David Lambert

Figure

Romuald Hazoumé

An Atlantic world -modernity, colonialism and slavery

A dark rainbow

Standing before me, a giant serpent casts a dark shadow in the bright summer day. It is a sculpture of a snake swallowing its own tail made from interlocking plastic jerry cans used to carry water and fuel. DAN-AYIDO-HOUEDO/Arc-en-ciel, symbole de perpétuité (Figure 1) is the creation of Benin-born experimental sculptor, Romuald Hazoumé, who has created artworks from salvaged industrial materials since the mid 1980s. Specially commissioned for the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum's exhibition, 'Uncomfortable truths: the shadow of slave trading on contemporary art and design', the sculpture stood in the centre of the London museum's John Madejski Garden from February to June 2007. DAN-AYIDO-HOUEDO is an ouroboros assembled from fragments of the modern world and symbolizes the cycle of poverty faced by many in Africa. 1 As part of an exhibition on the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, it evokes other meanings for me: the 'cosmic clockwise gyro' of winds and currents circling the Sargasso Sea; the 'triangular trade' in commodities and people-as-commodities connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas; the creation and destruction wrought by the slave trade and the plantations it supplied; the return of the past and the haunting of the present by the memories and legacies of Atlantic slavery. [START_REF] Steele | The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: an exploration of communication and community[END_REF] The V&A's exhibition was one of many commemorative events to mark the bicentenary of the British Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 2007. Owing, at least in part, to a cluster of insistent, troubling anniversaries -also including the 2008 bicentenary of the outlawing of the African slave trade by the American federal government, as well as the rather different sort of bicentenary in 2004: the independence of the Caribbean state of Haiti -the last few years have seen increasing popular and academic attention given to the Atlantic world. The three books under review attest to this, as well as to the continuing development of a field of inquiry that has followed path-breaking work by Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach, although its intellectual origins lie in C.L.R. James' The black Jacobins and Eric Williams' Capitalism and slavery. [START_REF] Williams | Capitalism and slavery[END_REF] This work is not only indicative of sustained interest in Atlantic slavery, abolition and resistance, but continues to challenge and transform understandings of the geographies and histories of modernity. If one of the well-rehearsed criticisms of contemporary discourses on globalization is to question its apparent novelty by pointing to earlier phases and places of globalization [START_REF]Globalization in world history[END_REF] of which the precocious Atlantic world was a clear example -then those who have sought to elucidate and advocate alternative and counter-visions of globalization have also seen the submerged histories and geographies of the Atlantic as a resource for different ways of imagining the future. [START_REF] Featherstone | The spatial politics of the past unbound: transnational networks and the making of political identities[END_REF] Like Hazoumé's dark rainbow, which evokes the slave trade and contemporary poverty in Africa, these books speak as much to the global present and possible futures, as they do to Atlantic pasts.

The Atlantic's long twentieth century

In 1781, the Liverpool slave ship, Zong, was travelling from the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean on the usual business of trafficking in captive lives. Facing rising levels of mortality amongst his human cargo, the ship's captain, Luke Collingwood, responded by ordering 133 enslaved people to be thrown overboard to their deaths and thereby ensure that the ship's owners, the Gregson family, would be able to claim compensation for property lost at sea through their insurance policy. Collingwood's extraordinarily callous decision was no aberration, rather it was an act underwritten by a culture and system of speculative capitalism. As a result, the Zong atrocity and its representations are 'central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but to the history of modern capital, ethics, and time consciousness'. [START_REF] Baucom | Spectres of the Atlantic: finance capital, slavery, and the philosophy of history[END_REF] This is the central claim of Ian Baucom's Spectres of the Atlantic, a provocative, staggeringly ambitious, if somewhat obfuscatory, book.

The first part of Spectres of the Atlantic is concerned with enumerating and accounting for the speculative culture that permitted Collingwood's actions. The argument is underwritten by two key texts: Walter Benjamin's The arcades project and Giovanni Arrighi's The long twentieth century:

Arrighi's Braudelian analysis of capital's long and short durées requires something like Benjamin's cultural materialism if it is to reveal the ways in which the oscillating forms of capital inform and are informed by the shifting phenomenologies and recycled generic protocols of cultural practice. [START_REF] Benjamin | The arcades project[END_REF] Arrighi's schema provides the grounds for historicizing the sort of cultural artefacts that interested Benjamin, whilst Benjamin's aesthetic and cultural analysis is used as a method for exploring Arrighi's cycles of accumulation. From Benjamin, Baucom borrows two ideas: that particular phases in capitalism's history were secured by different theories and forms of knowledge, and what he terms a 'repetocentric philosophy of history'. 8 Hence, Baucom explains, the 17th-century genre of allegory was repeated and intensified in the 19th century, which helped to secure the commodity capital for which Benjamin saw evidence in the warehouses and shop windows of Paris. Yet, Baucom asks, what should we make of the 18th century interruption? His answer is to turn to an 'oscillatory history of capital' derived from Arrighi's account of four long cycles of accumulation from the 15th century to the present, each dominated by a different hegemonic capital state. 9 For Arrighi, periods of commodity capital accumulation precede and follow periods of financial capital accumulation, but what interests Baucom are the transitional moments between these cycles. In these hyperfinancialized moments, 'capital accumulation proceeds virtually exclusively through "financial deals"' and they are dominated by the quarters of high finance. 10 The Zong massacre corresponds to one of these hyperfinancialized moments: the transitional phase between the Dutch and British cycles of accumulation from the 1750s to 1780s in which a system of maritime insurance underwrote Collingwood's actions and the entire system of Atlantic slavery. Moreover, in a further elaboration of a 'repetocentric' philosophy of history, Baucom argues that the hyperfinancialized phase of 'late capitalism' not only resembles the moment in which the Zong sailed, but also 'in a fully Benjaminian sense, inherits its nonimmediate past by intensifying it, by "perfecting" its cultural protocols, "practicalizing" its epistemology, realizing its phenomenology as the cultural logic "of the entire social-material world"'. [START_REF] Jameson | Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism[END_REF] These two hyperfinancialized moments -the mid-to-late 18th century and the present -mark the beginning and end of what Baucom terms the 'long twentieth century'. In so doing, he departs from Arrighi's deployment of this as a collective description of capital's 15th-to-20th-century longue durée, as well as his more specific use of it to designate the fourth, American cycle from the 1860s to the present. Rather, Baucom's 'long twentieth century' stretches from the mid-18th century to the present, conjoining the British and American cycles in a single sequence of Atlantic accumulation whose key sites include today's global cities of London and New York, as well as such circum-Atlantic ports and slave-trading posts as Liverpool, Bridgetown and Cape Coast.

Atlantic genres

Based on his argument that 'the oscillating forms of capital inform and are informed by the shifting phenomenologies and recycled generic protocols of cultural practice', 12 Baucom claims that the hyperfinancialized moments at either end of the Atlantic's long twentieth century were secured by an abstracting epistemology he terms 'theoretical realism'. He finds evidence for this speculative culture in 18th-century novelistic discourse, as well as in the insurance documents that endorsed Captain Collingwood's calculating actions. Furthermore, the epistemology underwriting the speculative culture was contested by a 'testamentary counterdiscourse on and of modernity' characterized by a 'melancholy but cosmopolitan romanticism'. 13 This counterdiscourse is specified and explored in the second part of Spectres of the Atlantic, beginning with the efforts made by British abolitionist, Granville Sharp, to have a murder investigation opened into the Zong drownings following the prompting of the formerly-enslaved campaigner, Olaudah Equiano. This romantic counterdiscourse also remains an important basis for responding to the world at this end of the long twentieth century because it serves as 'an alternative unit of geopolitical knowledge':

At either end of the long twentieth century…the melancholy fact of history and its dominant genres of articulation (now as then) offer the promise of an alternative vision, knowledge, and politics of the global, one which can predicate itself on a frank avowal of interestedness: in the subaltern, in the hauntological, in the multitudinous scenes of global injustice, in an entire planetary array of melancholy facts, scenes, images, and fictions of history. 14 Baucom also argues that the cosmopolitan interestedness at the heart of this counterdiscourse was -and is -always tempted, threatened and undermined by a tendency towards a universalizing, liberal cosmopolitanism that deals in abstract categories such as the 'Rights of Man' or 'human rights'. This is akin to the speculative culture that underwrote the Zong atrocity itself and takes the form of viewing this event as typical of something else -Atlantic slavery, global capitalism, human barbarity -rather than as a unique occurrence. A contrast is thus drawn between the melancholic politics apparent in Sharp's efforts to bear witness to the Zong massacre in the 1780s and the liberal humanitarianism that came to the fore with the institutionalization of the British abolitionist campaign after 1787. In making this argument, Baucom identifies the beginning of the Atlantic's long twentieth century with the emergence of a form of humanitarianism, in the abolitionist campaign, that gave rise to a geopolitical regime of sovereignty, apparent in the subsequent actions of the British navy to suppress the slave trade at sea and on land after 1807. [START_REF] Lynn | Britain's West African policy and the island of Fernando Po, 1821-43[END_REF] Thus, departing from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the articulation of global sovereign power through discourses of human rights, humanitarianism and humanity is shown not to be a recent phenomenon. [START_REF] Hardt | Empire[END_REF] In Conscripts of modernity, David Scott is also interested in genre, narrative modes and the philosophy of history. It is not the generic conventions associated with the longue durée of Atlantic capitalism that are his focus, however, but those through which anticolonial historiographies are emplotted and postcolonial theories constructed:

[A]nticolonialism has been written in the narrative mode of Romance and, consequently, has projected a distinctive image of the past (one cast in terms of what colonial power denied or negated) and a distinctive story about the relation between that past and the hoped-for future (one emplotted as a narrative of revolutionary overcoming). [START_REF] Scott | Conscripts of modernity: the tragedy of colonial enlightenment[END_REF] Whilst the romantic may have been the conventional narrative mode for anticolonialism, previous ways of narrating colonial pasts and theorizing (post)colonial presents and futures do not necessarily retain their critical power as the situation changes. Hence, Scott argues that 'after Bandung', the anticolonial future for which Romance was an appropriate narrative construction is now no longer achievable. The 1955 Bandung Conference brought together leaders from 29 newly-independent countries in Africa and Asia, and established the institutional basis of the Non-Aligned Movement. In consequence, this highly symbolic event is often held as a 'foundational moment for postcolonialism'. [START_REF] Young | Postcolonialism: an historical introduction[END_REF] Yet, this anticolonial confidence and solidarity did not last, owing in part to the recognition that political and economic independence were not the same. Today -'after Bandung' -'we live in tragic times', Scott suggests, times that are 'distressingly off kilter in the specific sense that the critical languages in which we wagered our moral vision and our political hope…are no longer commensurate with the world they were meant to understand, engage, and overcome'. 19 Scott's strikingly original argument about the need for a tragic mode of criticism in the postcolonial present is developed through a stunning critical reading of the foundational text in Atlantic studies. This is C.L.R. James' The black Jacobins, which describes the revolution that took place in the French colony of San Domingo (1791-1804) and resulted in the creation of Haiti, the second independent state in the Americas. Focusing on differences between the original 1938 edition and the 1963 re-issue, Scott describes The black Jacobins as a book of 'profound historiographic self-consciousness' that contained what could be thought of as a critical best-before date. 21 Hence, whilst James' account of the San Domingo revolution provided a narrative of black people making their own history that was both culturally resonant and critically powerful in the interwar period, the additions made for the re-issue, particularly to the seventh chapter, are held as evidence for James' belief that the anticolonial moment of the first edition had passed. Elaborating from James' portrayal of the Haitian revolutionary leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Scott argues that a tragic sensibility is more apt today because it is 'not driven by the confident hubris of teleologies that extract the future seamlessly from the past' and instead is more attuned to the 'intricacies, ambiguities, and paradoxes' that relate actions to consequences and chance. 21 Central to the critical languages of anticolonialism that Scott sees as no longer adequate in these tragic times are those of black emancipation. Whilst remaining sympathetic to the 'oppositional desire to affirm the humanity of the subaltern' that resonates in studies of the black Atlantic, he is doubtful that 'the story of resistance and agency' that this line of argument promotes is still useful or relevant for present-day postcolonial critique. 22 Indeed, rather than resistance being the key concept for understanding the Atlantic past today, in particular, and theorizing the postcolonial present, in general, Scott argues for the centrality of conscription, an idea he develops from the work of Talal Asad. 23 This refers to the ways in which non-Europeans -like Toussaint himself -were coercively obliged to render themselves the objects and subjects of modernity. Hence, instead of a narrative of how subalterns responded to and resisted (Atlantic) modernity, Scott wants to focus on how these subjects were constituted through modern conditions. Put simply, he argues that the key issue in our 'new history of the postcolonial present' is understanding the mechanics of power and dominance, not a vindicatory search for anticolonial resistance. 24 For some, this will be a profoundly pessimistic conclusion. They may even feel betrayed by Scott's use of The black Jacobins to make this argument given its canonical status for conceptualizations of the black Atlantic and work on modernity that it has inspired. Yet, turning to another book published in the same year as Conscripts of modernity that contributes to the writing of a 'new history of the postcolonial present' -Derek Gregory's The colonial present -it seems that Scott is not alone in believing that we now live in 'tragic times'. [START_REF] Gregory ; Baucom | The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq[END_REF] Scott's contention about the obsolescence of the romantic in the postcolonial present is in startling contrast with Baucom's belief that a 'melancholy but cosmopolitan romanticism' remains the basis for 'an alternative vision, knowledge, and politics of the global'. 26 One explanation is that, unlike Scott, Baucom's engagement with black-Atlantic thought is limited. He only devotes it one chapter, which alone makes up the third and final part of Spectres of the Atlantic, focusing on Édouard Glissant's Poetics of relation. [START_REF] Glissant | Poetics of relation[END_REF] In a book of such theoretical breadth -ranging from Agamben to i ek -it is striking that those who have articulated a 'diasporic philosophy of history', including Fred D'Aguiar, Paul Gilroy, Derek Walcott, as well as Glissant himself, are relegated to what feels like an addendum. Perhaps, in consequence, Baucom's conclusions about 'the promise of an alternative vision, knowledge, and politics of the global' based on the narrative mode of Romance are rather conventional and uncritical. 28

A disavowed Atlantic

Another difference between Spectres of the Atlantic and Conscripts of modernity is that Baucom does not demonstrate much interest in enslaved lives. Despite his insistence that the reader bear witness to the victims of Atlantic slavery, he is more concerned about how and why Captain Collingwood came to order 133 people to be thrown from the Zong than with those who were 'spared' for life on the plantations. The Caribbean barely features in his argument, as evidenced by the conspicuous absence of the Haitian Revolution from his account of the Atlantic's long twentieth century. In black-Atlantic historiography, this is deemed a revolution of at least the same importance as those in the American colonies and the French metropole. In many ways, it is seen to represent the realization of the potential in the French Revolution, whilst its marginalization highlights the Eurocentrism of discourses on modernity. [START_REF] Dubois | An enslaved Enlightenment: rethinking the intellectual history of the French Atlantic[END_REF] Baucom makes a similar argument with respect to the Zong atrocity. For him, trans-Atlantic slavery is 'an "event" of equal significance to the French Revolution in the philosophical discourse of modernity'. 30 Given this decentring of the French Revolution, Baucom's almost complete silence both on the place of the Haitian Revolution in his account and the discourse around this event -which is literally paranthesized in the book -is striking and underlines his relative lack of engagement with black-Atlantic theories and historiographies. 31 iž Ž In contrast, the Haitian Revolution occupies the central, if repudiated, place in the work of Sybille Fischer. In Modernity disavowed, she examines the impact and aftermath later in the 19th century of the revolution on the nearby territories of Cuba and Santo Domingo, as well as in Haiti itself. Examining constitutional, historical, literary and poetic texts, as well as fragments of material culture, Fischer searches for traces of a 'radically heterogeneous, transnational cultural network … whose political imaginary mirrored the global scope of the slave trade and whose projects and fantasies of emancipation converged, at least for a few years, around Haiti'. [START_REF] Fischer | Modernity disavowed: Haiti and the cultures of slavery in the age of revolution[END_REF] This radical antislavery formed part of the revolutionary Atlantic and, as with other elements of this 'many-headed hydra', its ideologies, politics and practices have been broken, scattered, and silenced. [START_REF] Linebaugh | The many-headed hydra. 34 Fischer[END_REF] In the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, this occurred through the establishment of a geopolitical, economic and cultural cordon sanitaire by regional slave-owning powers fearful that its influence would spread. Radical antislavery was also suppressed within Haiti itself. By scrutinizing changes in the Haitian constitution, Fischer skilfully demonstrates how the transnationalism of its founding ideology was renounced as the newly-independent state sought to survive in a hostile geopolitical environment.

To understand the suppression of the radical antislavery that coalesced around the Haitian Revolution, Fischer deploys the concept of disavowal, which is understood 'both in its everyday sense as "refusal to acknowledge," "repudiation," and "denial" (OED) and in its more technical meaning in psychoanalytical theory as a "refusal to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception"'. 34 This latter sense is particularly evident in the second part of the book, which considers the political and cultural impact of radical antislavery on Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that shared the island of Hispaniola with the Haitian state. Yet, whilst finding the concept of disavowal helpful for understanding popular and elite responses to the revolution in Santo Domingo, Fischer is critical about the unthinking application of trauma theory to such Atlantic contexts. 35 Generally, her concern is the politics of how and why disavowal occurred. 'Disavowed modernity' is used to signal how the radical antislavery of the Haitian Revolution was suppressed and made to vanish from 'respectable modernity' (as also seems to happen in Baucom's Spectres of the Atlantic). 36 This disavowed/respectable binary accounts for Fischer's rather different understanding of modernity from that of Scott:

Instead of equating modernity with the Eurocentric regime of racial subordination and colonial exploitation that became hegemonic in the course of the nineteenth century, and then opposing that modernity with a counterculture that grows out of suffering, we need to understand the ideological, cultural, and political conflicts that led to the ascendancy of a modernity that could be claimed only by European nations. 37 Her refusal to accept that modernity was wholly European in the first place challenges the formulation at the heart of Scott's concern with how 'non-Europeans were conscripted to modernity's project'. 38 In Fischer's account, those aspects of 'modernity's project' represented by the potential of radical antislavery were suppressed, denied and repudiated -but they had been there and traces remain. Perhaps it is best to see disavowal and conscription operating in conjunction in the Atlantic world in that through them non-Europeans were rendered external to modernity's creation in order that they could be coerced into being its objects, not its authors.

Fischer does not share the same explicit concerns with Baucom and Scott about genre and epistemology, but her narrative mode offers an interesting and provocative contrast on the history of the Atlantic world. Although she writes of Haitian elites and masses, as well as of those in Cuba and Santo Domingo, who longed for -or feared -radical antislavery, Modernity disavowed is not a romantic, vindicationist's story of 'the slave's unmediated will to resist'. 39 Its account of radical antislavery is assembled from fragments and conjectures that leave 'a trace of alternatives, of a route not taken, of unsuccessful historical projects'. Elsewhere, she considers what 'might have been different' in Haiti, Cuba or Santo Domingo -and, indeed, in the Atlantic world or with the construction of the discourse of modernity itself -had the radically heterogeneous transnationalism that converged around the Haitian Revolution not been disavowed. [START_REF] Fischer | Modernity disavowed[END_REF] Fischer thus offers an account of Atlantic modernity narrated not in the modes of Romance or tragedy, but rather the conjectural, hypothetical and counterfactual. This is a 'speculative' discourse on history, but not the same form that Baucom associates with hyperfincialized capital. Rather, this is a speculation about what 'might have been different', an anti-determinist narrative mode that insists on the radical openness of the past and suggests how this might serve as a resource for crafting alternative visions, knowledges, and politics of the global. This is a bold argument that stimulates questions about the place of counterfactualism in postcolonial and counter-global criticism, and what it might mean to think about the 'counterfactual Atlantic' for our understanding of modernity.

Atlantic endings

Just before closing his book, Baucom writes that the 'fatal Atlantic "beginning" of the modern is more properly understood as an ending without end'. 41 Sitting in the John Madejski Garden in the Victoria and Albert Museum as I read these words, I cannot help but look up at Romuald Hazoumé's DAN-AYIDO-HOUEDO/Arc-en-ciel, symbole de perpétuité. Simultaneously, it evokes the place of Atlantic slavery in the modernity of the Western Hemisphere, as well as the cycle of poverty faced by many in Africa at our end of Baucom's long twentieth century. In contrast with the heroic statues of enslaved resistance that were erected by post-independence Caribbean states -defiant figures with heads aloft, chains broken 42 -Hazoumé's dark rainbow also seems more appropriate for Scott's tragic times, evoking the continual processes of conscription that he insists must be the focus of the 'new history of the postcolonial present'. Yet, whilst this sculptural ouroboros is emblematic of at least some of the central concerns of Baucom and Scott, perhaps it does not quite fit with Fischer's more open and conjectural sense of what (Atlantic) modernity might have been. Nevertheless, like DAN-AYIDO-HOUEDO and the exhibition of which it was part, all three books attest to the shadow that Atlantic slavery continues to cast. In writing of the modern Atlantic world, Joseph Roach argued that 'a New World was not discovered' by Europeans, but that 'one was truly invented there'. 43 The originality and creativity of the texts by Baucom, Fischer and Scott suggest that the Atlantic remains an extremely productive -though dark -space for theoretical and historiographic inventiveness about our world.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alison Blunt, David Featherstone and the members of Royal Holloway's Social and Cultural Geography Research Group for their suggestions and illuminating discussions about these texts.

Biographical note

David Lambert is Reader in Historical Geography in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. His principal research interests are in cultural and historical geography, and he is currently writing a book on slavery, exploration and the histories of geography. He can be contacted at: Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK; email: d.lambert@rhul.ac.uk

Notes


Domestic mandala: architecture of lifeworlds in Nepal. By J. Gray. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. xvi ϩ163 pp. £45.00 hardback. ISBN 0 754 645 38 X Domestic Mandala, part of a series linking anthropological theory, cultural history and religious studies, focuses on the cosmological significance of houses (traditional and modern) in the Kholagaun hamlet in the village of Banaspati, Kathmandu. The concept of homology is central to the discussion: the human body relates to the house as the house relates to the cosmos.

The different spatial modalities of the house demonstrate this: the mandalic (concentric spaces around a centre) and yantric (cardinal directions and auspicious rituals) are underpinned by the foundational myth of Purusha, the cosmic being integral to sacred geometry.

Does Gray show that this system or philosophy is a conscious way of being for people, rather than an external construct imposed by the anthropologist? Utilizing excerpts and producing vignettes from fieldnotes, Gray reveals that the householders self-identify as having a lifestyle defined by dharma (which itself articulates the relation between an individual's stage of life and worldly duty). Particularly interesting is the analysis of marriage rites which, it is argued, are ritual as performance.

Indeed the notion of an embodied way of knowing is crucial to the argument that truth is made manifest through paradoxical attachment and detachment. That is, the process of building, the configuration of the built form, and everyday domestic activities are revelatory.

Gray highlights the importance of boundaries to Nepalese thinking, and ideas of purity and impurity are key here. Disembodied ghosts haunt liminal spaces, while women external to the family might be perceived as a potential threat to the house. Moreover, conceptions of pure and impure affect everyday rituals such as the preparation of rice, in terms of physical location and participants.

Ultimately, Gray is concerned with how to express, in an analytic ethnography, what he terms the 'lifeworld', the unspoken dimension of social life.

Faculty of Arts

INGA BRYDEN

University of Winchester

A war of images. By Stephen M. Norris. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2006. 291 pp. $40.00. cloth. ISBN: 0-87580-363-6. This interesting monograph explores what the author calls 'Russian visual nationhood.' Specifically, it is a study of how lubok illustrations (cheap and colorful bastwood prints long popular among Russia's lower classes) depicted -and propagandized for -Russian military campaigns, from the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 down to the Second World War. Challenging arguments of Geoffrey Hosking and others that a sense of nationhood in Russia was traditionally only weakly developed, or indeed absent altogether, Norris insists that the articulation of identity was a constant and pervasive process. His point is well taken and certainly well demonstrated, although given the intensely patriotic nature of the evidence he considers one could hardly have expected differently. He traces how the iconography of Fatherland representation shifted over the 19th century, with the image of the tsar-batioshka or tsar-father becoming less important while the image of the sturdy and diligent peasant remained ever stable. The discussion of how lubok illustrations survived the revolution of 1917 to prosper as an effective means of political propaganda and popular mobilization in the USSR is particularly fascinating. As part of this, we gain a glimpse into the little-known aspects of the oeuvre of cultural giants such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Kazimir Malevich, namely their careers as humble lubok illustrators. Overall, the book provides fascinating into how national identity was represented and perceived on the lowest levels of society, among a population that was for the most part illiterate. At the same time, however, the imagery it discusses is striking for the absence of a concern with landscape as a defining parameter for national identification. As Chris Ely's recent This meager nature demonstrates, landscape was a vital element in the elaboration of Russianness for the 'high' culture of Russian art and poetry. Perhaps a follow-up study, examining lubki pictures that are not related to war themes, would reveal a similar engagement with the geography of nationhood. This book follows on conceptually and in subject matter from Buttimer's Geography and the human spirit (1993) and Geographers of Norden (1988) co-edited with Torsten Hagerstrand. The volume explores the making of Swedish geography, emphasizing geography as socially constructed knowledges. Although principally an analysis of the historical development of Geography in Sweden, By northern Lights draws on the interviews of the International Dialogue Project 1978-88, notably in the interview with Hagerstrand constituting Chapter Six. This interview, in the spirit of the Dialogue Project brings the (albeit still mediated) personalprofessional voice of the geographer rather than their authorial or pedagogic voice to the history of geography. Buttimer brought oral history to the history of geography, long before it was fashionable, and this tradition is continued here. Many will find insight to Hagerstrand's work through this interview and it provides a useful resource in teaching the development of geographical thought -as does the whole book. The exploration of personal life-careers through biography (such as those of Edgar Kant, W. William-Olsson and Gerd Enquist) is a rich vein running throughout the text, linked in turn to wider intellectual, social and political milieu within and beyond geography.

University of Birmingham

Conceptually, changes in the history of Swedish geography are explained using Buttimer's threefold conceptual frameworks of meaning, metaphor and milieu and phoenix, faust and narcissus. Although explained here, a reader unfamiliar with these ideas may find it helpful to read Buttimer's earlier work first. However, once grasped, these analytical frameworks are applied to effect in this volume in the nuanced exploration of institutional and individual accounts of geography (although the poor text quality on some of the tables mapping these different elements is unfortunate). Buttimer and Mels provide the historian of geographical ideas and practices with a rich source of contextual studies at an institutional and national

  MARK BASSINBy northern lights: on the making of geography in Sweden. By Anne Buttimer and Tom Mels. Basingstoke: Ashgate. 2006. 214pp. £xx cloth. ISBN: 0-7546-4814-1 cloth.


cultural geographies 15(3) Clarke has shown that the city's population has increasingly become coloured and black (97%) due to out migration of whites. As such, colour and race segregation seen in the late colonial period has declined significantly. However, he provides proof that class (based on occupation) and culture (analyzed through the surrogates of 'religion, family, and kinship and education') have remained key aspects of social stratification and spatial polarization within Kingston. He suggests that such polarization may be partially responsible for the high levels of violence, also seen in other developing cities such as Sao Paulo and Johannesburg. His discussion of the slum/ghetto and the wealth of creativity that has emerged from the depths of deprivation add value to the understanding of Kingston's current culture and social representations. Clarke's explanation of plural stratification contrasts with other widely accepted academic ideological perspectives of Jamaican cultural creolization.

This book has done justice in adequately representing the changes in the socio-economic and political climate of Kingston. However, although mentioned partly in relation to political tribalism and patron-client relationships, a detailed chronological discussion of party politics from the 1940s to the present day early in the text would have been valuable in engaging the reader's understanding of the influence of political processes on the city. In addition, the limited use of qualitative research in this volume indirectly challenges other researchers for their contributions in providing a more holistic understanding of social and cultural processes and outcomes that shape post-colonial cities. However, after reading this new publication one merely needs to tour Kingston to experience what Clarke has substantially captured and put to paper; for it is remarkable that social legacies of colonialism are still vibrant, yet spatial transformations are apparent. A new book by David Morley (over half the chapters in Media, modernity and technology comprise original material) should always bear serious consideration from cultural geographers. Not only has Morley been one of the leading figures within British cultural studies over the past two decades, but in influential publications such as Spaces of identity (1995, with Kevin Robins) and Home territories (2000) he has consistently emphasized and worked through his conviction that -as he reaffirms here -'geography does indeed matter' (p. 63). Trained as a sociologist, Morley remarks now that if, in the 1980s, the discipline from which he learned most was anthropology, in the 1990s it was cultural geography. The fact that The geography of the new was in fact his preferred book title -'marketing considerations' ultimately putting paid to this preference (p. 11) -merely reinforces the centrality of matters spatial to his scholarly vista.

The University of the West Indies

Nonetheless, Morley's new book is, for this reader at least, slightly disappointing. It is not that it is a bad book. Rather, it is that Morley does not appear to be telling us much that is particularly original. The book, as he explains in the Introduction, develops two main, linked premises. The first is that the West has typically been seen as modern, rational and dynamic, in contrast to a 'traditional' non-West. The second is that technology in general, and 'new media' in particular, tend to be pegged to the future while 'old media' and ritualized practices are relegated to the past. His headline argument, then (his 'geography of the new'), is to argue against such false binaries, demonstrating continuities and overlaps between East and West, tradition and modernity, and magic and technology (although not, for the most part, economy and culture -but see pp. 322-3 on gift economies). This is all very well, yet as Morley himself notes (p. 175), ironically, of one such binary (the conflation of the West with modernity), it is also very well-established ground.

Media, modernity and technology should, however, prove of interest in a number of regards. It provides a good historical introduction to British cultural studies (particularly insofar as cultural studies has been concerned with the media), to Morley's relationship with key figures in that tradition (e.g. Stuart Hall), and to the trajectory of Morley's own work. In relation to the last of these, it recalls his seminal work on the ways in which 'local' spaces and technologies (the sitting room, home, family television) are bound up with the constitution of much wider cultural identities (e.g. 'nation'). Indeed, some of the book's most insightful passages occur where he nudges this work forward, as in Chapter 7 on identity and the 'mediated home'. Unfortunately, such passages are somewhat peripheral, the main thrust of the book predicated largely -and self-consciously (p. 327) -on reviews of what other writers have had to say on historical geographies of modernity. Cities of pleasure draws together economists, geographers and other social scientists to consider the growth of sex-based businesses and markets in contemporary cities. This book, which began life as a special issue of Urban studies, is attempting to offer something new to the study of urban sexual geographies -namely a focus on economic processes and a theoretical perspective that is not solely reliant on queer theory. These are both important and much needed developments, but neither theme is necessarily explored in ways that will inspire cultural geographers.

School of Geography and Environmental Science

Many of the arguments offered in the book by contributors from geography (Bell and Binnie; Hubbard) and sociology (Skeggs et al.) are fascinating and insightful, but they will be familiar to many readers. However, this work sits a little uneasily beside the work of the editor and other contributors writing from a more traditionally economic perspective. Collins attempts to apply a rational choice economic framework to the search for marriage and sexual pleasure in contrasting urban and rural settings. Similarly, Cameron applies a 'club goods model' in his ideal-typical modelling of the evolution of sexual markets in 'tolerant' cities. In pursuing these theoretical explorations, both authors rely on sociobiological perspectives on

  and technology: the geography of the new. By David Morley. New York: Routledge. 2007. x ϩ 346 pp. £18.99 paper. ISBN 0415333423.

  : sex and the urban socialscape. Edited by Alan Collins. London: Routledge. 2006. 248 pp. £70.00 Cloth. ISBN 0415360129.


premises. The first is that the West has typically been seen as modern, rational and dynamic, in contrast to a 'traditional' non-West. The second is that technology in general, and 'new media' in particular, tend to be pegged to the future while 'old media' and ritualized practices are relegated to the past. His headline argument, then (his 'geography of the new'), is to argue against such false binaries, demonstrating continuities and overlaps between East and West, tradition and modernity, and magic and technology (although not, for the most part, economy and culture -but see pp. 322-3 on gift economies). This is all very well, yet as Morley himself notes (p. 175), ironically, of one such binary (the conflation of the West with modernity), it is also very well-established ground.

Media, modernity and technology should, however, prove of interest in a number of regards. It provides a good historical introduction to British cultural studies (particularly insofar as cultural studies has been concerned with the media), to Morley's relationship with key figures in that tradition (e.g. Stuart Hall), and to the trajectory of Morley's own work. In relation to the last of these, it recalls his seminal work on the ways in which 'local' spaces and technologies (the sitting room, home, family television) are bound up with the constitution of much wider cultural identities (e.g. 'nation'). Indeed, some of the book's most insightful passages occur where he nudges this work forward, as in Chapter 7 on identity and the 'mediated home'. Unfortunately, such passages are somewhat peripheral, the main thrust of the book predicated largely -and self-consciously (p. 327) -on reviews of what other writers have had to say on historical geographies of modernity. Cities of pleasure draws together economists, geographers and other social scientists to consider the growth of sex-based businesses and markets in contemporary cities. This book, which began life as a special issue of Urban studies, is attempting to offer something new to the study of urban sexual geographies -namely a focus on economic processes and a theoretical perspective that is not solely reliant on queer theory. These are both important and much needed developments, but neither theme is necessarily explored in ways that will inspire cultural geographers.

School of Geography and Environmental Science

Many of the arguments offered in the book by contributors from geography (Bell and Binnie; Hubbard) and sociology (Skeggs et al.) are fascinating and insightful, but they will be familiar to many readers. However, this work sits a little uneasily beside the work of the editor and other contributors writing from a more traditionally economic perspective. Collins attempts to apply a rational choice economic framework to the search for marriage and sexual pleasure in contrasting urban and rural settings. Similarly, Cameron applies a 'club goods model' in his ideal-typical modelling of the evolution of sexual markets in 'tolerant' cities. In pursuing these theoretical explorations, both authors rely on sociobiological perspectives on cultural geographies 15(3) human sexuality that seem politically suspect after two decades of queer critique. In other respects, both authors have valuable new perspectives to offer on the interaction of microand macro-economic processes in the development, towards 'maturity', of markets in sexual transactions and the growth of gay urban villages.

The chapters in this book tend to fall into one of two camps. Either they proclaim contemporary cities to be tolerant, emancipatory spaces that celebrate and enable sexual pleasure and diversity; or, they buy into a revanchist model that sees sexual freedom being curtailed at every turn. Sadly too few of the contributors develop a more nuanced exploration of the complexities and contradictions of the both/and dialectic between these two positions.

It is time that sexual geographers take economic processes, transactions and markets more seriously in our consideration of the sexualization of urban spaces. However, this book demonstrates that economists could benefit from engaging with many of the critical insights developed by cultural geographers, feminists and queer theorists, if they are going to study the sexual pleasures of contemporary city dwellers.

Department of Geography

GAVIN BROWN

King's College London

  Citiesof pleasure: sex and the urban socialscape. Edited by Alan Collins. London: Routledge. 2006. 248 pp. £70.00 Cloth. ISBN 0415360129.


Lesley Hoskins

d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

This multidisciplinary text draws together key historical and contemporary readings to introduce readers to ongoing debates surrounding the roles and place of animals in society. Highlighting the shifting nature of human-animal divisions, it challenges readers to rethink contemporary animal practices and encourages them to be alert to the differences, continuities and interconnections between people and animals.

The book's six themed sections examine the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of human-animal relations, as well as animals' roles as pets, food, spectacle, symbols and scientific objects, in a predominately Western context. An examination of 'Animals as Philosophical and Ethical Subjects' provides a strong foundation for the collection and encourages readers to consider how the categorization of animals impacts on both the opportunities of people and their ethical obligations to animals. Contributions drawn from Aristotle, Singer, Regan and Nussbaum, among others, introduce contrasting perspectives on the question of animal rights and provide a challenging introduction to later sections.

Kalof and Fitzgerald discuss their choice of pieces that 'have had a major influence in how the Western world thinks about animals'. While they certainly achieve this goal, the inclusion of contemporary non-Western perspectives in the book's introductory section (and in addition to Levi-Strauss' contribution later in the book) would complement the text and further challenge readers' conceptions of human-nature and human-animal divisions in Western society by highlighting alternative ways of seeing and engaging with animals.

The editors' selection of often contrasting pieces sparks debate within the text. With its succinct introductions, which contextualize chapters historically and within the broader field of human-animal studies, this text provides a comprehensive introduction to key debates in a format that is accessible to undergraduate students. This book is written by a design historian but its themes -house-and-home, consumption and material culture -and its approach are entirely relevant to current cultural geography. Margaret Ponsonby develops a design historical focus on objects to give serious attention to both the 'fleshly' and the immaterial implications of possessions for those who acquire, live with and dispose of them. She understands the domestic as a setting for the production and manifestation of social and cultural identities and sees household goods as a crux in the complex negotiations between people, their circumstances (including their gender, age, social status, wealth and location) and discourses of home. This particular study is set among the middling sort in England between 1750 and 1850 because, argues, this is when, where, and for whom a particularly potent normative discourse of domesticity developed. She is impressed by the ethnographic approach of recent material culture studies but cannot observe or talk with her historical subjects. Instead, in a method more akin to the archaeological tradition of material culture studies in the United States, she minutely considers their household possessions, as evidenced in inventories, household accounts and personal papers. Ponsonby analyses combinations and arrangements of goods in a small number of specific houses, reading them in their social and cultural contexts to produce numerous new insights. For example, she follows a complicated trail of crockery and room names to delineate the gendered practices of genteel formal hospitality. And against the frequent assumption of the nationwide influence of London, she is able to retrieve a distinct elite provincial identity. It is, for the most part, the owners who are thus illuminated; the less privileged household members remain rather more in the shadows.

Macquarie University

In the second part of the book, Ponsonby turns to a discussion of the differing interpretive strategies used in historic house displays. She argues that it is more revealing to focus on individual cases than to take a generic approach. This is her own methodology, which does yield enormously rich results, although it makes her generalizations less convincing. This book's attention to the ordinary practices of everyday life brilliantly fractures the stillpervasive monolithic myth of Victorian domesticity. Ponsonby suggests that these 'different' homes were individual deviations from the ideals of the period; a larger study might allow us to consider whether such deviations might rather be seen as expressive, or even constitutive, of commonly held norms.

Queen Mary, University of London

LESLEY HOSKINS

A movable feast: ten millennia of food globalization. By Kenneth F. Kiple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. xvi ϩ 364 pp. £15.99 hardback. ISBN 9780521793537.

Based largely upon the author's The Cambridge world history of food (2000), this book offers an overview of the interaction between the world and the foods we currently consume. Reviewing the history of domestication, sedentism, power over resources, and trade, 'the globalization of foodstuffs' suggests that our world has been integrated since the beginnings of the Neolithic. The story of our foods is one where all aspects of history can be examined. Perhaps the best example is the expansion of the Portuguese along the African coast and Columbus' voyages across the Atlantic: 'The New Worlds they reached to link with the Old brought food globalization on a cataclysmic scale ' (p. 104). This led to what Thomas McKeown called the 'modern rise of population', because of the infusion of higher-caloric

  EMMA POWERStories from home: English domestic interiors, 1750-1850. By Margaret Ponsonby. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2007. x ϩ 221 pp. £55.00 hardback. ISBN: 9780754652359.


foods into famine-stressed populations led to improved nutrition, increased infant and child life expectancy, and protection against the ravages of infectious diseases.

The author tackles a number of subjects that directly relate to the development of agriculture: chronic malnutrition, famine, globalization, and the homogenization of culture. Much is made of the loss of overall health as a consequence of the move towards settled agriculture and reliance upon mono-cropping. The author suggests that diseases such as rickets, scurvy, and incidences of anemia, dental caries, and knobby joints do not seem to be indicated in our hunter-gatherer ancestors but begin to appear in archival records from Greek and Roman sources writing about the known cultures of that era. Kiple states that our ancestors were significantly taller than the following agrarians; similarly, American Revolutionary soldiers were larger then their European opponents, indicating more protein in their diets.

This book joins with those of Charles Mann, 1491, and Jarrod Diamond, Guns, germs, and steel, in examining the impacts of the new world upon the old. The author states that the 'Columbian Exchange,' touted as revolutionizing the world, did so by reversing the evolutionary trend to diversify: that it rather rearranged food around the world. This globalizing of our foods, fueled by immigration and the industrial revolution, 'ushered in the modern world ' (p. 162).

Although food geographers may consider this book a primer reader best suited to an introductory course, the bibliography is extensive and well researched, the writing fluid, and the themes well expressed and thoroughly explored. Culture, urbanism and planning is an edited book that reflects its roots in a collection of papers from an annual conference of the International Planning History Society. As expected from an IPHS conference, the majority of the 15 contributions are firmly rooted in the discipline of planning history, though most are concerned to link past, present and future, and some are predominantly about the contemporary city. The geographical focus is wide-ranging, including chapters on Latin America and South America as well as Europe and the US. Cultural geographers will no doubt be attracted by the intriguing title. They might, however, be disappointed by what they find inside the covers, especially as the combination of 'culture', 'urbanism' and 'planning' is used as a loose umbrella for disparate chapters rather than a starting point for analysis. The editors' introductory chapter has only a brief discussion of the three concepts, but it makes clear that their focus is planning for the cultural economy rather than the ways in which culture gets into planning. The presence of the terms 'urbanism' and 'planning' in the title is seen as little more than an attempt 'to delimit a more comprehensive and fluid area of problems, than that which each term evokes on its own' (p. xvi). Many of the chapters take a wider view of the culture-planning relationship, but the implications tend to be implicit rather than explicit. The chapters that rise to the challenge of linking culture and planning reflect the concern with planning for culture in its narrowest sense.

University of Wyoming

cultural geographies 15(4)

The strength of the book lies in the intriguing stories and thick descriptions of the chapters, such as Margarita Gutman's discussion of the metropolis-like future visions for Buenos Aires from the 1920's conceptualization and wider reflection. Moreover, Steven Ward's insightful concluding chapter on the origins and dissemination of the 'Baltimore model' of waterfront regeneration shows what might have been achieved by the other chapters in terms of linking case studies to broader conceptual concerns. Ultimately, however, too many contributions feel like they are conference papers rather than fully worked book chapters. Culture, urbanism and planning will probably have limited appeal for most cultural geographers. The mass movement of people across and between continents in the modern period engendered new responses to land in literature as in other areas of culture. Urban and imperial expansion, voluntary and enforced migration, exile and resettlement brought to the fore interdependent ideas about belonging and loss, wilderness and cultivation, homelands and promised lands, which were reflected and constructed in contemporary texts. Borrowing from the Antiguan-born writer Jamaica Kincaid, the fundamental premise of Garden plots is that 'gardens and gardening are political' (p. xiii). Informed by feminist, postcolonialist and psychoanalytic theories, this is a work primarily of literary criticism and history, focusing on the place and role of the garden in the works of about 20 authors writing in English in the 20th and 21st centuries. The material is organized by chapters in broadly chronological categoriesmodernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, cyberpunk -giving voice to Other voices and gardens, offering multiple perspectives of landscape through literature.

University of Sheffield

'Gardens' are broadly defined, embracing the material geographies of imperial botanical gardens, domestic plots and allotments but also the politics of plant collecting and biotechnology. At the same time, the book explores imagined landscapes and their relationship with literary processes: writing as cultural journey becomes a sub-theme of the book. Its geographical scope is equally wide-ranging, reaching through Britain, Ireland, India, Nepal, the Caribbean, the Americas, South Africa and New Zealand. In short, Shelley Saguaro shows that, far from being a neutral plot (in all senses of the word), the garden in these texts is materially and symbolically central to political, social and personal understandings of place, mobilized, for example, to articulate and remedy dislocation. These gardens, then, are the lens through which to explore power relations -in gender and race, and between colonizer and colonized. These are most compellingly explored through the works of J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul and Leslie Marmon Silko and their role in writing the 'postcolonial landscape'. This reveals, to cite one example, why, according to Morrison, the dominant, white, meanings of 'country' could never be shared by African Americans: 'country life through Black eyes produced visions of lynchings, share croppers [and] slavery' (p. 164).

  and planning. Edited by J. Monclús and M. Guàrdia. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. xix ϩ 293 pp. £55.00 hardback. ISBN: 0754646238.

  politics and poetics of gardens. By Shelley Saguaro. Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2006. xiii ϩ 249 pp. £50.00 hardback. ISBN: 9780754637530.


cultural geographies 15(4) The strength of the book lies in the intriguing stories and thick descriptions of the chapters, such as Margarita Gutman's discussion of the metropolis-like future visions for Buenos Aires from the 1920's conceptualization and wider reflection. Moreover, Steven Ward's insightful concluding chapter on the origins and dissemination of the 'Baltimore model' of waterfront regeneration shows what might have been achieved by the other chapters in terms of linking case studies to broader conceptual concerns. Ultimately, however, too many contributions feel like they are conference papers rather than fully worked book chapters. Culture, urbanism and planning will probably have limited appeal for most cultural geographers. The mass movement of people across and between continents in the modern period engendered new responses to land in literature as in other areas of culture. Urban and imperial expansion, voluntary and enforced migration, exile and resettlement brought to the fore interdependent ideas about belonging and loss, wilderness and cultivation, homelands and promised lands, which were reflected and constructed in contemporary texts. Borrowing from the Antiguan-born writer Jamaica Kincaid, the fundamental premise of Garden plots is that 'gardens and gardening are political' (p. xiii). Informed by feminist, postcolonialist and psychoanalytic theories, this is a work primarily of literary criticism and history, focusing on the place and role of the garden in the works of about 20 authors writing in English in the 20th and 21st centuries. The material is organized by chapters in broadly chronological categoriesmodernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, cyberpunk -giving voice to Other voices and gardens, offering multiple perspectives of landscape through literature.

University of Sheffield

'Gardens' are broadly defined, embracing the material geographies of imperial botanical gardens, domestic plots and allotments but also the politics of plant collecting and biotechnology. At the same time, the book explores imagined landscapes and their relationship with literary processes: writing as cultural journey becomes a sub-theme of the book. Its geographical scope is equally wide-ranging, reaching through Britain, Ireland, India, Nepal, the Caribbean, the Americas, South Africa and New Zealand. In short, Shelley Saguaro shows that, far from being a neutral plot (in all senses of the word), the garden in these texts is materially and symbolically central to political, social and personal understandings of place, mobilized, for example, to articulate and remedy dislocation. These gardens, then, are the lens through which to explore power relations -in gender and race, and between colonizer and colonized. These are most compellingly explored through the works of J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul and Leslie Marmon Silko and their role in writing the 'postcolonial landscape'. This reveals, to cite one example, why, according to Morrison, the dominant, white, meanings of 'country' could never be shared by African Americans: 'country life through Black eyes produced visions of lynchings, share croppers [and] slavery' (p. 164).

That 'gardens signify' and 'landscapes are contested' will not surprise cultural geographers. And while Garden plots does not seek to critically engage, at the intellectual level sustained in its core approach, with geographical approaches to landscape, it might well have benefited from this, not least because cultural geography has itself gained much from feminist, psychoanalytical and postcolonial theories. That said, Saguaro offers a valuable, readable perspective on the politics of landscape and identity in recent history and the global reach of even small, anonymous plots.

Kingston University

REBECCA PRESTON

American commodities in an age of empire. By Mona Domosh. New York: Routledge. 2006. ix ϩ 202 pp. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 0415945720.

Few historical geographers whose research is archival-based could write such a small, succinct book on the subject of American empire building in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This book convinces the reader that American imperialism -whether or not one believes it to have been 'informal,' 'peaceful,' 'free,' or 'exceptional' -was fundamentally a business venture of producing commodities and cornering markets for them overseas. Domosh examines American commercial imperialism primarily through three US corporations: Singer Manufacturing, McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, and the H. J. Heinz Company. She argues that American foreign economic and cultural dominance were achieved through the civilizing 'uplift' that commodities such as sewing machines, harvesting machines, and manufactured food products such as pickles and jellies brought to the less developed. American imperialism, according to Domosh, was enacted 'not through laws but through everyday acts of desiring and consuming' (p. 9).

American commodities resonates closely with Anne McClintock's work. To Domosh, consumer products do the 'work' of civilization, so political, military, religious, and other means were unnecessary to the American project. Domosh highlights in her final chapter her notion of the 'flexible racism' that was required for economic and cultural integration and dominance; that is, other nations and peoples 'became white' and modern through consumption of American products. Progress of such nations and peoples, then, could be measured not through some racial schema or hierarchy but through economic development measures. In all of this, the role of the US government and military apparatus in developing a foreign policy to enable these ventures is elided, in favor of foregrounding the role of businessmen, advertising executives, and so on who were set to directly make the profits (although in many cases, these and 'the government' were probably the same people).

One might wonder how this book, written by a geographer, differs from other similar works on the topic. In that respect, readers will find an especially useful model for historical economic geography in Chapter 2, where Domosh carefully lays out the developing organizational and manufacturing structure of these companies at various scales. The volume is also loaded with visual images, especially product advertising, and the author is as proficient at engaging the reader with these texts as any others.

Bucknell University KAREN M. MORIN

AIDAN WHILE Garden plots: the politics and poetics of gardens.

  By Shelley Saguaro. Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2006. xiii ϩ 249 pp. £50.00 hardback. ISBN: 9780754637530.


forms of publicness that others may not share. This underlines that when talking about public space, geographers are always and inevitably working with a specific notion of what the public city is -one that may or may not resonate with the concerns of others who are engaged in struggles for the city.

Iveson's book hence moves the debate on public space forward in a significant manner and will certainly be of interest to all geographers and urbanists for whom the life of the street holds fascination. Even those who find debates on public space somewhat arid should enjoy this book's lively range of examples. Drawn from across Australia, the case studies that Iveson presents are carefully nuanced and engage critically with ongoing debates in social and cultural geography about the making of gender, racial, age and sexual identities. Issues of aboriginal rights, youth countercultural expression, sexual citizenship and the gendering of space are flagged up by the varied case study chapters, meaning that there are multiple points of entry for those for whom public space per se is not a prime concern. This given, Iveson clearly demonstrates why issues of publicness should be of concern to all geographers, and he suggests that there is too much at stake to accept existing normative assumptions about the decline of the public sphere. Provocative and passionate, the fact that the book is laced with humour will also surely endear it to a student audience. For such reasons, Publics and the city is highly recommended both as a primer on public space as well as a state of the art intervention in debates on the 'struggle for space'.

Loughborough University

PHIL HUBBARD

The politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. By Nikolas Rose. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006. $25.95/£14.95. ISBN: 9780691121918.

In the classic analyses of Foucault, the 18th and 19th centuries saw the emergence of a biopolitical state, in which the very vitality of individual citizens came to be the subject of systems of management (through state provision for health and welfare, for example). Such a politics centred on the human body is today being reconfigured, claims the sociologist Nikolas Rose, in his new book The Politics of life itself. To summarize brutally, new ways of understanding life have resulted in new forms of managing, shaping and contesting it. Thus, vital politics today, Rose suggests, 'is concerned with our growing capacities to control, manage, engineer, reshape, and modulate the very vital capacities of human beings as living creatures' (p. 3). There is much to admire in his account of the forms that such a politics is taking, and I would encourage the reader to engage with this work. But two aspects of Rose's account warrant brief commentary.

First, both life and politics are given, in my view, too narrow a definition in this book. Central to what Rose seeks to analyse, for example, is the emergence of a particular 'style of thought' -drawing on Ludwig Fleck's phrase -based upon a shift in the scale at which we think to understand, act on, and act in relation to, human life: from a clinical gaze centred upon the body, to a molecular gaze that understands life at the level of its component cultural geographies 15(4) parts (sequences of nucleotide bases, transporter genes and the like). This approach is in many ways quite helpful, but to its detriment, I think, it emphasizes questions of technological novelty at the expense of questions about the distribution and control of those novel systems, not to mention the social inequalities from which they actively divert attention and in some cases may be contributing towards. As in the very western biomedical practices the book seeks to analyse, the infectious diseases, poverty and inequality that structure the politics of life for most of the world's population are given scant treatment. This is not, in fairness, Rose's intention, but my point is that it could have been. That it is not is indicative of a widening gap between the literature on public health and the literature on biomedicine and the biological sciences. Much is made in this book of the new choices and new responsibilities facing the individual. There is considerable scope for setting alongside this a fuller appreciation of how those choices are shaped by the often rather older and more mundane limits set by one's social and geographical location.

Second, there is a profusion of spatial metaphors and reasoning that I think geographers might usefully elaborate, contest and refine. There is something not just inherently but constitutively geographical about many of the changes wrought by the life sciences and biomedicine in particular that Rose describes in this book and that many geographers are actively engaged in researching. In addition to using geography as a shorthand for thinking about the wider implications and distributional effects of these new technologies, therefore (Rose speaks for example of a 'cartography of the future' in lieu of a 'history of the present'), geographical notions of space, place and scale might well be usefully brought to bear upon this emergent social and scholarly field.

Queen Mary, University of London

SIMON REID-HENRY