-cum-sectarian movement was used by the British state as a counter-revolutionary strategy in Ireland” (p. 22). It would not be the last. After the 1910 election, and faced with the risk of home rule for Ireland, the British Conservative Party formed an alliance with the Ulster Protestants, presenting home rule as a dangerous first step toward the unraveling of the British Empire, and giving Conservatives an ideological purpose (the defense of the constitution) around which they


might mobilize, as Callanan noted in his Atlas essay on the home rule crisis, “to challenge the intellectual ascendancy of incremental Liberal progressivism” (p. 140) and, “[h]alf catalyst, half pretext, the north-east of Ireland transcended its territorial confines to become for those on the right of British politics a highly charged imperial symbol” (p. 142). Within Ulster, the prospect of home rule drew from one leading supporter of the Union with Britain, the threat that “the morning Home Rule passes,” Unionists would be prepared on their own account “to become responsible for the Government of the Protestant Province of Ulster,” and in the following year, the leader of the British Conservative Party encouraged such insurrection, promising that he could “imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them” (p. 142). Ireland looked set for a civil war. Organized as the Ulster Volunteers, unionists had been importing arms, and, from 1913, had been drilling a militia. In March 1914, a group of about 100 officers with the British Army based in Ireland had vowed that they would not proceed against Unionists if asked to do so. But then World War I interrupted matters and the Act was suspended for the duration of the conflict. The Great War changed things utterly. Irish nationalists were divided over whether they should support the war or not. The leader of the IPP said that the cause of independence would best be served by showing loyalty to the British Crown. Yet the British Crown could not count on this. By January 1916, the British government had introduced conscription in Britain, but dared not in Ireland. In April 1918, the British Parliament returned to the question and, despite a warning from the head of the British army in Ireland that they “might as well conscript Germans” (p. 324), had passed a conscription act for Ireland that they then failed to make effective in the face of an Irish general strike. With that failure, as Travers notes, it was evident that “Britain [had] lost Ireland” (p. 323). In the general election of December 1918 that followed the end of World War I, it was the separatist, republican, and militaristic Sinn Féin that swept the Irish seats. The IPP could manage only six from the 105 in contention, and the Irish Unionist Party garnered twenty-two, and Sinn Féin made its debut with seventy-three seats. Refusing to serve in a British Parliament, Sinn Féin members, or at least those not in prison or on the run, convened their own Dáil [parliament] in Dublin. As the military wing of the republican movement, the Irish Republic Army (IRA) now began its war against British occupation and, by 1921, the British army educated the British Cabinet to

the view that Ireland could only be held with a level of repression that was surely unacceptable. Instead, a truce and then a treaty were negotiated, and by December an Irish Free State was established on twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties. The ten years from the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in 1912 to the inauguration of the Irish Free State in 1922 are now being commemorated as a “Decade of Centenaries” by the government of the Republic of Ireland. For the questions of history and memory raised by the Decade, Helen Laird’s Commemoration is an excellent guide. Laird considers the Decade agenda state-centric and progressivist. It is state-centric because it emphasizes legislation and government institutions. It is progressivist because it treats the present as an improvement over the past, achieved by eliminating the obstacles to change. As an alternative, Laird proposes an avant-garde nostalgia, a concept borrowed from a philosopher, Kate Soper, but best exemplified here in an extended quotation from an 1897 essay by Irish socialist James Connolly on the continuing relevance of Gaelic communalism: The ardent student of sociology, who believes that the progress of the human race through the various stages of communism, chattel slavery, feudalism and wage slavery, has been but a preparation for the higher ordered society of the future . . . will perhaps regard the Irish adherence to clan ownership at such a comparatively recent date as the seventeeth century as evidence of a retarded economic development, and therefore a real hindrance to progress. But the sympathetic student of history, who believes in the possibility of a people by political intuition anticipating the lessons afterwards revealed to them in the sad school of experience, will not be indisposed to join with the ardent Irish patriot in his lavish expressions of admiration for the sagacity of his Celtic forefathers, who foreshadowed in the democratic organisation of the Irish clan the more perfect organisation of the free society of the future. (pp. 45–46)

Forgiving Connolly the clumsy double negative, we find in this extraordinary passage a rebuke to progressive views of history, with Connolly arguing that resisting unwelcome change is prescient rather than regressive. It also suggests that some beneficial institutions fall under the wheels of the juggernaut of history, and in recognizing these a backward glance might disclose hope. Beyond this, Laird wants to make a more specific case about the revolutionary decade itself. Turning her gaze away from the parliamentary and social elites, Laird finds the revolutionary decade was a time of radical possibility chanced by the rural poor. This is an attempt to give voice to an egalitarian vision that, from the trenches of the Somme, an Irish poet Thomas Kettle described as the cause of his

FALL 2018 277

life, “a dream born in a herdsman’s hut . . . the secret scripture of the poor’ (“To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God”). The force that imposed capitalist relations of production on the poor people of rural Ireland was colonialism. Communalism stalled the triumph of absolute property rights. For the British, then, it had to go. Across extensive parts of rural Ireland, however, resistance to capitalism was granular, guerrilla, and general. The law of the bourgeois property order could not be installed by consent: It had to be imposed by force. Juries could not be trusted, so judgment had to be summary. For much of the nineteenth century, and unlike England, large parts of Ireland saw the right to bear arms suspended, the right to trial by jury suspended, the right of assembly suspended, and so it went on. The last third of the nineteenth century saw a rural revolt so general as to fairly earn its contemporary moniker, the “Land War.” A great Irish revolutionary, Michael Davitt, described the evils that beset the countryside as landlordism, introduced by the English as a new feudal property when they took the land from the native Irish. As late as 1860, the British Parliament was still passing laws to eradicate communal property in Ireland and to give landowners absolute rights. Irish resistance to capitalism was a resistance to this absolute and individual form of property ownership. Because it took colonial force to give capitalism the field, anticapitalist agitation was anticolonial, and, because ejecting colonial power implied self-government, anticolonial agitation was nationalist. In each of his first two periods as Liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone passed Land Acts for Ireland. Gladstone accepted that Irish people would not agree to the English version of landlord rights and he thought that by concessions on this he could spike the anticolonialism that Irish resistance fostered. Acts of 1870 and 1881 conceded rights to tenants, setting rents by tribunal rather than in the market, and effectively making landlord and tenant joint owners. Laird describes “periods of potent possibility” (p. 33), seemingly fecund with counterfactual speculation about how things could be better. The rural insurgency fed such a revolutionary imagination. In an essay for the Atlas, Smyth finds much of the ideological and geographical basis of the Irish revolution in this rural insurgency. The heartland of the Land War were the districts in the west of Ireland crammed with landless poor people reluctantly accepting any opportunity to emigrate away from shameful poverty. The region proved to be a bedrock of political separatism, and Smyth’s essay emphasizes the culture of insurgency nursed in these districts over the preceding

278

century. This vital, revolutionary heritage looked back to what had been taken away, but it could also engage with contemporary debates about liberalism, socialism, and economics, particularly when in dialogue with organic intellectuals such as Connolly, Davitt, or Lalor (Kearns 2014). The centrepiece of the revolutionary decade was in some respects a geographical anomaly: The Rising in Dublin, which began on Easter Monday, 26 April 1916, included about 1,400 people. Fearghal McGarry’s Atlas essay describes the well-known geography of the rebels’ encampments and attempted maneuvers within the city, during the six days it took the British to force an Irish surrender (pp. 240–57). Jérôme aan de Wiel’s contribution frames the Rising differently. He argues that, having broken the German codes, the British military leaders in London knew in advance of the Rising and its certain failure, and, in welcoming the repressive opportunity that an abortive putsch would give, decided not to tell the British authorities based in Dublin (p. 231). The deaths in Dublin were a little shy of 500 and about half were civilians. Sixteen of the insurgents were executed in the six weeks that followed. In some quarters, these sixteen would later be venerated as martyrs who gave their lives for Irish freedom. Irishmen, both unionist and nationalist, both Catholic and Protestant, residents either of Ireland or Britain, joined the British army during the Great War of 1914 to 1918, and of the 210,000 who enlisted, between 30,000 and 35,000 died, a number that, as Horne shows in his essay for the Atlas, was some five to six times the combined mortality of the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence of 1919 to 1921, and the Civil War of 1922 and 1923. Members of the Ulster Volunteers joined en masse under their own officers; nationalist and Catholic Irish were not trusted in like manner and were given British officers. The deaths of these thousands of Ulster Protestants were soon cherished as a sacrifice for Ulster, a blood bond between unionists and Great Britain. So things stood at the end of World War I. With the British government unwilling to give precedence to enacting the home rule measures that had been suspended for the duration of the war, the IRA began to make Ireland ungovernable, attacking police barracks and stealing guns. Martial law was declared across much of south and southwest Ireland, and the British army began attacking villages that were shielding rebels. The army and the armed police in Ireland were supplemented by auxiliaries recruited in Britain who, dubbed Black-and-Tans by virtue of their makeshift uniforms, became notorious for their


ill-disciplined violence. Reprisals and collective punishment were effectively official policy by the end of 1920, but from the heartland of the Land War, in the west, southwest, and south, the insurgents continued with a guerrilla war that the British found difficult to quench. In Dublin, the IRA had a few spectacular intelligence successes, including discovering and then, on the morning of Sunday 21 November 1920, killing some fourteen British undercover agents at their homes. That afternoon a group of Black-and-Tans burst into Croke Park, Dublin, firing into the crowd at a Gaelic football match, killing fourteen civilians and wounding sixty more. The IRA burned some 275 (10 percent) of the so-called big houses of rural Ireland; some of these had been billeting British soldiers. Over 11 ad 12 December, Black-and-Tans set fire to large parts of the central districts of the city of Cork. In Belfast, street riots and arsonists’ eviction of Catholics from mixed areas killed 267 Catholics and 185 Protestants, and reduced 650 houses to ash. There was more than destruction and murder, though. Some of the attacks on big houses attempted to evict large-scale graziers and reclaim the land for local tillage. In Roscommon, land that was held by the Congested Districts Board as part of a planned redistribution to tenant farmers, was instead occupied by villagers who set about reestablishing communal farming on strips within common fields (Laird, p. 54). The British filled Irish prisons with rebels, and riots within and protests without soon followed. The British opened internment camps. In 1921 these Irish prisons had, as Murphy shows in his essay in the Atlas, some 1,343 rebels incarcerated after the summary justice of courts martial. The British sent the more dangerous IRA leaders to prison in Britain and, faced with hunger strikes, let die three Irish men under their control, recalling the Famine to any Irish mind, when, over the seven years from 1845 to 1852, over 1 million died and a further 1.5 million had emigrated from a population of about 9 million. The British wanted to clear the potato eaters off the land and to consolidate holdings into pastures from which cattle would be marched to the table of urban Britain. Unsurprisingly, migration continued, and the population of Ireland declined continually from the time of the Famine to World War I, when it stood at about 3 million, a third of the level some seventy years earlier. In speaking of dissensus in Ireland, for Churchill to refer to the “integrity of their struggle” was imperial disingenuousness of the purest water. The Irish struggle was not in the main an internal one. The British Empire was about to lose its first significant territory since the American

War of Independence, but rather than prepare the island for peaceful independence, the British were steeling the resolve of unionist opposition. In 1886, Churchill’s father, Randolph, had given Ulster one of its proudest boasts: “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.” When an early biography of Randolph Churchill was published, one reviewer remarked that it showed Randolph “participating in politics for the sheer pleasure of it . . . a cynical politician who believed that the gyrations of political parties had value for their own sake” (Chartwell Books 2008). Could the Ulster policy of Randolph Churchill really be a callous excitation of unionism primarily for domestic political ends, and Ireland a mere chip in the roulette that was British party and parliamentary politics? That early biography said as much, quoting a letter of 1888 from Randolph to a political ally: “I decided some time ago . . . that if [Gladstone] went for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play” (Churchill 1906, p. 89). The author was his son, Winston. When, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, then, Churchill affected dismay at the long-standing Irish mutual antipathy that tried parliamentary patience, he knew full well the complicity of British politicians in encouraging resistance even to the point of insurrection. This was the legacy the British shaped in 1922. As they left, the erstwhile masters extracted from the Irish Free State a contentious oath of loyalty to the British monarch, destabilizing that polity. To the six counties they gave untrammelled Protestant majoritarian rule, brutalizing that polity. In neither case did the British attend at all to the interests, or even safety, of the minority left on the wrong side of the line. In the twenty-six counties, stability was installed, but only by giving the Catholic Church a force in social policy and civil society that imperiled the autonomy of women, children, and free thought generally. In Northern Ireland, for the fifty years of the Stormont Parliament (1922–1972), the Protestant majority exercised one-party rule and a permanent suspension of civil liberties (special powers). In After Ireland (2017), Declan Kiberd describes how literature responded to these postcolonial polities. He documents writers’ profound and deepening disillusion. For Kiberd, Samuel Beckett’s tramps are living after a promise that was not kept, a world in which people must live in the wake of the intolerable. Of course, there were many other reasons why Beckett refused optimism, and Emilie Morin’s brilliant new book, Beckett’s Political Imagination, discusses many of them, but the hostility of Catholic Ireland and its proto-fascist Anglo-Irish cultural elite toward cosmopolitanism was certainly primary.

FALL 2018 279

If the Republic disappointed, Northern Ireland was appalling. Inspired by the bravery of African-American civil rights campaigns in the United States, northern Catholics campaigned for political rights and economic fairness from the mid-1960s, only to be met by an armed police force, an armed militia, and later still by the British army once again. At this point, their peril revived republican, nationalist struggle. On both sides, informal militias disciplined their own communities to shield their armed men from the police or army. They also found easy targets among neighbors from the other side. There was extreme pressure on literature to serve, rather than remain independent of, the struggle, and Kiberd provides a moving account of the courage of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who insisted instead on the necessity of facts against the comfort of cliché, requiring that culpability be judged rather than excused or explained away. The counterinsurgency tactics developed by the British army in Ireland, and inflicted along the ragged edge of its unravelling empire from Malaya to Kenya, now returned to the six counties. Thirty years of violence and an average ten violent deaths per month, however, brought an acceptance that Protestant privilege must be qualified and that republicanism must stick to the ballot, not the bullet. Republicans were given a context in which their tradition was promised parity of esteem and in which there would be a political context for all-Ireland cooperation. Protestants shared in a peace dividend. To monitor fairness, though, many aspects of Northern Ireland society are now organized for two tribes, reinforcing separation. In this respect, Declan Long’s Ghost-Haunted Land shows how some artists at least followed the example of the Heaney, anticipating some of the arguments on the strategic use of memory in Northern Ireland put forth by Robinson (2018) in his recent book Transitional Justice and the Politics of Inscription (reviewed by Sarah McDowell in this issue). After the heroic achievement of peace with the Good Friday/ Belfast Agreement in 1998, there was a devious invitation to move on and forget. People were being asked to move into a world in which everything could start afresh, a world with no history. This is the neoliberal imaginary of absolute property, where commodities come with neither messy social ties nor historical obligations. In this sense, the spectral, the ghosts of the past, as Long points out, might vaccinate against spectacle. For example, Long discusses Willie Doherty’s film installation, Ghost Story (2007). The film begins by comparing the thin trace left by a landscape

280

with the permanent impression of a face seen in a crowd, which, from the context becomes clear, was someone fleeing the slaughter of Bloody Sunday in Derry, 30 January 1972. The following day, the British Home Secretary said he believed that the army had been fired on and, in protecting themselves, had shot dead thirteen armed civilians (another would die later from his wounds), but promised a tribunal. The Widgery Report that followed was quickly issued and included evidence that was only heard in private, with no cross-examination, and led to the exoneration of the soldiers within eleven weeks. As part of the Peace Process, in 1998 the British Prime Minister promised a new, public inquiry. In 2010, accepting the findings of the Saville Report, another British Prime Minister said that the British government accepted that the fourteen killed had been unarmed and that their shooting was “unjustified and unjustifiable” (McDonald and Bowcott 2010). This is the bloody history over which a neoliberal peace barks the peremptory command, forgive and forget. As in 1912, so in 2017, a general election in the United Kingdom left an Irish party holding the balance of power between the two largest (British) parties. Once again the empire is in question, a vainglorious English nostalgia imagining a world where, shorn of European obligations, the United Kingdom can swagger abroad. Once again, there is an Irish problem. The UK government is committed to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, which, in settling the conflict in Northern Ireland, promised that whoever held sovereignty over the six counties would exercise that authority “with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions” (Belfast Agreement 1998). In making an agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party to ensure Conservatives could govern with a parliamentary majority, this impartiality was set aside. The election of 2017 had been called in the hope that the Conservatives would increase their parliamentary majority and could thus implement with renewed authority the opinion of the referendum of 2016, which had produced a slim majority for leaving the EU. In any event, the Conservative parliamentary majority disappeared, and hence the deal with the Democratic Unionist Party. It is not at all clear that the U.K. government can implement a revision of the status of the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland without the explicit consent of the people of the six counties (who actually voted to remain in the EU). The Agreement declared that “it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people.” Introducing a land border


between Northern Ireland and the Republic is certainly a change in the status of Northern Ireland, as would be the introduction of a sea border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Brexit in any likely form is precisely a change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. A land border sets Northern nationalists further apart from their southern compatriots. A sea border sets Northern unionists further apart from their British compatriots. In any likely version, Brexit makes the dual-identity Irish–British harder to sustain across the two communities in Northern Ireland. Yet, some version of this dual identity is central to the resolution of conflict in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, the British were only able to achieve this resolution in the context of EU institutions that dissolved to a very large degree the significance of the border. Now, all of this is cast aside so that Britain can feel more independent, and can desist payments to the EU. The dishonesty of the promises made by the Brexit side is not my main concern here; rather, it is the fact that at no point during the debate did any of the principal Brexiteers give a thought to Ireland, and that is why we now see a British Foreign Secretary assuring a bunch of Thatcherites that it is mere “folly” to believe that the Irish question places any serious check on UK geopolitical ambition. It should, though, and these books explain why. ORCID Gerry Kearns

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6461-7064

References Belfast Agreement. 1998. https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/136652/agreement.pdf (last accessed 22 June 2018). Chartwell Books. 2008. Lord Randolph Churchill (1906). https://www.churchillbooks.com/GuidePDFs/g7.pdf (last accessed 21 June 2018). Churchill, W. S. 1906. Lord Randolph Churchill: Vol. II. London, UK: Macmillan. Doherty, W. Director 2007. Ghost story, video, Northern Ireland. Kearns, G. 2006. Bare life, political violence and the territorial structure of Britain and Ireland. In Violent geographies: Fear, terror and political violence, ed. D. Gregory, and A. Pred, 9–34. London, UK, and New York, NY: Routledge. ———. 2014. “Up to the sun and down to the centre”: The utopian moment in anticolonial nationalism. Historical Geography 42: 130–51. McDonald, H., and O. Bowcott. 2010. Bloody Sunday report: 38 years on, justice at last. Guardian 15 June 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jun/15/bloodysunday-report-soldiers-prosecuted (last accessed 22 June 2018). Robinson, J. 2018. Transitional justice and the politics of inscription: Memory, space and narrative in Northern Ireland. London, UK, and New York, NY: Routledge. Spence, A. 2018. Let Trump handle Brexit: An explosive leaked recording reveals Boris Johnson’s private views about Britain’s foreign policy. BuzzFeed News 7 June 2018. https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexspence/boris-john son-trump-brexit-leaked-recording (last accessed 19 June 2018).

FALL 2018 281


BOOK REVIEW FORUM

Extinction: A Radical History Ashley Dawson. New York, NY: O/R Books, 2016. 126 pp., photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $10.84 paper (ISBN 978-1-944869-01-4).

Introduction by Christopher R. Cox, Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Conceptualizing extinction is a messy process. Whoever dares to write about it must contend with the never-ending debates over its causes, meanings, background rates, and the many fetishes of animal charisma that accompany efforts to stop it. The Oxford English Dictionary (Swannell 1992) defines it three ways: “(1) the act of making extinct; the state of being or process of becoming extinct. (2) the act of extinguishing; the state of being extinguished. (3) total destruction or annihilation” (372). Taking this defining at face value, it seems only logical to assume that extinction is a process of being erased, extinguished, and annihilated. There even seems to be a kind of purposefulness to these definitions, as though there is an assumption of systemic pressures at work. Let us hold that thought. Extinctions of individual species are an integral part of the overall process of evolution, a process that well over 99.999 percent of all known species to have lived on the surface of the Earth have now already undergone. Further, as Lewontin and Levins (2007) reminded us, “Whereas human sociality is itself a consequence of our received biology, human biology is a socialized biology” (36). Of

course, so are the biologies of all living creatures caught up in the matrix of socialities that make up processes of production and reproduction across the planet. We are all productivores in the end, but no species produces just as they please, for we are all on “Spaceship Earth” careening through the dark matters of a much more-thanhuman space. Since the rise of capitalist agriculture, coinciding as it does with the fall of European feudalism, the ability to produce desirable conditions for capitalist production has rested on a consistently rising rate of appropriation of all of nature (human and otherwise) into the global circuits of capital that keep some people happy, fat, and powerful at the expense of nearly every other sentient being on the planet. Dawson gets this, and it is clear right out of the gate, when he makes the key point that “biodiversity is unevenly distributed” (p. 10). The greatest amount of biodiversity is not so ironically located in the areas of the world that the metropolitan core has systematically underdeveloped since at least the end of the fifteenth century. Dawson importantly acknowledges the specifically capitalist intentions behind the first exploitation of furs in the New World, one of the most successful expansions of the European capital frontier (pp. 45–47). This is a portion of the book I found immensely satisfying to read. It is also one of the areas I find some discomfort with. Dawson’s characterization of the impact of the fur trade on the Native American tribes (p. 46) is more than a little homogenizing. Geography of place matters a great deal


when appealing to the complex histories of indigenous communities and their relations with white civilization’s capitalist ways. That said, Dawson clearly understands this because he has the presence of mind to speak the unspeakable: that wildlife conservation in the form of setting aside islands of “untrammeled wilderness . . . is failing miserably” (p. 64). It is failing not only because there are no supposedly “untrammeled wilderness” areas, but because those spaces lose their boundaries in the face of “Anthropogenic extinction.” This is a crucial aspect of the extinction crisis: Islands of biodiversity are absorbed into the atmospheric and bioregional flux that comes with climate change. There is nowhere left to hide. The subject matter that extinction contains within its orbit is evidence, in my view, that we are amid a paradigm shift in the way that science is going to be done in the post-Capitalogenic era. Capra (1988) reminded us that scientific knowledge in the new paradigm is recognized as “limited and approximate.” Its corresponding facts are also therefore approximate descriptions of seemingly stable moments. Descriptions, no matter how “scientific” they might be, are also narratives strung together as assemblages, producing knowledge (Haraway 1989, 5). Dawson takes the leap into this kind of thinking, asking crucial questions that bring us at least a little closer to a popular discussion about the role of the “the system” in the bringing to endangerment and eventually extinction of an alarmingly rising number of species. So many seem content to talk about climate change, ocean acidification, desertification, natural resource depletion, pollution, and the long litany of other offenses to the Earth system as the cause of the rapidly rising rate of extinction, but appear uninterested in further understanding how capitalism and its gang of other -isms has made these conditions endemic to the system. Dawson manages to bring this extremely important and difficult conversation to a broadly conceived readership, and this must continue. There is a growing critical discussion of what Moore (2015) called “capital’s exterminism,” or capital’s greatest contradiction, its incessant need to devour past death to create new life that is efficient, profitable, and above all, cheap. Responding to Crutzen’s dating of the Anthropocene’s “inaugural moment” as the late eighteenth century, Dawson argues, “This dating has become widely accepted despite the fact that it refers to an effect rather than a cause, and thereby obscures key questions of violence and inequality in humanity’s relation to nature” (p. 20). The trickery of time causes even those with the most critical eye to unwittingly scapegoat all of humanity as the “bully

species” (Kolbert 2014), allowing not only the capitalist world economy (dominant since at least the middle of the fifteenth century), but the global capitalist class, to quietly exit the stage, just as the penultimate scene is about to take place, the so-called sixth mass extinction. Indeed, argues Dawson, “extinction needs to be seen, along with climate change, as the leading edge of contemporary capitalism’s contradictions. While vast swathes of the human population on earth suffer from the worst of these effects, much smaller portions of the population enjoy the benefits” (p. 13). The coming of the next mass extinction is a systemic crisis of the Capitalocene. I am left, after reading this book, with one overarching question: When does extinction become systemic extermination? Put another way, if we accept that capitalism is at the root of the extinction crisis, something that frankly seems indisputable at this point, must we not also assume that this is a systemic crisis versus a biological, evolutionary, or even mass extinction crisis? My answer is “yes.” To address this as a systemic crisis does in fact require a radicalized narration of history. Dawson’s history is radical, but not because he is radically retelling a history that has already been written. It is radical because he is considering what so few of those who are concerned with the extinction crisis dare to consider: capitalism. In this sense, the true historical radicals of the Capitalocene are those who write history as though capitalism has been intrinsically interwoven into the processes of this planet since the rise of industrialized agriculture. In times of great historical determinism—such as now—to write history as a nonstatic, always already unfolding symphony of moments that are at once processes and relations, is quite a radical undertaking. We have a long way to go, but this book is, in my view, a great contribution to the larger intellectual project we want to see develop. What follows are three responses to Extinction: A Radical History, followed by a wonderfully empathetic and exciting response by the author. Our aim here is to encourage more discussion within geography and elsewhere about extinction, but with a ruthlessly critical eye turned toward the role that the systemic relations of capitalism have played in the bringing to extinction of so many species in such a short period of time. Let us call this critical extinction studies. The extinction crisis is not just a crisis of biodiversity loss, but a crisis of capital’s gluttonous lust for what Marx called the “free gifts of nature.” This book stands as a great jumping-off point for this more nuanced discussion we want to stir up.

FALL 2018 283

Commentary by John G. Hintz, Department of Environmental, Geographical, and Geological Sciences, Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, PA. Two other relatively recent books come to mind as I read and write about Ashley Dawson’s entertaining and informative, if somewhat unsatisfying Extinction: A Radical History. One is Klein’s (2015) popular This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. The other is Torres’s (2007) Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. The common thread across the three is the basic premise that—for the environmental issue that each book tackles (biodiversity loss, climate change, or animal rights)—a properly placed radical critique could act as a corrective to dominant narratives that fail to place contemporary capitalism as fundamentally causative to the problem at hand. The radical critiques in each book are quite different. Without getting too deeply into the other two books, I would argue that Klein, in This Changes Everything, makes an effective case that climate change will not and probably cannot be solved within the current, growth-fueled capitalist economic system. Making a Killing forges a very different path, with Torres arguing that (some) leftists correctly interpret Marxist political economy as unmasking the inherently unjust and exploitative nature of social relations in contemporary capitalist society. Dominant left politics fail, however, by not taking the critique far enough, walling off analysis to human intraspecies relations. Torres forges a tough and certainly radical critique, one that hands Marxists their own toolkit while broadening what’s broken by an order of magnitude. Dawson’s Extinction, however, is not quite as successful, at least not in effectively making a radical case that directly implicates capitalism in the problem at hand. That, frankly, is a problem. Informative as it is (and the book is informative!), I do not find it adequately presenting, as its subtitle promises, “a radical history.” Capitalism is not sufficiently implicated. The inclusion of class issues feels a bit tagged on. A standard (and often true) critique of establishment environmental literature is that analyses are not rooted in sufficient political, economic, and historical context, and therefore an undifferentiated humanity winds up taking the blame for the environmental malady. Dawson critiques Kolbert’s (2014) bestselling Sixth Extinction in this way, yet at the same time leans heavily on this book for information and data on historical extinctions. I might be less prone to say, “Sorry, you can’t have it both ways” (meaning, either it is or isn’t a viable source on the subject) if Dawson had been more careful to point out where

284

in the book and in what ways Kolbert’s lack of political economy diminishes her analysis. Part of the problem with Dawson’s avowed “radical history” might be its narrow focus on extinction. Extinction, the death of the last individual of a biological species, is only one facet of biodiversity conservation. Many conservation biologists and popular writers on the subject are coming to the realization that too narrow a focus on literal biological extinctions (historic, current, and projected) could serve as a distraction, even possibly a mollifying one at that, from the broader crisis of habitat loss and defaunation—the ongoing contemporary loss of animals, or wildlife, in general. (It should be noted that the defaunation crisis per se is noted in the book but is far from central to the analysis therein.) Species themselves appear to be a bit more resilient than many expert projections predicted (e.g., Wilson’s alarming claim that half of earth’s species could be gone by 2100). Not insignificantly, considerable conservation work goes into fighting endangered species from going extinct, often successfully. Capitalism, it seems, has been much better at staving off extinctions than expected, even as market forces destroy wild terrestrial and marine animals, plants, and habitats at paces never before witnessed in history. A singular focus on extinction might, as per Ehrlich’s (1968) Population Bomb (that never exploded), wind up looking like more tired environmentalist hyperbole, thus unwittingly enabling the destruction of (more or less) wild habitats and the loss of wildlife worldwide. In sum, blaming industrial capitalism for a problem that is not as bad as we thought it was going to be might not provide the needed headline grabber. What follows are some pretty specific critiques that, taken as a whole, reinforce my broader gripe: The book fails to live up to its title, and therefore loses much of its potential impact. For one, the inclusion of wilderness preservation and advocacy, including recent calls for “rewilding,” feels more like a literature review (and a problematic one at that) than evidence implicating industrial capitalism in the biodiversity crisis. Dawson begins the section of the book that reviews conservation measures intended to mitigate biodiversity loss, appropriately enough titled “Anti-Extinction,” with a rather unqualified critique of wilderness preservation. Citing the 1964 (U.S.) Wilderness Act—a law, mind you, that makes no mention of protecting biodiversity or even wildlife—Dawson states that “[c]learly the strategy of setting aside dwindling islands of wilderness as ‘untrammeled’ reserves . . . is failing miserably” (p. 64). This claim is problematic in a few ways. First, it is not original, and that should be


flatly acknowledged. Everyone in the know knows that isolated wilderness areas will not solve the biodiversity crisis. No one is making this argument. This is especially true for conservation biologists, the scientists who specialize in biodiversity conservation. I am frankly not sure who or what “movement” this critique targets, but such a bold stating of such common knowledge rings a bit hollow. To Dawson’s credit, he follows this vacuous accusation with a detailed overview of rewilding advocates, including the conservation-biology-based carnivore conservation of Reed Noss and Michael Soule in North America and the more journalistic rewilding advocacy of George Monbiot in Great Britain. It would have been helpful, however, if Dawson had noted the near total lack of a critique of capitalism within North American Noss–Soule informed conservation biology or Monbiot’s pretty scathing indictment of capitalism within his rewilding advocacy. These two “schools” of advocacy for a fairly new and loosely defined thing (rewilding) are actually quite distinct and highlighting the politics of that distinction could have been helpful to Dawson’s broader thesis. It is also deeply disappointing to see his conflated review of rewilding advocates wrap up with the claim that the “contemporary rewilding movement proposes . . . construction of a sublime—and people-less—wilderness” (p. 71). Although this critique no doubt holds up to some degree for (some) North American rewilding advocates (although Dawson could have gotten more mileage out of critiquing the unapologetically Malthusian rewilding advocacy of Dave Foreman than the science-based advocacy of Noss and Soule), it is still way too broad of a brush with which to paint an evolving and diversifying quarter-century of literature. North American rewilding advocates are not simply looking to depeople the landscape. For Monbiot and the European rewilding literature, the assertion is all the more fatuous. Finally, the preceding accusation and quote is supported with the footnote, “For a deconstruction of such notions of the pristine nature of wilderness, see William Cronon ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’ . . . 1995” (p. 122). Certainly, Cronon’s (1995) “The Trouble with Wilderness” was a groundbreaking essay. It spawned many and informed countless debates and academic forums, including many within academic conservation biology. “The Trouble with Wilderness” is central to a twenty-plus-year literature that starts with the understanding that pristine wilderness is a fallacy, then follows the implications across myriad directions. It is a bit telling, I am afraid, of Dawson’s dated reading of the literature that, in 2016, he would summon “The Trouble with Wilderness” in the present tense as a current and singular exposé.

All that said, few will finish this book with the same misgivings as mine, and that is a good thing. The book is ambitious and makes significant and important connections, and the book does finish strong. The last two chapters are clear and convincing. Nearing the end of the book, after Dawson has correctly and concisely argued that any effective mitigation of biodiversity loss must also be a fight for social justice, one can almost read echoes of Leopold’s (2004) “Land Ethic” in Dawson’s heartfelt plea: “The plants and the animals that surround us synthesize the oxygen we breathe, consume the carbon dioxide we emit, produce the food we eat, maintain the fertility of the soil, and return our bodies to the earth after we die” (p. 96). Leopold also, and with similar eloquence, reflected on our interdependence with all of nature. We must, Leopold urged, give up our role as “conquerors” of the earth. Dawson would most surely concur, as this book, in some places quite effectively, makes the case that capitalism is a system built on continual conquering, of nature and of people. I hope readers of Dawson’s book come away more clearly seeing the delusion of fighting for biodiversity with the hammer of capitalism.

Commentary by Jody Emel, Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, MA. This is an elegant book, perfect for popular and classroom consumption. Ashley Dawson identifies capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and an ever-expanding human population as the causes of our current predicament with species loss. Rewilding and deextinction projects are heralded and critiqued in terms of social and environmental justice and the ways in which they feed biocapitalism. Dawson asks, “What would be the shape and fundamental goals of an expansive anti-capitalist movement against extinction and for environmental justice?” (p. 87). The author offers some strategies for how we might move forward toward such an end. These include a universal income in recognition of biodiversity debt; degrowth; drastic reductions of carbon emissions on the part of northern nations by way of “contraction and convergence” as recommended by the Global Commons Institute; a Robin Hood tax such as that suggested by James Tobin; and carefully vetted rewilding, recolonization, and plain old conservation biology approaches. Dawson does not advocate ecosystem service valuation and is plainly critical of such efforts to commodify “nature” and privately capture still more of the global commons. This is all quite reasonable—coupling conservation with social, environmental,

FALL 2018 285

and economic justice to achieve what Dawson calls “radical conservation.” But how do we achieve this? I am reminded of Berlant’s (2011) “cruel optimism.” She wrote about how people prefer to “ride the wave of attachment that they are used to” rather than “interfere with varieties of immiseration” (23). Yet, I also think of de Certeau’s (1984) practices of everyday life that reappropriate space “organized by the techniques of sociocultural production” and the microbial tactics that can reorganize, ultimately, institutions and larger systems. What has the left got to say about these attachments and revolutionary microbial tactics? For years, Marxists critiqued environmentalism as an unnecessary product of middle-class thinking and action. Consumer ethics were critiqued; voluntary simplicity was critiqued; ecological economics and steady-state (read smaller) economies were critiqued; animal rights activism was critiqued—and now there is a championing of radical conservation, degrowth, tax reapportionment, and so on. How different are the goals of these groups? Granted, the social, environmental, and economic justice aspect has sometimes been missing from the politics of the critiqued groups. As long as activists keep these goals simultaneously in mind and practice, we can all be on the same team. Yet how are we to accomplish the greater goal of replacing capitalism with some other more just, ecologically sound, animal-friendly economic system? Gibson-Graham (2006) and the others involved in alt-economies take steps in the direction of such “replacement.” Growing something aside capitalism is one way that anarchists and others advocate and practice. Morton (2016) wrote in Dark Ecology that Marxism has been hobbled by anthropocentrism. He argued for small experiments that join onto other experiments—he called them “toys.” He argued that “we are lazily used to our ontology coming with an easy to discern, snap-on ethics or politics and vice versa, rather than as complex Legos we have to assemble” (Morton 2016, 143). As Guthman (2004) warned, however, the corporations and their practices are still going strong, pointing at state-based action as a necessity to accomplish large-scale change. Do we write letters to Congress or Parliament? Vote and run for office? Practice consumer ethics and economic simplicity? Join organizations already working on making institutional changes? What to do with the state is a major issue for strategy and tactics on the left. We can ignore the state with alt-economies; we cannot ignore the state if we want to change production and distribution systems, trade agreements, climate agreements, energy subsidies, taxation, justice for human and nonhuman animals, migration, and so on.

286

I think we are used to our ontologies and theories of critique without a snap-on ethics or politics. We are used to critique and leave readers without options—capitalism must be replaced—how? Which parts of it? Accumulation of surplus, private property, a market-based economy, distribution of surplus? It seems obvious that a reduction of consumption and production are necessary. It seems obvious that industrialized, intensive agriculture (as opposed to agro-ecology) must be drastically discouraged (Through taxing pesticide use? Through progressive taxation of large land ownership?). It seems obvious that we (in the Global North) need to get off fossil fuels as soon as possible (through subsidies to renewable energy). We need a solidarity-building manifesto like Canada’s LEAP Manifesto with specific goals and strategies to achieve them. I think the left knows well enough the problem. My students know well enough the problem. What they want now are strategies and tactics for solving or mediating it. The first step is to build solidarity and stop critiquing our friends and allies. They are not the enemy. As academics and writers, our job is to now offer solutions—including how to deal effectively with a dangerous, pirating, racist, sexist head of government (and supporters), if we live in the United States. We need to do the complex work of taking things to pieces and rebuilding them with goals of ecological sustainability, human rights, animal rights, and the multiple forms of justice the left embraces. “We” are socialist workers, human rights activists, environmentalists, Black Lives Matter activists, differently abled activists, voluntary simplicity followers, feminists, farm animal rights activists, transgender rights activists, and so on—“we” are many, and it is a good thing, as there is an enormous amount of work to do!

Commentary by Justin McBrien, Department of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. Common in literature on extinction is the trope of silence. Ecological elegies such as Carson’s (1962) Silent Spring or Leopold’s ([1949] 1968) Sand County Almanac come to mind, the latter of whom imagines the final end as when “the last crane will trumpet his farewell . . . and then a silence never to be broken, unless in some far pasture of the Milky Way” (101). Ashley Dawson’s Extinction: a Radical History, however, is no meditation on an abyssal silence—it is a call to arms to stop the screams of extermination. Dawson argues the contemporary extinction crisis is the result of capitalism’s relentless assault on the global commons for some 500 years. Extinction


must be “framed” as an “attack on the planet’s common wealth,” just as climate change—a “leading edge of contemporary capitalism’s contradictions” (p. 19). Capitalism produces extinction by virtue of its very logic, a process of metastatic replication that requires “people to be destructive of their environment” (p. 77). Dawson shows us how ecocide and genocide are one and the same process, linked through the unfolding of the Sixth Extinction of life on earth under the aegis of capital accumulation (p. 124). Extinction: A Radical History illuminates one of the most crucial questions of our contemporary crisis: How is it that capitalism has been able to consistently capitalize on its own catastrophes? Capital’s relationship to extinction is dialectical: The annihilation of biodiversity “represents a direct threat to the reproduction of capital,” and yet at the same time this annihilation presents capitalism with a new opportunity for growth (p. 21). Capitalism operates on the principle of catastrophism—as theory, praxis, and affect, it “generates a chaotic world-system that compounds ecological crises” for its own benefit (p. 84). Dawson argues that this chaotic system finds an epistemic resonance between neoliberal free market autopoesis and the self-emergent “punctuated equilibrium” of evolutionary theory. This allows for the justification and naturalization of capitalism’s crises as necessary creative destructions similar to that of the species radiations detected after mass extinction events in the fossil record (pp. 118–19). Dawson labels this capitalization on self-induced catastrophe “disaster biocapitalism.” It is not simply the exploitation of resources that is driving extinction—capital now “takes the extinction crisis as an opportunity to ratchet up the commodification of life itself” (p. 119). Dawson argues that the bio-fix practices of rewilding and deextinction advance a technocratic Ecomodernist perspective on the extinction crisis that “obscure the pivotal role of capitalism in global ecocide” (p. 108). He rightly points out that this crisis is not the result of an undifferentiated humanity, as the discourse of the Anthropocene would have us believe (p. 146). Disaster biocapitalism justifies its ecocide through a discourse of life’s resilience while exploiting this depleting resilience to secure the conditions for the reproduction of capital (Broswimmer 2002). How, then, to stem the tide of capitalist necrosis? Dawson proposes a universal basic income (UBI) to redress a “biodiversity debt” using a “Robin Hood tax” on global speculation that would be distributed to local inhabitants of biodiversity “hotspots” (pp. 132–33). What constitutes a biodiversity hotspot, and if such a classification is use-

ful, is itself a contested issue (Daru, van der Bank, and Davies 2015), however. A UBI for hotspots means that socioeconomic reparations from the legacy of imperialism and that of environmental debt become severed, leaving an unknown tribunal to determine which areas are deemed worthy of income subsidization. Those regions in the Global South that have historically been the most adversely affected by ecocide would be left out of such a model for want of sufficient biodiversity today. There is also the temporal problem of calculating an “extinction debt,” the inevitable future extinction of certain species due to irreversible processes set in motion today—what scientists call a “dead clade walking.” Poaching is only one of many causes of extinction—habitat destruction and fragmentation, land use changes, invasive species, exotic diseases, climate change, pesticides, fertilizers, and even the growing consumption of meat vie for top ranking. Coral bleaching, ravaging many of the most diverse and important ecosystems in the world, has little to do directly with poverty. The UBI operates under a behavioral economic paradigm of uniform and universalized incentives, a calculus of debts and credits that seeks a transactional measure of value in the natural world while the underlying structural resource demands remain the same. The assumption that a UBI would stop biodiversity loss presumes the market that could allow for latent value to remain as “dead assets” even though the very logic of global financialization is, as Dawson himself argues, a relentless drive for surplus extraction that is running out of time and resources. If most indigenous peoples today are not auctioning off their rights to land but rather getting forcibly expelled from them, then a UBI does little. We cannot frame biodiversity in terms of wealth or human interest. The declaration of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth refuses to place value on land and life, even as a means of reparations— any financial mechanism short-circuits a radical solution to this problem (World People’s Conference 2010). This leads us to energy, which is notably absent in Dawson’s account. The crisis of extinction is also a crisis of energy—capital’s accelerating metabolic rate of accumulation comes at the price of an accelerating entropic dissipation of the ecological conditions necessary for its continued reproduction. Dawson is correct to say that Exxon and others will extract the last remaining ounce of value from the earth even if it means its total destruction (p. 137). When and how that last remaining ounce of value comes might not necessarily be close at hand, though. There is no reason to believe, as Dawson asserts,

FALL 2018 287

that we are witnessing the terminal crisis of capitalism if capital itself proceeds by exploiting extinction. The logic of extinction is not only immanent to the logic of value— it is itself the valorization of value. The problem of capitalism’s accumulation of extinction cannot be framed in a binary of either the destruction of all limits or reaching the limits of destruction. When it comes to disaster biocapitalism, the future rests not in deextinction or rewilding, but in the renewable energy market. Renewable energy reveals capital’s dialectical relationship between “accumulation by conservation” and “accumulation by extinction.” This dialectic mediates a necropolitical economy based on the unpaid labor of extinction, and a biopolitical economy that seeks to mitigate and control those aspects deemed a threat to its continuation. Ensuring the continuation of capital would require that the undervalorization of fossil fuels could be compensated through extraction of cheap nature elsewhere—a return to “live energy” in an attempt to “save capitalism from itself.” We cannot rely on the logic of capital’s accumulation of extinction to make capital extinct. The Sixth Extinction is of a greater order of magnitude than both capital and humanity—it has dialectically unfolded through the combination of the nonlinearity of geological processes and the internal logic of capitalist accumulation. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) observed, “What we make history with is the matter of a becoming, not the subject matter of a story” (347). Life discovers itself anew through the perpetual evolution of practices, creating new conditions to emerge that were still present “for all of time.” This becoming is a great wager cast again and again, one whose future is neither guaranteed in its continuation nor inevitable in its erasure.

Response by Ashley Dawson, Princeton Environmental Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. It would be hard to find a worse time to publish work minimizing the significance of biodiversity loss. We are in the midst of a massive assault on the global environmental and social commons by an oligarchy whose rapaciousness knows no bounds. In the last year the Trump administration has green-lighted extreme extraction projects like the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, attacked climate scientists, turned the agencies charged with protecting the environment into arms of fossil capitalism, and dispatched a team of oil and coal executives to make

288

a mockery of the United Nations climate talks in Bonn, and, most recently, cut roughly 2 million acres from two national monuments in Utah in what is the largest rollback of federal land protection in the nation’s history. As I write these lines, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) remains imperiled, as plans to open this iconic piece of wilderness in Alaska to drilling for oil and fracked gas have been smuggled into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The coastal plain of the ANWR, along with three contiguous protected areas, forms a vast transnational nursery for hundreds of species, including the Porcupine Caribou herd, sacred to the indigenous Gwich’in Nation. The attack on the ANWR is particularly significant because the Arctic functions as an integrator of the planet’s climate systems. With the region warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet, the impact of the Arctic climate breakdown is already being felt around the world. As increasing numbers of people and other species suffer from this baleful transformation, oil barons and other plutocrats and charlatans seek opportunities for windfall profits amid the melting ice and intensifying storms. It is a moment of reckoning, a fateful conjuncture when we need clear thinking about the causes of the climate crisis and concerted action to fight back against the slide toward planetary ecocide. It is an epically bad time, in other words, to dismiss the significance of global biodiversity loss, one of nine critical planetary boundaries that are currently imperiled. Yet this is precisely what Pyron (2017) did in an op-ed titled “We Don’t Need to Save Endangered Species; Extinction Is Part of Evolution.” Pyron, who is Robert F. Griggs Associate Professor of Biology at George Washington University, argued in his opinion piece that “species constantly go extinct” and that “extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish.” This perspective, which has a certain grosgrain truth on a scientific level, allows Pyron to adopt an Olympian resignation toward current environmental catastrophes: “Unless we somehow destroy every living cell on Earth,” he informed us, “the sixth extinction will be followed by a recovery, and later a seventh extinction, and so on.” So why worry about coral bleaching, the acidification of the oceans, and the annihilation of roughly 40 percent of animal and plant species on the planet over the last half-century? Why bother with conservation, or with political activism of any sort, for that matter? Pyron’s blithe resignation to ecocide leads him to characterize the Paris Accords as a nostalgic effort to “revive the status


quo ante,” one that is futile because “whatever effort we make to maintain the current climate will eventually be overrun by the inexorable forces of space and geology.” Pyron comes across rather like H. G. Wells’s time traveler, who witnesses the bleak evolutionary terminus of Homo sapiens and the heat death of our solar system before disappearing into a nihilistic temporal abyss. Although there are some scientific mistakes in Pyron’s op-ed—such as his equation of viruses like HIV and ebola with keystone species like elephants—what really stands out about his piece is the theoretical muddle. On the one hand, he espoused a universalizing utilitarianism in which “the only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings.” Taken to its logical extreme, this perspective suggests that we only need conserve animal species we have domesticated (e.g., cows, sheep, goats, pigs, and, above all, chickens), hundreds of billions of which we raise and slaughter every year. While attacking the idea that conservation should be an end in itself, however, Pyron also argued that we should adopt “moderation” as a policy in our exploitation of the natural world: “we should save whatever species and habitats can be easily rescued.” Pyron’s suggestion that an undifferentiated humanity should adopt moderation as a policy might have some antecedents in the environmental movement, but it seems wholly innocent of any conception of the social forces driving the global destruction of biodiversity. This lack of cogent analysis suggests that the valuable work of scientists in cataloguing nature’s despoliation urgently needs to be linked to a politically and historically informed analytical lens that helps make sense of the catastrophic losses we are currently witnessing. It is precisely such a lens that the humanities in general and radical scholarship in particular can help provide. It was Kolbert’s (2014) similar absence of a basic critical orientation in her influential book The Sixth Extinction that impelled me to write my radical history of extinction. Near the conclusion of her book, Kolbert suggested that “if you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book in your lap (p. 266). As I argue in my book, this sweeping indictment of an undifferentiated humanity is both historically inaccurate and politically disempowering: It offers no understanding of the structural forces that generate exploitation and ecocide. Kolbert’s book certainly provides an extremely important documentary account from the environmental frontlines, engaging with scientists

from around the world who are studying biodiversity loss of various forms. Like all such catalogues, though, without an explanatory and politically engaged framework to make sense of the sixth extinction, the horror show runs the risk of generating resignation and even apathy of the sort reflected in Pyron’s op-ed. My book Extinction: A Radical History seeks to articulate a clear and accessible historical materialist understanding of biodiversity loss. As I say in the introduction to the book, “The destruction of global biodiversity needs to be framed as a great, and perhaps ultimate, attack on the planet’s common wealth. Indeed, extinction needs to be seen, along with climate change, as the leading edge of contemporary capitalism’s contradictions” (p. 13). Later in the book I lay out the specific destructive aspects of capitalism as they relate to the obliteration of biodiversity: “Three destructive aspects of the capitalist system stand out when we view this system in relation to the extinction crisis: 1) capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own production; 2) it must expand ceaselessly in order to survive; 3) it generates a chaotic world system, which in turn intensifies the extinction crisis” (p. 41). I then provide specific examples of each of these three destructive systemic tendencies, including the fur trade that accompanied early modern European colonial expansion into the New World, the whaling industry of the nineteenth century, and the ecocidal destruction of tropical forests by U.S. forces during the war in Vietnam. Subsequent portions of the book offer descriptions of—and critical comments on—contemporary efforts to address the extinction crisis, including rewilding and deextinction. The book closes with a series of proposals for what I call “radical conservation.” My goal here was to situate conservation within the context of broader struggles against neoliberal globalization and for climate justice, and, as a consequence, many of the proposals I advance for radical conservation are inspired by the perspectives of grassroots anticapitalist movements fighting for global justice. My book as a whole is animated by the belief that the extinction crisis is not just an example of epic bad timing (as the dominance of neoliberal ideology robs us of the tools we would need to address the crisis), but rather is a direct product of hypercapitalism. Radical perspectives on scientific and environmental issues have been gaining strength, notwithstanding the unfortunate example of Pyron. Impelled by the climate crisis and by the Trump administration’s attacks, significant mobilizations such as the March for Science on Earth Day 2017 and the revival of the organization Science for the People provide hopeful examples of radical conversations

FALL 2018 289

and movements in the sciences. This forum among geographers can be seen as part of a progressive interdisciplinary ferment around issues of crucial environmental and social import. I am very grateful to the participants for their attentive readings and feedback on my work on extinction. Even when I disagree with their comments, I want to underline that I feel that their engagement with my work and with the topics it attempts to foreground is a very good thing, both for my thoughts about the biodiversity crisis specifically and for the cause of ecosocialism in general. John G. Hintz begins his review by very generously comparing my book to Klein’s (2015) This Changes Everything and Torres’s (2007) Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. Both these other books, Hintz contends, argue that what have often been seen as environmental issues (climate change and animal rights, respectively) need to be analyzed in relation to contemporary capitalism, and that a radical critique can help illuminate why this is so. Having placed my book in this context, however, Hintz goes on to say that it does not “effectively mak[e] a radical case that directly implicates capitalism in the problem at hand.” I am frankly mystified by this assertion, which inexplicably seems to ignore the prominent passages and organizing framework I cited earlier. Hintz’s suggestion that “class issues feel a bit tagged on” to my book totally disregards my arguments about the fundamentally ecocidal dynamics of the capitalist system, not to mention the anti-imperial and antiracist criticism of European American colonialism I articulate through readings of texts such as Columbus’s (1895) Letters, Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, and photographs of European bison-slaughtering campaigns on the plains of North America. Hintz makes other even more glaring errors, though, such as asserting that my book “leans heavily” on Kolbert’s book “for information and data on historical extinctions.” A simple perusal of my endnotes contradicts this argument: There are only six references to Kolbert in the entire text, two of which relate to the ideological framing passage I discussed earlier. Similarly, Hintz argues that I focus too narrowly on extinction, but then goes on to say that I do “note” defaunation, although it remains peripheral to the book. Yet, as demonstrated by the key examples of capitalist ecocide I alluded to earlier (fur trading, whaling, and the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam), my book is replete with discussions of defaunation and deforestation. When Hintz turns to my discussion of rewilding, however, he offers a useful critique of my own efforts to challenge contemporary conservation measures intended to miti-

290

gate biodiversity loss. I agree with Hintz that my critical commentary on proposals for rewilding parts of Europe and North America would have been strengthened had I draw more careful distinctions between unapologetically Malthusian advocates such as Foreman, conservation biologists such as Noss and Soule, and more radical activists such as Monbiot. My criticism of rewilding was shaped by my discomfort with the very idea of wilderness, as this concept constitutively erases the indigenous peoples who shaped the landscape that settler colonials described as wild. Rewilding advocates repeat this colonial outlook today, I argued, not simply by using the idea of wilderness but by focusing on the repopulation of portions of North America and Europe even as once-colonized countries in the tropical latitudes continue to have their rich ecosystems mowed down by global capitalism. In some cases, advocates actually embrace the idea of stealing African megafauna to rewild the North American plains. Although, as Hintz usefully notes, such forms of latter-day colonialism do not characterize the rewilding movement as a whole, I continue to believe that rewilding efforts in the Global North should not be undertaken without commensurate pledges of economic assistance for conservation in the Global South. Jody Emel and Justin McBrien focus in their reviews on the question of what is to be done about the extinction crisis. As Emel notes, many on the left today would agree that the different facets of the environmental crisis— extinction included—are at bottom driven by capitalism’s remorselessly destructive drive to grow incessantly on a finite natural resource base. The solution to these problems is less obvious, though. As Monbiot (2017) argued in Out of the Wreckage, we are vexed today by the exhaustion of the two great framing narratives of the twentieth century—social democracy and neoliberalism (although he could—and should—have added postcolonial nationalism to that list). How to extend the liberatory struggles of the last century in the context of an ideologically exhausted but still virulently destructive global neoliberal capitalism is the great question of our time, one that, given the crisis of climate change, will determine the fate of the vast majority of people and other species on the planet. In retrospect, I think my book would have offered a more valuable primer for activists had I devoted more space in my final chapters to specific examples of contemporary struggles against extractivism (of natural resources of all varieties). Proposals for concrete strategies of resistance might have evolved relatively organically out of discussion of such struggles. Instead of adopting this approach,


however, my book advances a small number of radical proposals inspired by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Nature in Bolivia, a conference I attended as part of a delegation of environmental justice activists from New York City. Drawing on the arguments of the People’s Agreement around climate change and climate debt, for example, I argued for policies of global contraction and convergence of carbon emissions, and for a UBI to be applied initially in postcolonial nations with significant troves of fauna and flora—so-called biodiversity hotspots. The former proposal still seems sound, and opens the way for the discussion of the collectivization of energy assets that both McBrien and I call for. McBrien offers some very insightful critiques of the latter suggestion, however, including that UBI will not stop climate change, that determinations of biodiversity hotspots are contested, and that even if UBI halts poaching of megafauna it will not stem extinction more broadly. These are all strong points, but I am not sure that McBrien and I are in agreement that the People’s Agreement characterizes any financial mechanisms as short-circuiting more radical solutions to environmental problems. Although the Agreement certainly decries financializing strategies such as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries program’s commodification of global forests, the Final Conclusions of the Working Group on Climate Debt forthrightly call on developed countries, transnational corporations, and financial speculators “to compensate for the disasters that they have provoked.” Furthermore, the idea of climate debt permeates much of the document. Consequently, the People’s Agreement calls not simply for immediate and wholesale mitigation of developed nations’ carbon emissions, but also for the rich nations to “provide the means required by developing countries to facilitate adequate responses to climate change and to meet the costs of its adverse effects . . . [and] provide additional unconditional financial resources to enable technology transfer, capacity building and adaptation in developing countries.” In sum, imperial pillage and capitalist ecocide demand concrete and meaningful reparations. As the extinction crisis deepens, these demands for reparations and for the just transition that they would facilitate only become more insistent. ORCID Christopher R. Cox 6810

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4072-

References Berlant, L. 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Broswimmer, F. 2002. Ecocide: A short history of mass extinction of species. London, UK: Pluto Press. Capra, F. 1988. Physics and the current change of paradigms. In The world view of contemporary physics: Does it need a new metaphysics?, ed. R. F. Kitchener, 144–52. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Carson, R. 1962. Silent spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Columbus, C., W. E. Curtis, J. I. Rodríguez, and J. B. Thacher. 1895. The authentic letters of Columbus. Publication (Field Columbian Museum); 2. Chicago, IL: Field Columbian Museum. Cronon, W. 1995. The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature. In Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature, ed. W. Cronon, 69–90. New York, NY: Norton. Daru, B. H., M. van der Bank, and T. J. Davies. 2015. Spatial incongruence among hotspots and complementary areas of tree diversity in Southern Africa. Diversity Distribution 21: 769–80. de Certeau, M. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ehrlich, P. 1968. The population bomb. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Guthman, J. 2004. Agrarian dreams: The paradox of organic farming in California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Haraway, D. 1989. Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. London, UK, and New York, NY: Routledge. Klein, N. 2015. This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Kolbert, E. 2014. The sixth extinction. New York, NY: Holt. Leopold, A. [1949] 1968. A Sand County almanac: And sketches here and there. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. Living with the land ethic. BioScience 54 (2): 149–54. Lewontin, R., and R. Levins. 2007. Biology under the influence: Dialectical essays on ecology, agriculture, and health. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Monbiot, G. 2017. Out of the wreckage: A new politics for an age of crisis. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Moore, J. W. 2015. Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. New York, NY: Verso. Morton, T. 2016. Dark ecology: For a logic of future coexistence. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

FALL 2018 291

Pyron, A. R. 2017. We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution. Washington Post 22 November 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ outlook/we-dont-need-to-save-endangered-speciesextinction-is-part-of-evolution/2017/11/21/57fc5658cdb4-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html?noredirect= on&utm_term=.5cd704be25f3

292

Swannell, J. (ed.) 1992. The Oxford modern English dictionary. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Torres, B. 2007. Making a killing: The political economy of animal rights. Oakland, CA: AK Press. World people’s conference on climate change and the rights of mother earth. 2010. Humanist Perspectives 43 (2): 30.



BOOK REVIEW FORUM

Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest Over Ukraine and the Caucasus Gerard Toal. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017. xx and 387 pp., photos, maps, graphs, tables, notes, index. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 9780190253301).

Introduction by Alexander B. Murphy, Department of Geography, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. Territorial struggles in Ukraine and the Caucasus have helped make geopolitical upheaval one of the defining themes of the early twenty-first century. Both struggles raise fundamental questions about Russia’s role in the contemporary world and the degree to which the Cold War is really behind us. Addressing those questions requires careful consideration of the underlying circumstances and motives at play in the Russo-Georgian war of 2008 and the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. That is the task Gerard Toal has taken on in this book. Toal is a political geographer who is best known for the pioneering role he played in advancing a critical approach to the study of geopolitics. Rather than viewing geopolitics as a grand game shaped by physical-environmental and strategic arrangements, critical geopolitics is grounded in the idea that what really matters are the perspectives and motives of those in a position to shape policies of geopolitical import. Following that approach means emphasizing the nature and significance of prevailing ideological norms rather than material circumstances. Some of Toal’s most influential early publications explore the theoretical

underpinnings of the critical geopolitics project in detail. That is not the case with this volume. Instead, critical geopolitics lurks in the background as Toal grapples with the geopolitical dynamics at play in Russia’s recent engagement with its near abroad. Even though this is not a book that wears theory on its sleeve, Toal sets forth an underlying conceptual framework in a few crisp pages in the introductory chapter. He argues that an analysis of geopolitical conflict needs to take three matters into consideration: (1) the spaces, territories, and landscapes produced by power structures (what he calls geopolitical fields); (2) the prevailing understandings and identities of influential geopolitical actors (geopolitical cultures); and (3) the mix of available military resources and infrastructure that influence perceptions and decisions (geopolitical conditions). These three dimensions shape the ensuing discussion, but they are not singled out for deep discussion in and of themselves. Instead, Toal draws on them to construct a narrative that sheds light on the interplay of intentions and actions at play in the conflicts that unfolded in Ukraine and the Caucasus (principally Georgia). The book is empirically rich. Despite some acknowledged research challenges due to access restrictions and linguistic limitations (overcome to a significant degree through collaborations and the use of research assistants), Toal offers an array of insights into the Russian geopolitical imagination, the responses to Russian threats in Tbilisi and Kyiv, and the positions taken by the United States. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Putin’s Russia gets the

Editor’s Note: Jeremy Tasch served as guest editor for this forum.


most extensive treatment, and Toal takes the reader on an extended (and very readable) tour of the forces shaping Russian actions in Georgia and Ukraine: the desire to reclaim lost power and prestige in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the perceived threat from European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion (in the latter case in direct contravention of promises made in the late 1990s and early 2000s), the inertia of imperialist and nationalist impulses from earlier times, concerns over the fate of ethnic Russians living in neighboring countries, and more. Toal offers the reader a nuanced sense of what the world has looked like from Moscow’s perspective during the Putin (and Medvedev) years. He shows that, from the vantage point of those in power in Moscow, Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and Georgia are not properly understood as invasions; instead they were necessary actions to protect the interests of allies (South Ossetia), respond to an externally driven coup d’etat (Ukraine), and ensure the territorial security of the Russian state (both).

insights that come from the latter approach has the potential to expand appreciation of the ideas underlying the critical geopolitics project even among those who have never encountered the term. Indeed, that was the single most striking point that struck me when I first read a prepublication copy of the book; as I wrote in a statement that ended up on the back cover, the book will “help audiences beyond the academy appreciate the nature and value of the ‘critical geopolitics’ project that Toal himself has played such an important role in advancing.”

Other geopolitical actors get their share of attention, too—most notably the United States. U.S. geopolitics is not viewed in isolation, however. Government officials in Tbilisi and Kyiv had a significant influence on U.S. policy, and Toal’s accounts of the interplay of interests and perspectives across the Atlantic are among the most interesting parts of the book. In discussing the actions of Georgian President Saakashvili at the time of the Russo-Georgian war, for example, Toal shows that despite Saakashvili’s role in starting the war, he had reasons to believe the United States would back him in an armed confrontation with the Russians. As for the situation in Ukraine, Toal draws attention to the stark contrast between how the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovich was viewed in Washington, DC, and how it was seen by a good half of the population in eastern Ukraine.

A book with the breadth and depth of Near Abroad inevitably raises questions of analysis and interpretation, a number of which are explored in the commentaries that follow. Two issues stood out for me. The first is methodological: What types of geopolitical representations are revealing of geopolitical culture and which are not? Toal makes reference to many such representations in an effort to explain the perspective emanating from Moscow, and he is quick to point out that his effort to seek understanding should not be seen as justifying particular actions or practices. That’s surely right, but which representations provide cultural insights and which are simply knowingly false propaganda (fake news) to advance particular agendas? As one reads through the litany of representations set forth in Near Abroad, it is sometimes not easy to separate one from the other. In the absence of a concerted effort to separate the two, is there a risk that explanation might bleed into (at least mild) justification?

Despite its largely empirical cast, Near Abroad also has broad conceptual resonance. Students of critical geopolitics will easily recognize the influence of that perspective on the book—particularly in the central role geopolitical culture plays in the text. Indeed, of the three conceptual concerns undergirding the analysis, this is the one that gets the most attention. Toal’s efforts to explore the Russian geopolitical mindset are telling, and they allow him to juxtapose what he terms the thin geopolitical reasoning that is often on display in Washington, DC—the classic geopolitics that fails to probe how differences from place to place might affect understandings and practices—and a thick geopolitical perspective that takes those differences seriously. The book’s success in highlighting the

294

Toal’s emphasis on geopolitical culture, and the ways he explores the concept, also draw attention to the role that affect, emotions, ingrained prejudices, and unexamined assumptions play in the making of geopolitics. His book thus underscores the importance of a point that feminist geographers have been making for some time. Feelings, senses of identity, and positionality matter—even in a realm such as geopolitics with its superficial veneer of reasoned, objective, dispassionate analysis and practice.

A second issue worth considering is how to blend the analysis of geopolitical fields, cultures, and conditions. In my view, Toal’s book does a remarkably good job laying out the relevant geographical context (the geopolitical field) and explaining the Weltanschauung of the main actors (geopolitical cultures). Elements of the geopolitical condition (infrastructure, military resources) make periodic appearances as well, but in more minor, supporting roles. Should these material factors get more play? Is that possible without undermining the central (and I believe correct) point Toal wants to make about the critical importance of geopolitical culture?


However one comes out on these matters, there is little doubt that Near Abroad represents a significant intervention—both in advancing understanding of what happened in Ukraine and Georgia and in pointing to productive ways of analyzing geopolitical developments. It is a book that challenges oversimplified understandings of the post-Soviet realm, and it is a clarion call for a thicker geopolitics—a project to which geographers have much to contribute. Its engaging style and thoughtprovoking analysis make it a work that can and should reach audiences outside the academy. It is also the kind of book that can advance understanding of geography’s relevance for public debate. More such books are very much needed.

Commentary by John Agnew, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA. Gerard Toal’s Near Abroad is a tour-de-force about the geopolitics of two recent Russian adventures in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014) set in the broader context of the rule of Vladimir Putin and his regime and U.S. government efforts to expand influence into the now-independent states that once constituted the Soviet Union. It has rightly garnered praise for the accuracy of its reportage about the events in question and for its case “against reducing complicated geopolitical issues to facile formulas, and particularly against the U.S. tendency to back political leaders who talk a good line, preferably in English” (Quinn-Judd 2018, 37). Among its many strengths as a serious academic title that go well beyond its recounting of the details of the cases themselves, I would identify three as particularly original and helpful in making sense out of the cases and providing ideas that can be deployed more widely to geopolitical settings the world over. One is the useful theoretical framework laid out in Chapter 1 positing three dimensions to any particular geopolitical setting: the field of practice for actors and their impacts, the culture in which the actors are embedded, and the material conditions and associated representations that condition and direct conflicts that arise. In this way Toal manages to propose a modus operandi that integrates rather than privileges any one of these. On my reading, all three contribute to the structuring of the narrative as we move from the Caucasus to Crimea and Ukraine if with somewhat less emphasis on the material factors (from highways to resources, etc.) that old-style classical geopolitics overemphasized to the exclusion of all else.

A second strength is the emphasis in Chapter 2 on the collapse of the Soviet Union as absolutely central to what has happened since, with a particularly useful discussion of how terms like tragedy, catastrophe, and disaster were translated from Russian into English, for example, and how the trope of the Soviet “tragedy” combined with U.S. government expansion of NATO to color the responses of the Kremlin under Putin to challenges from political leaders “who talk a good line” such as Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia. Finally, in Chapter 8, after detailing the two cases, Toal draws a contrast between what he calls “thick” and “thin” geopolitics. The former is what he claims he has done in this book to the best of his ability. The latter is typically what goes for “geopolitics” in the hands of many pundits and practitioners in which ill-thought-out images such as domino theory substitute for careful analysis of specific settings and how they are constructed by a range of actors and their effects. Broader geopolitical frameworks are useless and dangerous unless relevant to the specifics of different geopolitical settings. With regard to the cases at hand I would say that I find the overall story about the Georgian conflict somewhat “thicker” than the Ukrainian one. This might, however, reflect the fact that I am more familiar with the latter than with the former, perhaps in part because the Georgian conflict coincided with the financial crisis of 2008 that distracted some of us from it for much of that year. Entirely fit for the purpose in terms of the goals Toal sets for himself, the book nonetheless has stimulated some musings on my part about how to engage in “geopolitical analysis” in general and in relation to Russia in particular. For example, I am struck by how much a geopolitical concept such as the near abroad informs the book but remains difficult to capture conceptually beyond describing territories previously but no longer within the Soviet Union. At one time I certainly associated it with the necessary presence of Russian identifiers or Russified socioethnic groups. This applies to these two cases, but the term has recently seemed to take on a life of its own to the extent that an expansive Russian sphere of influence, potentially including, for instance, Syria, becomes part of the near abroad. Perhaps what is needed to make it more definitive and useful is to reexamine the historical context of Russification and Sovietization as parts of the historical experience of living in the Soviet Union. Ethnic Russians were only ever a bare majority of the population of the Soviet Union at its height, yet, at least at the level of local elites, there was an intense investment in the overall

FALL 2018 295

Soviet project notwithstanding its slow degradation and sudden collapse. Going back to the insights and discussion provided in the 1960s and 1970s by such students of Sovietization as Aspaturian and Silver might have some payoff. Toal alludes to this process at various points in the book and how it figures into the post-Soviet identities of Russians, Ukrainians, Chechens, Ossetians, and Abkhazians, as well as Russian identifiers outside the borders of Russia proper. A more sustained discussion of these identities might well be in order, though. As Toal strongly suggests, nostalgia for what has been lost seems to have become a substitute for looking forward, not just in Russia but also across much of the former Soviet Union. Yet, many identities are complex as illustrated in the Estonian-Georgian coproduced film Tangerines (Urushadze 2013), where two Estonians transplanted to Abkhazia during the Soviet period find their tangerine orchard in the middle of the early 1990s conflict between the Georgian army and a group of Russian and Chechen mercenaries fighting on behalf of an Abkhazia independent of Georgia. Even as they speak their own languages to those in their own group, they all speak Russian to everyone else. Such bilingualism and biculturalism are important resources for a revanchist Russia. The extent to which the spatial adjacency implicit in the idea of the near abroad accounts for this, however, needs more exploration. Of more general significance, for me one of the most intriguing features of both of the geopolitical situations covered in this book is the way in which power as coercion and the use of force were intrinsic to Russian responses to challenges on its fringes. It is as if alternative strategies such as subversion of institutions, casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections through disinformation campaigns, or arranging to control crucial economic sectors never entered into the calculation of options. Yet as we know from the past few years, Russian operatives have been actively involved in subverting elections and governments far from the near abroad. The popular television series Occupied (2015), about the EU inviting Russia to take command of Norway’s oil and gas assets when that country elected a Green government committed to ending the extraction and export of fossil fuels, shows at least one possible way of engaging geopolitically without firing (many) shots. Perhaps Putin and his cohort have learned from watching the series that another modus operandi is possible. Some sorts of hegemony do not require empire. For a relatively poor country, it is also a whole lot cheaper. Finally, the whole question of a revanchist Russia under Putin also needs more attention. Although I agree with Toal that U.S. policy expanding NATO into the territory

296

of the former Soviet Union was completely wrongheaded in both military and political terms, the response from Putin’s Kremlin is not solely as reactive as he seems to suggest. He allows that Putin has been involved in “making Russia great again” (p. 280), even if he inherited many of the geopolitical conundra (from Chechnya to Abkhazia, etc.) from the 1990s, but he does not connect this to what I think is a long-standing sense of Russian exceptionalism that challenges that of the United States in terms of the depth and range of its hubris. Beyond being a front man for a crony-capitalist kleptocracy, Putin is also someone with clear commitments to making Russia count in world politics notwithstanding its economic and demographic weaknesses. He has surrounded himself with and celebrates personalities living and dead who define Russia’s place in the world in openly Messianic terms (Agnew 2017). At the same time, it is important to remember that not everything about conflicts in the former Soviet Union outside of Russia is geopolitical in the sense of directly involving Russian government as a directing force. The constant referral back to the victories of the Great Patriotic War of 1941 to 1945 and the invariant use of the term fascist to describe Russia’s current enemies is suggestive, however, of how important past achievement and sacrifice is to contemporary collective memory. Across Russian society and even among minority groups treated badly during the Soviet period, this messaging has extremely wide and positive resonance. One does not need to see Putin as a sort of Global Wizard of Oz (like on some broadcasts of MSNBC) to acknowledge how much a certain “idea” of Russia can figure in his justifying actions such as those in South Ossetia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014 without neglecting all of the other factors Toal so carefully marshals in this book. Is Russia really so tired of empire?

Commentary by Klaus Dodds, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, UK. The term near abroad has an awkward linguistic history. As befitting a term that blurs and blends proximity and distance, its transliteration into English from Russian is an approximation. As the New York Times informed its readers: The seminal phrase, blizhneye zarubezhye, was obviously giving translators a hard time. Blizhneye is the neuter of blizhniy, an adjective meaning “near” (Near East


is Blizhniy Vostok), but “zarubezhye is a noun with no English equivalent,” writes Kenneth Katzner of Washington, author of the English-Russian, Russian-English Dictionary, based on American English. “It is built around rubezh, a word meaning ‘border.’ The prefix za means ‘beyond.’” (Safire 1994)

Popularized in the early 1990s, with earlier antecedents in the 1970s according to some observers, it signified a postSoviet reimagination of geopolitical space. This was a recognition, even determination, that Russia might have “lost” a union of socialist Soviet republics but not given up on a substantial sphere of influence and interference (the Commonwealth of Independent States). According to the aforementioned New York Times article, this notion of a near abroad might have had a more benign, even ironic intonation—a term of sorts that Russians used to describe their relationship with the greater Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Although I claim no expertise on its linguistic and political genealogy, the near abroad became an expedient term for European and U.S. analysts grappling with the implications of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. What emerges from this engagement is that the near abroad not only signified a political geographical space (the fourteen former Soviet Union republics to the west and south of Russia), but a signal of intent that post-Soviet Russia intended to maintain more than a watching brief over its former hinterland. In other words, the near abroad was not only descriptive, but also declarative in intent. Russia enjoyed special interests in these countries on account of their former relationship to the Tsarist and Soviet empires, the presence of Russian-speaking peoples, and their proximity to recent Cold War and historic adversaries including NATO member states such as West Germany, Norway, and Turkey. The United States, as a consequence of its military presence in air bases throughout Europe and the Middle East, was embroiled in the near abroad. Over the next two to three decades, the overwhelming direction of travel has been Russian consolidation of influence and interference in the near abroad. Ranging from outright conflict with some former Soviet Republics (Ukraine and Georgia) to hybrid warfare (Estonia), security partnerships (Central Asian Republics), brutal suppression of republican areas within Russia (Chechnya), and economic and political dependencies (Belarus), Russian governments have been consistent in their zeal to retain a dominant role in this complex and multilayered geopolitical space. Web-based disruption, for example, was not an option in 1991 but it played a decisive role

in 2007 when Russian-backed hackers attacked the digital informational architecture of Estonia. In the last decade, relations with Russia have been particularly poor, and even poisonous, as the Russian ex-Federal Security Service agent Alexander Litvinenko and former military officer turned British spy Sergei Skripal discovered in November 2006 and March 2018, respectively. Remarkably, the latter survived. The United Kingdom was no safe haven for critics and cashiers of the Putin government. Where exactly did the near abroad begin and end? The poisoning incidents demonstrated to many that Russia was perfectly prepared to violate UK sovereignty in pursuit of a public critic of President Putin and the business and political elites in Moscow who were already busy availing themselves of UK property and City of London financial and legal services. Whatever the term near abroad might have signified, say in 1991 or 1992, it was now capable of being stretched and pulled in different directions, as and when circumstances demanded. Toal’s publication, Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus, is a timely affair. For more than twenty-five years, Professor Toal has been one of the most innovative and productive political geographers in the English-speaking world. His work, alongside his PhD supervisor John Agnew and fellow Irish compatriot Simon Dalby, was pivotal to the initiation of critical geopolitics. I, for one, remain indebted to his support and encouragement when embarking on my doctoral studies in the early 1990s. Always theoretically innovative, Toal has a persistent knack of making his writings academically accessible, and I think more so when he took up his current appointment at the Alexandria/Washington, DC, campus of Virginia Tech. Close to but never complicit with the heartland of federal power, he has established himself through his writings (and online presence—@Toal_CritGeo) as a public geographer and intellectual. His latest book, following earlier publications on critical geopolitics and Bosnia, is book-ended by two conflicts—the 2008 Georgian war and the 2014 annexation of Crimea and ongoing instability in eastern Ukraine. It also coincides with a worsening of relationships with Europe and the United States, which was made manifest by the imposition of sanctions against Russia following the annexation of Crimea. As an Arctic observer, I would merely note that Russian investment and interest in the Arctic also “spiked” during this period following the infamous flag-planting incident in the central Arctic Ocean in August 2007. Fresh concerns were expressed that the Arctic region might become as bothersome as the southern near abroad. Although we have not yet wit-

FALL 2018 297

nessed conflict (and do not expect to do so), the arrest and detention of the Arctic Sunrise thirty in September 2013 signaled a willingness by the Russian state to put law and military force to work in confronting environmental campaigners. Thankfully, for Arctic Sunrise thirty, the 2014 Winter Olympics provided an opportunity for Putin to order their release from prison lest the optics surrounding a $50 billion investment be tainted. Toal is no misty-eyed observer of Russia and its near abroad. He can be blunt, and even very blunt. Former Russian and Georgian leaders Boris Yeltsin and Mikheil Saakashvili, respectively, are not spared, and perhaps deservedly so. Saakashvili left Ukraine in 2013, and adopted Ukrainian citizenship (eventually to become a governor of Odessa). In December 2017 he was involved in a bizarre standoff with security agents in Kiev. Accused of taking money from Russian organized crime, it is hard to believe that he was once positioned as the leader of a progressively minded Rose Revolution (2003). The “rose” in question has well and truly wilted. Readers should be warned; there are few likeable political characters in Toal’s auditing of the near abroad. One possible exception might be the former Georgian leader, Kakha Bendukidze, who became a leading figure in the development of tertiary education in the country. In a series of fluent and tightly argued essays, he dissects Russian geopolitical culture and uses a medley of work from geography, political science, psychology, and postSoviet studies. Both conflicts are contextualized and historicized, and I think he complicates any prevailing assumptions about Russian-speaking communities and their (unthinkingly supportive) connection to Putin and his “Greater Russia” project. Although not a Ukrainian, Georgian, or Russian-speaking expert, my sense is that the author has worked well with academic collaborators and used his discursive and survey-based research to develop a series of aperçus regarding why tension turns into crisis, and crisis turns into conflict. Repeatedly, he rejects any notion of predestination. Making sense of crisis and conflict requires us to think about triggers. In other words, nothing is inevitable and endemic features of societies such as political corruption and economic marginalization make conflict sometimes less unpalatable. As a passionate advocate of “thick geopolitics,” he is forthright in his belief that careful empirical analysis is sina qua non for an appreciation of Russia and its relationship to the near abroad. Toal can and does do theory. In this book, it is a more muted affair. Again, I think this is part and parcel of a de-

298

sire to communicate somewhat beyond the academy. For me, the novelty of his work lies in developing “affective geopolitics” and explaining how affective feelings and storylines generate waves of emotion at particular times and spaces. Whether it pivots around lost territories, status anxiety, great power nostalgia, humiliation, and so on, Russia under Putin is surely a productive place to think about how affect gets mobilized and memorialized, and, importantly, when and where affect fails to move and sway populations. The public audience that the book is appealing to is one rooted (I think) more in the United States rather than Europe. Europe’s relationship with Ukraine is rather different, and is framed by the EU as part of an Eastern Neighborhood (Eastern Partnership) rather than near abroad. The texture and tone of affective geopolitics is different—natural gas and energy geopolitics has more affective potential in Europe. In turn, this raises interesting political geographical questions about the role and scope of rival and complementary affective storylines and whether there might be different sorts of thick and thin affective geopolitics. It also remains an open question as to how effective the EU has been or will be in its promotion and endorsement of “shared values” and “collective norms.” Immediate proximity matters and EU and NATO membership of many former Soviet bloc countries, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, profoundly shaped Russia and EU imaginaries and practices regarding Eastern and Central Europe. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad provides a near permanent reminder that Russian sovereign territory is both within and at the edge of the EU. Most U.S. citizens would have little to no awareness of Kaliningrad, I suspect. Toal is (rightly) critical of U.S. reporting and political engagement with its tendencies either to simplify or exaggerate Russia and “great power.” Russia’s relationship with the United States has arguably become even more intriguing. Awaiting further news from the Mueller enquiry, U.S. citizens are going to be confronted by further revelations of collusion and financial transaction. Whether any of this is likely to stimulate the production of reasonable public debate and evidential discussion is a moot point. Accusations of fake news and disinformation are likely to drown out the careful evaluative labor of scholars and special investigators. Affective geopolitics works well at a time when Putin and Trump are perfectly capable of embracing a “paranoid way of knowing”—a grim determination to believe the worst in your enemies and a guarded appreciation of your allies (who can never be trusted). When citizens cannot turn


to reliable sources of information by trusted public broadcasters then all bets are off. The final chapter of the book is, paradoxically, the least developed. Having carefully paved the way for this close reading of Russia’s geopolitical imaginaries and practices, the last few pages (pp. 298–302) seem a bit rushed. An afterword might have been better where those three geopolitical concepts are broadened out a bit further. For example, how different is the U.S. articulation of a “backyard” from Russia’s near abroad? Are the modalities that different when it comes to articulating and implementing a sphere of influence and intervention? Although the author only mentions Brexit briefly in the final pages of the book, it does raise the intriguing case of the United Kingdom, which has elected to disengage in some sense from its near abroad in favor of a rebranded #globalBritain, which appears to mean finding solace in the Commonwealth and a hoped-for special relationship with the United States. One striking new development is the UK authorities asking direct questions about how vast sums of Russian money ended up in London. The U.S. international relations scholar Ikenberry (2018) spoke of a postliberal international order and thanks to Toal we have a better sense of Russia’s possible role in the future. The red lines in its near abroad provide vital clues. As Chinese analysts speak of the United States losing its “moral advantage,” we might well ask how far that moral advantage depends on the U.S. relationship with Russia.

Commentary by Marianna Pavlovskaya, Department of Geography, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, NY. With vivid accounts of fast-changing situations, Near Abroad reads like a suspense novel that happens to also be a remarkable piece of scholarship. It is thoroughly researched and written with great care and responsibility. Gerard Toal uses a critical geopolitics approach that he pioneered to tell a story that is different from traditional geopolitical narratives of the Cold War. Although he writes about the various invasions by Russia, the book also is a critique of U.S. international policy that operates based on a truncated understanding of Russia and the world more generally. My own work focuses on privatization and social reproduction in Russia and I am not an expert in geopolitics. Post-Soviet social reproduction and people’s everyday lives have, however, been profoundly affected by geopolitical events, including those described in Toal’s book. The deep connections between the con-

flicts detailed in the book and human security at multiple scales is increasingly clear: from destroyed bodies, livelihoods, and nations to the entire planet already made precarious by climate change, economic crises, and the rise of terrorism, itself a brutal response to the geopolitics of the Cold War and empire. Toal insightfully argues that the geopolitical tropes of the Cold War perpetuated from both sides not only jeopardized relationships between Russia and the United States, but also provide no resolution to current and emerging conflicts. Toal moves beyond those tropes by elaborating and applying the framework of critical geopolitics to the events in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014. He convincingly demonstrates that traditional framings of Russia as driven by the innate ambitions of imperial control and expansion are not good enough as explanatory frameworks of why it invaded its neighbors, created de facto states, and directly annexed territories from other countries. Things are much more complex, and dealing with Russian invasions requires grasping this complexity. Toal brings into the picture the new security concerns produced by NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders and the highly dynamic rivalry of nationalistic and liberal geopolitical discourses within Russia itself that have shifted the country in a particular geopolitical direction. He also carves out a new image of Vladimir Putin. Instead of an irrational Russian bear that wants to conquer and control, the book portrays Putin as a highly pragmatic and strategic politician driven by many considerations, including the restoration of Russia’s standing in the world, the need to protect Russian populations outside Russia, and protecting Russians within Russia from near and far threats including terrorism and U.S. imperialism. This textured analysis exemplifies what Toal calls “thick geopolitics.” It contrasts with traditional thin geopolitics that flattens the world, ignores geographic realities and the heterogeneity of place, and, more or less, produces scripted responses to conflict situations that often involve military force instead of diplomacy. States could learn much from Toal’s thick geopolitics to differently approach conflict regions across the world, including, of course, the Middle East, which has become the latest arena for geopolitical and surrogate military confrontation between Russia and the United States. I see a window of opportunity here because—and this might be a surprise for some—the United States has a remarkable presence in Russia’s contemporary geopolitical field and culture. Despite past Soviet and current antiU.S. propaganda, Russian society remains fascinated with the United States. If Americans pay attention to Russia

FALL 2018 299

when Putin flexes his geopolitical muscle, public figures and mass media in Russia reference the United States on all possible occasions. They blame the United States for all problems and note in the same breath, “You know, in the United States they do it this way or that way, why cannot we?” In other words, Russia is measuring itself in all directions with one yardstick, which is the United States. In seeking to both challenge and replicate U.S. geopolitical privilege, it adopts an anti-imperial stance against the United States and justifies its own aggressions as a response to previous uses of force by the United States. One commonly hears, including from Putin, “Look at yourself first! You see a little speckle in our eye but do not see a log in your own. I am only as bad as you. Why can you do those things and we are not allowed?” At the same time, Russia continues to seek “partnership” with the United States to a greater degree than with any other country. The concept of affective geopolitics is another fascinating theme that Toal skillfully develops, drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and feminist geography. As he explains, emotions and feelings have played a significant role in activating such consequential geopolitical events as the creation of de facto states such as South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorny Karabakh, and Transnistria, as well as the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, and annexation of Crimea. In each case, the invasion does not simply follow an order from a dictator; it has to be implemented through the sophisticated production of consent, navigation of competing geopolitical visions, explanation of actions to the public via mass media, and staging of spectacles of rescue missions. Such events, taken together, work to produce a nationalistic pride and the widespread belief that Russian greatness is being restored step by step. Similar to Trump, who successfully established a connection with voters based on affect, Putin performs a politician who speaks his mind in the layperson’s language and goes against the grain, most prominently during his annual three- to five-hour-long “unscripted” question-and-answer sessions, the public’s so-called direct line to Putin, which are broadcast on TV and watched by millions. Performance of hypermasculinity also contributes to the production of affective geopolitics. Highly entertaining footage of Putin riding horses (with a Rambo-like naked torso), motorbikes, and trucks; handling rifles; saving egrets and tigers; wearing judo belts; playing hockey; flying airplanes; scuba-diving; and so on is meant to instill a sense of confidence, strength, and security. The billboards in Moscow declare: “Strong president—strong Russia!” and music videos depict a Putin-like hero freeing from captivity a young woman dressed in the colors of the

300

Ukrainian flag, which change to the colors of the Russian flag as they drive off on his motorcycle. Such videos clearly reference the rescue of the now feminized populations of the countries Russia invades. The production of affect is a big departure from the Soviet era, when fixed and monotonous discourses were meant to instill a longterm sense of security. The long horizon no longer exists, and political and geopolitical situations constantly shift and rapidly evolve, requiring quick, bold, and opportunistic justifications. Another purpose of affective geopolitics is to maintain power at home. The bold annexation of Crimea has been presented to Russian society as evidence of strength and independence, and videos of Putin as a puppet master who makes both Trump and Clinton dance his way suggest his power extends far beyond Russian borders. His answer of “No,” given with a smile to questions about whether Russia intervened in the 2016 U.S. election, is meant to be read as “Yes, we can influence the biggest power in the world.” In other words, geopolitics is not always a goal in itself, but a means to control domestic politics. For example, the annexation of Crimea has brought nothing internationally to Putin but sanctions, but what did it achieve domestically? How did it contribute to the new brand of Russian “managed democracy” that requires that consent be constantly renewed and the public stay engaged and entertained? Seemingly irrational geopolitical actions can have meaning in the context of domestic politics, making it worthwhile for critical geopolitics to consider. Although Toal’s book is essential reading that demonstrates clearly what critical geopolitics looks like, I would like to suggest that he and others working in the field of critical geopolitics also consider the consequences of Putin’s geopolitical actions for the people whose lives have been shattered as a result. These wars have killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands, and millions lost their homes and livelihoods only to become the source of temporary labor migration to Russia, the only place they can earn income to support their families back home. Although traditional geopolitics does not focus on “collateral damage” or destroyed processes of social reproduction, critical geopolitics should insofar as human security is one of its major concerns. In this case, the tragic aftermath of invasions could be fruitfully theorized as the linkage among geopolitics, political economy, and social reproduction. In conclusion, Toal’s book is a formidable step articulating thick geopolitics in the case of Russia. My hope is that critical geopolitics finds a way to radically change


the practice of geopolitics on all sides, and relations between states will be structured not according to the relative powers of the states, but the needs of their people. The greatest need today seems to be peace.

that international state boundaries fashioned by the legal principle of Uti Possetis were just the constructions of the Soviet Union and so essentially “legal fictions,” are ascribed by Western commentators to Putin to help explain Russia’s seemingly expansionist tendencies.

Commentary by Jeremy Tasch, Department of Geography & Environmental Planning, Towson University, Towson, MD.

In contrast with conventional explanations for “Why Does Russia Invade its Neighbors,” Toal’s finely nuanced interpretations are Matryoshka-like in that his series of narratives reveal layers of interconnected histories and geographies. From Chapter 1 to concluding Chapter 8, “Geopolitics Thick and Thin,” Toal’s knitting together stakeholder commentaries—from diplomats and journalists to lobbyists and analysts—is not done to develop judgments on whether the Kremlin’s activities were wrong or right. Rather, Toal weaves together a variety of storylines to help reveal the reasoning that seems to undergird Russia’s actions, as well as the West’s own geopolitical culture and its navigation of post-Soviet discursive space.

Beginning from Chapter 1’s provocative title, “Why Does Russia Invade its Neighbors?” Gerard Toal, in his book Near Abroad, contrasts worn-out answers to this question with a rich account of contested spatial imaginaries and sustained analyses of geopolitical discourses. The specific “neighbors” and “invasions” to which the title of Chapter 1 refers and that the entire work explores through an interlinked troika of geopolitical field, geopolitical culture, and geopolitical condition include Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014). Russia’s movement of troops into Abkhazia in late spring 2008, followed by Georgia’s deployment of its own soldiers into South Ossetia, which was then answered by the Russian military’s invasion of Georgia proper, is sometimes considered the first European war of the twenty-first century. Eight years later, in the wake of Russia’s hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Putin ordered the forceful annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of Ukraine that continues today. It is critical to try to understand what made the order on which post–Cold War Europe rested so precarious. Neoclassical ideological explanations tend to inform Western policy prescriptions and remain a dominant discourse on U.S. cable news programs. Commentaries that contain echoes of Brzezinski, Kaplan, and Kissinger in the United States and Alexander Dugin, Dmitry Rogozin, and Nikolay Starikov in Russia often frame the ways that Russia and its historical antecedent the Soviet Union are discussed and remembered. In this manner, drawing from the classical geopolitical tradition and its mainstream advocates, Russia then is a tangible result of the union over time and expansion over space of a recognizable “ethnonational” group of people. Although existing within the boundaries of its own national territory, through the circumstances of the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”—as Putin is generally translated into English as having said and as remarked on by Toal—“Russia’s people” had become thinly and perilously dispersed throughout the former Soviet Union. The notion of a “body” politic as a sovereign people who occupy their own national territory, who had been violated by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, together with a logic

In knitting together a broad range of voices and their political and social settings, Toal illustrates how Putin’s government integrated contesting strains of Russian identity and ideology to formulate a foreign policy agenda that he—Toal—identifies as “revanchism” (pp. 87–92). Putin is well aware that international boundaries are social constructs; in the case of post-Soviet space, borders were largely drawn over time, first by the Russian Empire’s cartographers before they were then revised multiple times by their Soviet successors. Consequently as a revanchist, Putin and his supporters would neither use “annexation” nor “invasion” to characterize Russia’s relations with Ukraine and Georgia. Toal finds that Putin’s—as well as other actors’—words matter. Thus, although examining geopolitical discourses at a societal level, Toal’s analysis attempts to reconcile the tensions between structuralist and agent-centered perspectives. According to Toal, to develop a “fuller understanding of the dynamic geopolitical field characterizing post-Soviet space,” it is critical to uncover “the attitudes of ordinary residents of contested territories” (p.10). By illuminating the agency of stakeholders in meaning creation, Toal’s chapter-by-chapter narrative attempts to trace the discursive pairing of text and context. In this “thicker” account of geopolitics, Toal implicitly draws inspiration from Geertz’s (1973) seminal work as well as from some of his own seminal studies. As cultural anthropology is about explicating others’ explanations of explanations, Toal’s approach to understanding Russia’s geopolitical culture is to reveal the “geopolitics of geopolitics” (p. 21). Toal’s critical geopolitics demonstrates that territorial delimitations are conjoined with political prac-

FALL 2018 301

tices, and recursively, that political practices are linked to territorial delimitations. The discursive construction of sociopolitical realities is not only shaped by the practitioners of and commentators on statecraft, but through, too, the constructions by everyday subjects performing their daily (political) practices. Perhaps this is where Toal’s work could become even “thicker.” Toal gracefully brings together many of the academics, politicians, government officials, and diverse commentators who are positioned along a wide geopolitical spectrum. We hear the voices of both well-known and lesser known but still influential actors often juxtaposed in revealing ways. So Toal acquaints us with Vladimir Putin and George Bush, Alexander Borodai and Igor Girkin (“Strel’kov”), Mikheil Saakashvilli and John McCain, Alexander Dugin and Dmitry Rogozin, Dmitry Medvedev and Matthew Bryza, and many others. Clearly, the production of contesting geopolitical norms is shaped by the personalities and personal histories of the elites who are involved in statecraft. Near Abroad persuasively disentangles the power relations and personalities that are hiding within dominant post-Soviet geopolitical narratives. What remains largely just out of view and earshot, though, are the contesting and enabling geopolitical practices, experiences, and voices from those located outside the figurative walls of the White House and the Kremlin; that is, beyond the upper stratum of states and societies. Despite an introduction that references a personal conversation between Toal and a Croatian friend while riding in a bus that was under armed guard (p. 1), and some discussion in Chapters 6 (“Places Close to Our Hearts”) and 7 (“The Novorossiya Project”) of the aggregated responses uncovered through the first public opinion survey conducted by Toal and his colleagues in “disputed Ukraine,” divisions between the public sphere of geopolitical discourses and the private sphere of everyday lives largely remain. Toal’s work is kaleidoscopic in that it presents a lens through which to observe multiple reflecting and coconstituting geopolitical perspectives that at times tilt toward each other and other moments away, each consisting of dynamic filaments that move, shift, and combine relative to each other within a field of post-Soviet space. Through the lens offered by Toal’s Near Abroad, readers will indeed see a “thicker” account of multiple scales of geopolitical action and contesting spatial imaginaries. Perhaps an even finer view from the field could produce a still stronger—thicker—sense for how “geopolitical thinking is embodied, of how unconscious habits, gender norms, and discursive frames shape how people see the world” (p. 300).

302

Response by Gerard Toal, Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Alexandria, VA. I want to thank all of the respondents for their careful and constructive critical readings of Near Abroad. Space is short so my responses are inevitably brief. First, Alexander B. Murphy asks “which representations provide cultural insights and what are simply knowingly false propaganda (fake news) to advance particular agendas?” There is a potentially false dichotomy in juxtaposing “revealing” and “fake,” for both provide insight into geopolitical culture. Geopolitical cultures rest on events and creeds that become “bronzed” with state commemoration and institutionalization. Myth replaces history, a tendency that makes recovery and respect for historical truth difficult. What is recognized as historical fact is too often a function of hegemonic cultural systems and entrenched power structures. U.S. efforts to deal with unsavory aspects of its history—violent displacement, racism, slavery, patriarchy, imperialism—are an ongoing struggle. Russia has barely begun to address some of the darkest chapters of its history (Walker 2018). Selfaggrandizing positive myths (propaganda to some) run deep in geopolitical cultures. Contemporary international affairs are characterized by intense ideological contestation over the attribution and meaning of key events, with disinformation part of this. Near Abroad calls out many instances of Russian disinformation, with Flight MH-17 an egregious example. Disinformation is not new. It has a long history and was a tool in the arsenal of the West during the Cold War. The emergence of social media as news affordance platforms has created a “golden age” of disinformation (and surveillance). “Fake news” is now a frame weaponized to further undermine the authority of facts and the rule of law by none other than the President of the United States (tweeter-in-chief President Donald Trump). Concerted efforts to debunk Russian and U.S. “fake news” activities are needed and necessary. Sometimes, though, if not often, counterpropaganda itself becomes a means of disseminating propaganda. Great care is needed, consequently, to avoid falling into lazy “us versus them” traps around fake news and information warfare. What I sought to do in Near Abroad was provide an account of the different regimes of truth circulating around key events. This required an ethnographic attitude, strategic empathy, and judgment. It is very important that we understand how others understand and justify their actions. To some, this is dangerous moral relativism. I disagree. Confronting moral complexities and grasping strategic dilemmas


makes possible deeper foreign policy understanding, better strategic analysis, and smarter foreign policy behavior. Murphy’s second observation (also noted by Agnew)— should “material factors get more play?”—is a fair point. One of the weaknesses of Near Abroad is that it does not sufficiently address two important geopolitical fields of competition in the region: (1) energy infrastructures and markets, and (2) evolving military infrastructures and missile deployments. Fortunately, new books provide good accounts of both (Grigas 2017; Sakwa 2018). Although the Russian state is currently empowered by its petroleum riches, the sources of its conduct are shaped by long-standing structures emerging from its geopolitical setting and associated culture. Both John Agnew and Klaus Dodds comment on near abroad as an intriguing geopolitical imagination. The term was initially used to describe the “outer empire,” the Soviet-sponsored “people’s democracies” beyond the borders of the Soviet Union that were members of the Warsaw Pact. Indeed, a similarly named book examines this relationship (Wojnowski 2017). After the Soviet Union collapsed, it came to describe the “inner empire” of former Soviet states. The New York Times first used this meaning in 1993 in an article on the Russian army after the Soviet Union, specifically Russia’s 201st Motorized Rifle Division “stationed abroad in nominally independent Tajikistan” (Erlanger 1993). One way of rendering the pentad of territories I discuss (pp. 36–38) is using variants on the phrase: far abroad (United States), near abroad (former Soviet Republics), nearer abroad (pro-Russian de facto states), and inner abroad (Chechnya). New imaginaries, of course, are displacing old ones. Moscow’s outer empire near abroad is now inside the EU and NATO. The Baltic states, former Soviet states that are still nominally part of the near abroad to Moscow, are now EU and NATO members. Because of their adjacency to Russia they are now frequently paired with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova as “frontline states.” This rhetoric of frontiers and frontlines in Europe grows out of the Trump administration’s reconceptualization of Europe as an arena of great power competition. In the face of Russian revanchism and Chinese infrastructural extension, it argues, “the West” needs to shore up its vulnerable frontiers. This is the language of the New Cold War in Europe, one promoted by figures like Wess Mitchell, Trump’s Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs. Those trying to avoid full geopolitical polarization use the less elegant “in-between states” to refer to Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. The EU is struggling with its own (re)formulations. Positive proposals for deescalating the geopoliticization of post-Soviet Europe

exist and deserve pursuit. Cursory research on prevailing discourse suggests that Russia’s intervention in Syria is categorized not as a near abroad intervention, but as a regional or global power play, one that has revanchist significance given that Syria was a former Soviet ally. Agnew argues for the importance of the historical context of modes of Russification and Sovietization in the diverse territories of the near abroad. I touched on this, but there is a lot more that could be said. He notes how power as coercion and use of force were intrinsic to Russian responses to challenges on its fringes. In focusing on military invasions, Near Abroad probably conveys a misleading impression of Russia’s power toolbox in its neighborhood. In actuality, Russia uses a full spectrum of power resources. That Russia has massive economic leverage is obvious. It also has formidable reservoirs of soft power to mobilize and broadcast, from orthodoxy and Soviet nostalgia for older generations to TV melodramas and social media trends for younger generations. The enduring power of Russophone culture and education creates a certain cultural hegemony across the region, but this varies in practice depending on language repertoire contexts. Agnew is correct to point to an enduring sense of Russian exceptionalism also, something marginalized in my more relational chronological account of the two invasions. Snyder offered a dark hyperbolic account of this, one that has attracted criticism but deserves serious engagement (Snyder 2018; see also Pinkham 2018). Dodds’s important point that the Arctic is another territorial arena where Russian revanchism found expression is well documented (Steinberg, Tasch, and Gerhardt, 2015). He correctly observes that the book is U.S.-centric and that telling the story of the EU’s relationships with Ukraine and Georgia requires discussion of quite different interests and aspirations to those prevailing in U.S. geopolitical culture. He points the way toward a research project on the affective geopolitical foundations of EU diplomacy, the EU’s European neighborhood policy, and Eastern Partnership countries. Browning (2018) insightfully explored this in terms of ontological (in)security. Dodds is correct that the Mueller investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government is crowding out the possibility of reasoned debate on U.S.–Russia relations. The situation today is quite remarkable and foreshadowed in the final pages, where I cite an emergent contradiction between imperial (Wilsonian) and narrow (Jacksonian) U.S. nationalism (written, incidentally, in a condition of shock the day after Trump won the 2016 election). Today the United States has three centers of policymaking toward

FALL 2018 303

Russia: (1) Congress, which has institutionalized Obamaera sanctions, and added new ones; (2) the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy, which has some experts (like Fiona Hill on the National Security Council) and many hawkish Republicans (like Secretary of State Pompeo, National Security Adviser Bolton, and Weiss); and (3) the President himself, who remains consistent in his affinity for President Putin and recently called for Russia to be readmitted to the Group of Seven industrialized (G7) countries that are generally considered the core of “the West.” The result might appear remarkably chaotic, but Trump administration policies, as opposed to the president’s rhetoric, express establishment foreign policy desire to pursue U.S. primacy on the European continent. What outsiders define as the West today is a subject of some debate. Trump has his version, one he articulated in a July 2017 speech in Warsaw. For him, the West is a civilization of strong values and strong families that requires secure borders. Islamic terrorists, migrants, and racial others are the implicit outsiders in this vision; Russia is an explicitly named one. Echoing the conservative ethnonationalist anxieties of his hosts, he declared that the “fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump’s frequently expressed admiration for Putin, however, has led critics to question his commitment to delimiting the West in opposition to Russia. After the G7 debacle in Quebec in 2018, critics went further and charged Trump with a desire to destroy the West because of both protectionist policies and sympathy for Russia (Leonhardt 2018). In the eyes of Snyder (2018) and others, Trump is an unwitting Russian political agent. Marianna Pavlovskaya correctly notes how Putin’s affective geopolitics enables domestic control. Tolz and Teper (2018) suggested how this works, arguing that Putin’s third term saw the emergence of a new media strategy of agitainment, “an intensive and prolonged, centrally sanctioned communication of ideologized political messages, delivered in accordance with an entertainment logic” (216). Putin’s foreign policy, however, was not rooted largely in regime preservation needs, an explanation favored by some. Gunitsky and Tsygankov (2018) persuasively argued for the centrality of derzhavnost’ (“great powerness”) to Russian foreign policy behavior, an emphasis on affective motivations consonant with the arguments in Near Abroad. Pavlovskaya draws our attention to the human consequences of the wars the book chronicles. With less space devoted to Ukraine than Georgia in the book, I did not have the space to chronicle these in any depth. Finally, Jeremy Tasch underscores the need for even finer views from the field. It is difficult to combine both “high politics” and “low politics” in one book, to do justice to

304

both the views from geopolitical capitals and those of ordinary people on the ground. My colleagues and I strive to provide the latter through our survey research work (which is ongoing) but this needs to be supplemented by grounded ethnographic field work. Near Abroad was an attempt to write for a general audience without abandoning theory or social science methods. I am pleased that the book has enjoyed reasonable sales and garnered positive reviews beyond the academy. Trump’s election, and the circumstances behind it, however, have propelled Russia to the very center of U.S. partisan politics, accelerating the New Cold War the book sought to avoid. The events and issues described in the book remain central. Truthiness, not truth, still prevails. The need for nondogmatic critical thinking about Russia and its neighboring territories remains pressing. ORCID Gerard Toal

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9110-458X

Klaus Dodds

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5074-0662

References Agnew, J. 2017. Enduring Russian messianism before and beyond the Revolution. In 1917–2017: The geopolitical legacy of the Russian Revolution [Review forum]. Geopolitics 22 (3): 665–92. Browning, C. 2018. Geostrategies, geopolitics and ontological security in the Eastern neighbourhood: The European Union and the “New Cold War.” Political Geography 62: 106–11. Erlanger, S. 1993. In ex-Soviet lands, Russian army can be a protector or an occupier. New York Times 30 November 1993. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/30/world/ in-ex-soviet-lands-russian-army-can-be-a-protector-oran-occupier.html (last accessed 16 June 2018). Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York, NY: Basic Books. Grigas, A. 2017. The new geopolitics of natural gas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gunitsky, S., and A. Tsygankov. 2018. The Wilsonian bias in the study of Russian foreign policy. Problems of Post-Communism. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216. 2018.1468270 (last accessed 16 June 2018). Ikenberry J. 2018. The end of liberal international order? International Affairs 94: 7–23. Leonhardt, D. 2018. Trump tries to destroy the West. New York Times 10 June 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/10/opin ion/g7-trump-quebec-trudeau.html (last accessed 18 June 2018).


Pinkham, S. 2018. Zombie history: Timothy Snyder’s bleak vision. The Nation 3 May 2018. https://www. thenation.com/article/timothy-snyder-zombie-history/ (last accessed 16 June 2018). Quinn-Judd, P. 2018. The revolution that wasn’t. New York Review of Books 65 (7): 36–38. Safire, W. 1994. On language: The near abroad. New York Times 22 May 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/ 1994/05/22/magazine/on-language-the-near-abroad. html (last accessed 16 June 2018). Sakwa, R. 2017. Russia against the rest: The post-Cold War crisis of world order. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Snyder, T. 2018. The road to unfreedom. New York, NY: Tim Duggan Books.

Steinberg, P., J. Tasch, and H. Gerhardt, with A. Keul and E. Nyman. 2015. Contesting the Arctic: Politics and imaginaries in the circumpolar North. London, UK: I. B. Tauris. Tolz, V., and Y. Teper. 2018. Broadcasting agitainment: A new media strategy of Putin’s third presidency. PostSoviet Affairs 34 (4): 213–27. Urushadze, Z. (writer, dir., prod.) 2013. Tangerines. Culver City, CA: Samuel Goldwyn Films. Walker, S. 2018. The long hangover: Putin’s new Russia and the ghosts of the past. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wojnowski, Z. 2017. The near abroad: Socialist Eastern Europe and Soviet patriotism in Ukraine 1956–1989. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

FALL 2018 305


Editor’s Note It has come to our attention that the review of Judith Matloff’s No Friends but the Mountains: Dispatches from the World’s Violent Highlands (6(2) 2018, 107–09) incorrectly identifies her as a “staff writer for the New Yorker” (108). The review also erroneously states that she has visited the Kashmir–Kabul region (108), and states that “the

book concludes with a glimpse of mountain problems in the Spanish Pyrenees” (108), when in fact, the discussion concerns problems in the French Pyrenees. The book has received widespread praise from authors and critics as diverse as Robert Kaplan and Yi-Fu Tuan, who said Matloff is “someone who has clearly done her fieldwork.”

The AAG Review of Books 6(4) 2018, p. 306. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2018.1508202. ©2018 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.