in the scientific legacy. Whether intentional or not, such narratives often resonate with popular conceptions of the scientist-as-recluse or with the drama associated with novel experimentation and high-profile public debate. Geography has not been anywhere near as prominent in critical explorations of science. As David Livingstone illustrates in his wonderfully written Putting science in its place, geography challenges scientific culture by concentrating on the particularities of what turns out to be a highly localized and regionally distinctive social practice. Livingstone deftly uses three simple spatial concepts -site, region and circulation -to deconstruct science's claims to universality and thereby reveal an intriguing set of relationships that begin to characterize the social geography of scientific endeavor.

Livingstone's account is ambitious in scope, ranging from the spatial politics of laboratory investigation and medical examination to the ways museums and gardens interacted with popular perceptions of far-flung regions and peoples. By design, he rejects a chronological ordering of events and opts instead to juxtapose temporally disparate episodes in an effort to discover science's site-specific and regional qualities. The relative lack of historical analysis, however, ends up concealing what might be some insightful connections between science and society. This deficiency is perhaps most evident in the third chapter, which concerns the regional cultures of science. Livingstone demonstrates how the political-economic pressures of various regional contexts (for instance, Victorian Manchester) shaped the type of science that was accepted and supported there (utilitarianism, in this case). Yet, beyond the point of identifying a basic interaction between regional culture and scientific practice, broader socioeconomic connections and trends remain undeveloped and unexplored. It would be fascinating, for instance, to undertake a systematic investigation of the relationships between science's spatiality and the political economies and cultural formations evolving in different parts of Europe, Such an analysis is most certainly beyond the scope of Livingstone's current book, which serves as a highly accessible and introductory typology of science's social geography. But the point remains that space and time have factored equally in the production of science as an intellectual division of labour, and that both have been manipulated and erased to create the unfortunate illusion of a placeless social project. The essays collected here explore the connections between blood, genes, selves, community, soil and geography. The underlying themes of race and nature -as they are socially produced and experiential -structure the text and advance innovative ways of reconceptualizing, and respatializing, uneven socio-spatial patterns. That is, race, nature and difference in the text are simultaneously evident in the built and natural

Georgia

Reviews in brief

environment and within and among skin-blood histories; together, race, nature and difference chart locations of decay and possibility on and beyond the racial body. Environmental pollution, land claim struggles, skulls, disease=health, nationalism, intimacy, tourism, genetics and violences demonstrate the consequences of skin-blood essentialisms and the limitations of their attendant geographies which include nationalist projects, outer-national 'crusades' for Western democracy, territorialization, border security, racial-sexual segregations. For example: ideologies of bloodznation-community-purity naturalize social and spatial hierarchies, thus reinforcing expendable geographies and subjects; the scale of the racial body is inscribed with natural blood-histories -risky bodies 'carry' risky genes; biotechnologies simultaneouslydestabilize and stabilize nature-places and racialization.

While the political and theoretical positions of the essays vary, it is the twofold spatialization of new humanism and racial genealogies (alternative conceptualizations and historicizations of humanness) that demonstrate the ways in which nature, and the natural, are infused with all sorts of geographical politics. This is the uniqueness of the text: it does not simply replicate or describe analyses of race and place, anti-racism or racial injustice; rather it seeks to undo blood-essentialisms by exploring the seeming naturalness, or transparency, of geography and its inhabitants. What I mean by this is that the authors take seriously the role played by nature in determining spatial zallegiances, desires and rifts, and the ways in which ideological 'naturalisms' are invoked in situated contexts. By refusing to complement one side of racial essence debates (as resistant or emancipatory), each essay imagines the possibilities advanced by ongoing struggles which are never resolved: what kind of politics, articulations and geographies, then, are forged through social struggle?

The arguments do not only seek to 'denature' race and nature and their commonsensical truths. They also hinge on recognizing how essences are lived and constructed through alterity and the work and the workings of subaltern political subjects. It is the work and workings of political subjects -taken up differently in each chapter and ranging from environmental activism to dog breeding and native geographies, spanning the USA, Guatemala, South Africa, Germany, Indonesia -that create innovative theoretical and everyday sites of opposition. The text offers not simply maps of difference, but locations where difference, and struggle are wrought with the demands of natural, commonsensical, sometimes violent truths.

York University KATHERINE MCKITTRICK

South Asian women in the diaspora. Edited by Nirmal Puwar and Parvati Raghuram. Oxford: Berg. 2003. 252pp. £15.99 paper. ISBN: 1 85973 602 5.

In the last decade, there has been an expansion of research and publications in the US and UK on South Asian women in the diaspora, within the contexts of identity, visual culture, transnationalism, material culture and literature. This edited collection is a rich and extensive set of interventions into the disabling paradigms within which South


Asian women are located, including a narrow set of temporal and spatial geographies. It is an essential read, and offers a challenge for all geographers engaged with these literatures. The text is a stark reminder of the continuing acceptability of an Orientalist lens through which ethnographies and academic literatures are received, produced and reproduced. South Asian women in the diaspora is a collection written by South Asian women within the academy who theorize from a position of being producers and subjects of research within the institutions of knowledge production. This collection offers a critical review of the nature of the racial politics within the academy, and an insight into the sociology of knowledge production from the perspective of the South Asian academic. Here, the heterogeneity of South Asian women's academic interventions are explored, and thus challenge the usually reductive frame of subjective knowledges.

The first key theme within the text is the objectification, essentialism and limitation of intellectual agency afforded to South Asian women, reflecting the dynamics of race and the reductive dynamism within academic process. The second theme is the means through which stereotypes of South Asian women's embodied identities are purveyed in familiar iconographic forms. Nayanika Mookerjee examines the aestheticization of the raped woman as being incorporated within masculinist constructions of Bangladeshi nationalism, communicated through icons of nature and landscape. Bakirathi Mani also reviews the form of the South Asian body, within work on South Asian fashions in the West, as being one located in a cultural and homogenizing intellectual cul-de-sac. The third theme of the book is concerned with grounded approaches to South Asian spatial, identity, and participatory politics. In this section Rani Kwale records South Asian lesbian activism, which challenges the heterosexual matrix which structures spatial politics within society. Samina Zahir extends this concern with participatory practices in the context of community arts; here she examines the continued burden of representation played out within the political landscapes of community arts projects This burden is expressed effectively by the editors in their development and promotion of a productive dialogue with social theory and practice within and outside the academy. Here, the gaze of those Othered is returned, and a variety of new lenses of academic enquiry are borne through new research trajectories and epistemological challenges.

Lancaster University

DIVYA TOLIA-KELLY

The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. By Donna Haraway. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2003. 100pp. $10.00 paper. ISBN: 0 97175 758 5.

In this well-written, well-researched and thought-provoking essay, Haraway argues that a human's cross-species 'companion' relationship with a dog can tell and teach something profound about the importance of recognizing the facticity of difference and, hence, how to engage with 'significant otherness': 'Contrary to lots of dangerous and unethical projection in the Western world that makes domestic canines into furry

Reviews in brief children, dogs are not about oneself . . . that is the beauty of dogs. They are not a projection, nor the realization of an intention, nor the telos of anything. They are dogs. . .' (p. 11). For Haraway, cross-species companionship involves recognizing the complexity of all beings, each born into an orbit of different experiences, cultural=species values, abilities, materialities and history. It involves considering both humans and dogs as 'subjects', and entails processually taking 'intersubjective' notice of one another in ways that lead to trust-filled, meaningful rapport. Such appreciation of, and working attentively with, cross-species differences is something she avers is more easily apprehensible in human relationships with dogs and, especially, dogs bred for particular functional (i.e. work rather than leisure) purposes. Drawing upon Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, doggieland listservs, doggie magazines and secondary sources on dog histories and meta-histories, Haraway drives her points home partly through telling us about how she has engaged 'intersubjectively' with her two dogs -Roland (an Aussie-mix) and Cayenne Pepper (her pure-bred Aussie) -in agility training. Here, a trainer uses bodily and voice cues to help her pooch run an agility course that typically takes less than a minute to complete, the sport drawing upon these dogs' histories and abilities as working dogs on ranches and the like. The tight relationship, Haraway tells us, ideally requires dog and trainer to develop a zen-like union, each one deeply trustful and respectful of the other, though not without clearly enforced rules of hierarchy. The success of this intersubjectivity requires, in her borrowed phraseology, 'ontological choreography'. Using her own and other dog stories, Haraway shows how significant differences can be charted, cultivated and engaged, engagement involving a deep appreciation of a particular dog's history, a history at times (as in the case of the Aussie) implicated in colonial violences, appropriations and inequality.

Two strengths stand out. Haraway is deeply aware of how 'dogs' are complex nodes through which all kinds of biopowers, biosociality, biohistories (and, I would add, 'bio-geographies') pass. She also brings her quotidian self to scrutiny through including snippets of her own intensely personal letters and essays dealing with dogs. She also admits at one point that she had always desired to give birth to a member of a species other than human (p. 96).

I was left, however, with a number of wagging racialized and class-inflected questions. What does it mean that middle-class white women dominate agility sports, which Haraway carefully points out? Is it possible to have a respectful 'intersubjective' relationship with your canine and still use the dog to track slaves and 'enemies' in war? Or would such things be mitigated by learning about and appreciating 'intersubjectively' the larger history of violence that often came to emplace dogs in our lives and cultures (e.g. Spanish-derived Merino sheep sent to Australia on colonized land and later shipped to the US whereupon US-derived dogs were developed to corral them). How does Haraway's message speak to the potential for, and ethos of, cross-species 'companionship' in impoverished places (especially in non-Western contexts) where animals (e.g. oxen, the cart-horse, the hunting dog) commonly overwork alongside humans. For what cultures and sectors of society is her message intended?

Reviews in brief I am also left with three major questions: First, who is to communicate this radical way of engaging doggie-human relationship, one that does not conflate all dogs with dogs used as 'pets' ('. . .many pets and pet people deserve respect' although 'being a pet seems to me to be a demanding job for a dog, requiring self-control and canine emotional and cognitive skills matching those of good working dogs' p. 38). My question is salient given that the vast majority of the burgeoning doggie-loving masses support non-radical, mushrooming 'pet' industries antithetical, I suppose, to Haraway's project: witness the proliferation of doggie bakeries, doggie parks, doggie bedding, couture and perfumeries, doggie magazines, doggie insurance plans and the like. Those who buy into these industries do not treat their dogs simply as 'furry little children ' (e.g. pp. 11, 38, 95). These are actors caught up in post-industrial commodity domains of desire and consumption enmeshed in highly mobile, post-industrial 'family' formations in which children are often optional and dogs provide all kinds of alternative functional convenience and affection (you can put them in kennels or the SPCA). Given that Haraway's meta-knowledge about significant otherness does not travel easily alongside commodity chains, it appears that we would need meta-training schools to teach humans how ethically to engage and think about (only working?) dogs as nodes of much larger historical and material processes ('Dog people need to learn how to inherit difficult histories in order to shape more vital multi-species futures', p. 63).

Secondly, if the majority of dog-owners are deeply enmeshed in commodity circuits divorced from the embodied practices Haraway describes, why does she find working dogs to be particularly compelling vehicles for teaching humans about intersubjectivity, trust, and respect -a group of dogs largely inaccessible and unknown to 95 per cent of those living on the planet? Is it only because she happens to own dogs and to engage them in agility training? Is she arguing that dogs hold potential for being the ultimate(?) 'companion species' because they are common? Because they've been around in history for a long time? Because they are physically engaging, active creatures? Because, unlike birds or turtles, they are proxemic? Thirdly, if we (who the 'we' is, is unclear) learn her radical way of knowing dogs, will the world be saved? ('[In agility training] -both dog and handler have to be able to take the initiative and to respond obediently to the other. The task, is to become coherent enough in an incoherent world to engage in a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response in the flesh, in the run, on the course. And then to remember how to live like that at every scale, with all the partners' (p. 62)). The conservative in me wants to ask how counterhegemonic or recuperative this text is when the level of investment in pet-dogs, especially in post-industrial contexts of privilege soars while the gap between the wealthy and impoverished widens; and the expensive art of agility training remains a largely feminized, 'white' and elite one. Reviews in brief

  Encyclopedia of world environmental history. Edited by Shepard Krech III, J.R. McNeill and Carolyn Merchant. New York: Routledge. 2004. 3 vol; 1429 pp. $495.00 cloth. ISBN: 0 41593 732 9.


the text through their decisions on how it is read. Ultimately, Patterned ground succeeds because both the editors and the authors have created a compilation of vignettes that interrupt the reader's normal flow of experience and create renewed perceptions of place. Habermas, an evaluative critique of whose writings forms the core of the first four chapters. In Chapter 1 Barnett considers the idea of spaces of representation, asking in particular where the public makes its presence felt through an analysis of the geographies of democratic communication. Chapter 2 examines the production of communicative spaces, while the third chapter is devoted to a critique of the concept of the public sphere as formulated by Habermas. In Chapter 4 the author looks at technologies of citizenship, re-evaluating the Foucauldian approach to understanding power. Taken together, these chapters aim to 'develop a theoretical account of the practical difference that principles of deliberation, communication and representation make to the way power is exercised upon and through practices of mediated public communication' (p. 7).

The book is also empirically grounded. Chapter 5 explores the role of constitutional law in determining the meanings ascribed to democracy when applied to the regulation of new communications technologies. In particular, Barnett charts the way in which in the latter part of the twentieth century the US First Amendment was interpreted in an essentially libertarian fashion to underpin a particular deregulatory approach to communications policy. Chapter 6 examines the contribution of European Union media policy to the process of democratising a transnational polity. Finally, Chapter 7 uses the case of South Africa to discuss issues of media and democratization, and in particular the need for a pluralistic associational culture for the functioning of a healthy democratic public sphere. These three chapters illustrate a specific aspect of Habermasian theory, but they can also be appreciated as freestanding explorations of particular communicative features in the functioning of democratic polities. This is a work which makes demands of the reader, with the early chapters in particular requiring considerable familiarity with the ideas of key writers in democratic and cultural theory. Habermas, an evaluative critique of whose writings forms the core of the first four chapters. In Chapter 1 Barnett considers the idea of spaces of representation, asking in particular where the public makes its presence felt through an analysis of the geographies of democratic communication. Chapter 2 examines the production of communicative spaces, while the third chapter is devoted to a critique of the concept of the public sphere as formulated by Habermas. In Chapter 4 the author looks at technologies of citizenship, re-evaluating the Foucauldian approach to understanding power. Taken together, these chapters aim to 'develop a theoretical account of the practical difference that principles of deliberation, communication and representation make to the way power is exercised upon and through practices of mediated public communication' (p. 7).

The book is also empirically grounded. Chapter 5 explores the role of constitutional law in determining the meanings ascribed to democracy when applied to the regulation of new communications technologies. In particular, Barnett charts the way in which in the latter part of the twentieth century the US First Amendment was interpreted in an essentially libertarian fashion to underpin a particular deregulatory approach to communications policy. Chapter 6 examines the contribution of European Union media policy to the process of democratising a transnational polity. Finally, Chapter 7 uses the case of South Africa to discuss issues of media and democratization, and in particular the need for a pluralistic associational culture for the functioning of a healthy democratic public sphere. These three chapters illustrate a specific aspect of Habermasian theory, but they can also be appreciated as freestanding explorations of particular communicative features in the functioning of democratic polities. This is a work which makes demands of the reader, with the early chapters in particular requiring considerable familiarity with the ideas of key writers in democratic and cultural theory. The book would have benefited from a stronger Introduction and Conclusion which more clearly laid out the key overarching arguments and more

  This book addresses numerous issues pertaining to the interdependence of culture, democracy and communication. It is a philosophical work, informed by a broad range of cultural and democratic theorists Á/ including among others Derrida, Foucault and

	Slippery Rock, University of Pennsylvania	JACK LIVINGSTON
	Culture and democracy: media, space and representation. By Clive Barnett.
	Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2003. viii'/232 pp. £47.50 cloth; £16.99 paper.
	ISBN 0 7486 1400 1 cloth; ISBN 0 7486 1399 4 paper.

  The book would have benefited from a stronger Introduction and Conclusion which more clearly laid out the key overarching arguments and more 252 Reviews in brief the text through their decisions on how it is read. Ultimately, Patterned ground succeeds because both the editors and the authors have created a compilation of vignettes that interrupt the reader's normal flow of experience and create renewed perceptions of place. This book addresses numerous issues pertaining to the interdependence of culture, democracy and communication. It is a philosophical work, informed by a broad range of cultural and democratic theorists Á/ including among others Derrida, Foucault and

	Slippery Rock, University of Pennsylvania	JACK LIVINGSTON
	Culture and democracy: media, space and representation. By Clive Barnett.
	Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2003. viii'/232 pp. £47.50 cloth; £16.99 paper.
	ISBN 0 7486 1400 1 cloth; ISBN 0 7486 1399 4 paper.

Reviews in brief

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

Queen Mary, University of London RAYMOND KUHN

Backward glances: cruising the queer streets of New York and London. By Mark Turner. London: Reaktion. 2003. 191 pp. £16.95 paper. ISBN 1 86189 180 6.

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

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

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

Strangely, however, Turner's analysis effaces these points. Turner works by laying fragments from different times alongside one another Á/ moving between 1880s porn and Jarman's journals in one paragraph (pp. 50Á/1). Sometimes this highlights 253 Reviews in brief explicitly pulled the two sections of the book together. Despite these caveats, however, the author has written an intellectually stimulating work, which critically combines an assessment of ideas with an evaluation of policies at the interface of media, culture and democracy. The idea that modern urban life actuates particular social practices is well established. The streets' erotics have their literary and academic canon. But Backward glances compels us to rethink how we understand both ways of being in the city and what makes cities sexy. Its distinctiveness is twofold. First, Turner locates the pleasures of 'mutual recognition' in precisely the fragmentation and anonymity of urban culture. Cruising, indeed, 'exploits the ambivalences and uncertainties inherent in the city' (p. 7). It is, as such, characteristic of urban modernity. Ranging from Whitman to Hockney, Turner moves to evoke the erotic 'excitement of the passing moment' (p. 118). Second: Turner's cruiser disrupts the dominant status of the 'Ur-man of urban modernity' Á/ the ever-watching fla ˆneur (p. 29). If the fla ˆneur is outside the crowd, the cruiser is immersed in it. Reciprocal glances are 'a vital point of interaction, an expression of togetherness rather than of alienation, of connection rather than separation' (p. 59). Turner highlights those everyday fleeting connections when individuals look at those around them. The cruiser suggests alternative modes of urban movement.

Queen

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

Strangely, however, Turner's analysis effaces these points. Turner works by laying fragments from different times alongside one another Á/ moving between 1880s porn and Jarman's journals in one paragraph (pp. 50Á/1). Sometimes this highlights


garden: the garden in British art, 1800 to the present day

and social signification of space and landscape have been taken over by other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

University College London MARK BASSIN

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

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

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

In their introduction the editors anticipate the tension produced by their title. They suggest that they wanted to present the artworks as 'imaginative constructs in their own right' Á/ a justifiable aim, given the English predilection for gardening, and arguably a function of public display. Yet because these were pictures of gardens, themselves imaginative constructs, there was a paradox at the heart of the exhibition, a problem of representation. In the catalogue this is less troubling, but the show was full of double representations and extraordinary ambiguities, such as Helen Allingham's watercolour of Gertrude Jekyll's garden, or Anya Gallacio's Red on green . The strength of the catalogue is that it addresses those ambiguities in ways that exhibition captions alone could not (in spite of some perhaps over-explicit captions). For this reason, readers of the catalogue may be better satisfied. The key to this exhibition (Tate Britain 3 June Á/30 August 2004, followed by Belfast and Manchester) and its catalogue, is in the title: it's about art, as well as about gardens. This at once presents a tension for both viewer and reader, because art and gardens are practices that require different modes of engagement and interpretation, different 'ways of seeing'.

The editors observe that gardening is currently the most popular leisure activity in the UK, and suggest that England is a 'quintessential' nation of gardeners. This claim for gardening greatness is often made for England, and the editors/curators work hard to substantiate it, while recognizing that gardening cultures extend across the British Isles, particularly to Scotland. Largely, however, they work with a very particular variety of Englishness. Their achievement is to successfully disturb the idea of green pleasantness that the English garden is popularly supposed to convey.

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

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

Queen Mary, University of London


logic and, on the other, that this logic has become obsolete for the understanding and organization of the world in present times. The map is defined by the author as 'a formidable ontological device, a silent tool for the implicit Á/ and therefore unreflexive Á/ definition of the nature of things in the world ' (p. 85). Farinelli leads us through the labyrinthien origins of this device, from Homer to Hippodamos and Alberti. A device through which the world is 'curarized': movement is frozen into solid matter, process into form, people into things. Geography as a discipline has been, Farinelli argues, of critical importance in this 'mappification' of our ways of thinking, and consequently for the transformation of the material world.

The thesis itself will not surprise readers of Geografia familiar with work in the history of geography and cartography of the past two decades. What is dazzling, however, is how the author moves smoothly, in the spaces defined by his rigid cartographic grid, from Hobbes to Hippodamos, from Humboldt to Alberti, from Dolly to Mike Davis or from the Italian soccer star Alessandro Totti to . . . Anaximander, creating unexpected and illuminating relations.

Too enthusiastic this review? Okay, let's come with a critique then. Franco Farinelli remains very much the heir of German phenomenology. This is manifest in his (Heideggerian) passion for origins and etymology as well as in his critique of modernity as a disenchantment of the world. I sometimes wonder, however, in the company of a few others, whether we have ever really been modern, if the world was ever really disenchanted and, therefore, if the critique of modernity should not be replaced (or at least complemented) by the careful analysis of the heterogeneous associations that we day by day fabricate with pieces of beings and technology, nature and culture, symbols and stones, maps and subversions of the maps. Because of this 'German idealist' positioning Geografia does not completely live up to one of its proclaimed ambitions: 'to be a first step towards the only possible global geography: that of senses, viewpoints and models of the world' (p. 37). Farinelli's book is more often a brilliant critique than a proposal.

This being said, for anyone only remotely interested in the discourse of geography, reading Geografia is a constant jubilation. This book explores four moments in the changing architectural expression of the relationship between nation and nature in the United States: the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of conservation; the economic depression of the 1930s and ideals of a return to nature; the atomic age in the aftermath of the Second World War associated with hubris and paranoia; and ecopolitics in the 1970s and movements for alternative living. For each moment the authors focus on particular buildings that express ideas about nature, although discussion ranges widely over architecture, landscape and urban design, biography, and technological and social context. Following a brief introduction justifying the choice of buildings and the historical approach, the first substantive chapter examines the images of wilderness at the Columbia Exhibition, focusing on the 'Boone and Crocket Club House'. This hunter's lodge is interpreted as both 'a lesson in natural law' and a statement of 'essential American national character [of] individualism, courage and self-reliance'. For a book on architecture, however, there is surprisingly little about the cabin itself; most of the chapter is about the hunters and naturalists who sponsored it, the ideal of the primitive hut, the 'hunting man' as a natural aristocrat and the relationship between the 'fair chase' and 'free trade'. This pattern is repeated in subsequent chapters, such that buildings under discussion sometimes get lost in the details. The little hut thus becomes a metaphor for the architectural content of the book when the authors describe it as 'striking in its ability to say so much with so little'. The tone is also conspiratorial: in the first chapter, for example, conservation is reduced to a means to wage war on working class; ethnographic representation is a means to 'isolate' and expel Native Americans from the natural landscape; and sculptures of wild animals express a unique and threatening 'American animalism'.

University of

The second chapter focuses on another log cabin: Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park. Although much grander, it similarly offers 'a moral lesson', in this case on the appropriate conduct of nature tourism. The authors discuss discourses of tourism and nature, and national parks, photography, highways, anthropology of Native America and the emergence of a 'national landscape of leisure'. Like the Hunter's Lodge, the Inn provides a masculine retreat from the enervations of feminine civilization, but it also reflects the 'bisexual design' of the Arts and Crafts period: 'the rusticated masonry, solid volumes and deep relief [are] reassuringly masculine', but the log cabin has been 'dramatically femininized', as evidenced in interior timbers that are 'slender . . . kinked and curvy' and in bedroom details such as cotton lace curtains.

The third chapter focuses on 'great works' of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which articulate a vision of conservation based on integration of humans and modern technology with nature through regional planning. The authors consider the ideal 'American folk', new towns, the craft movement in Appalachia, freeways and progress, and, again, conservation and tourism. Exposing gender contradictions of the progressive agenda, Norris Dam is read in terms of the 'technological sublime', as a monument to American modernism whose mass and power is testament to national masculinity Á/ even more than the skyscraper, in fact, since the latter, although 'thrusting towards fantastic heights still carries voids within its towers. The dams, free of such anxiety, are the perfect expression of a solid and therefore masculine architecture.' Citing eroticization in historic reports, the authors claim. 'Once the TVA has plugged up the river and restrained it, no longer does the wasted seed of the frontier spirit flow downstream. If the self-serving ethic of frontier capitalism is associated with wasted seed flowing downstream, a biblical sin in this Bible belt region, the collective spirit of New Deal cooperation was to fertilize and renew the American garden.'

The fourth chapter examines Case Study Houses of Los Angeles, part of a postwar competition for housing design. The transparency and openness of the emerging 'California Look' are taken as expressions of democracy, even as nature and the public realm are privately appropriated in the form of enclosed or interior gardens. Contradictions within domestic architecture are linked to 'atomic anxiety', allowing play on multiple meanings of containment, and the authors explore aesthetics of nuclear explosions, McCarthyism, and symbolism of Superman. Living in fragile glass houses becomes an act of denial since '[t]o be behind glass is to be paralyzed Á/ one can see everything and do nothing. Through glass, the final flash will be visible. Darkened, it becomes the sunglasses worn by spectators of the bomb. Translucent . . . it turns bodies into ghosts, much as the atomic flash turns shadows into solids.'

The final chapter considers geodesic domes and ecological consciousness of the 1970s, arguing that Buckminster Fuller's architecture expresses emerging consciousness of the global dimensions of nature. The authors are more sympathetic to the progressive vision of green architecture, though they poke fun at the 'earnest morality' and 'religious sensibility' of the 'Integral Urban House' developed in Berkeley in the 1970s. Strangely, there is no consideration of gendering of this architecture or alternative lifestyles. Instead, the authors argue that in rejecting separation of humans from nature, counter-cultural activists close the circle: like hunters in the Boone and Crockett Club and architects of national parks, they desire communion with nature, though in this case more inclusive and democratic, particularly in their respect of Native American culture; and like TVA and architects of the Case Study Houses, they seek to integrate humans and nature through technology, though more appropriate and under collective rather than public or private initiative.

Unfortunately there is no concluding chapter, and it is hard to identify common themes within selected case studies that might allow us to identify something called 'the American landscape', or even to understand architecture as symptomatic of a particular 'American' relationship between nation and nature. Although the authors claim to take an historical approach, they read buildings from a critical present, neither sympathetically locating architects in their context nor considering how contemporary users experienced the buildings. The book relentlessly exposes ideologies of progress, but there is not much in it that might help us realize the goal with which it ends: 'if people are to learn to live in harmony with nature, that has to do not only with how buildings are designed, but how we live in them.'

  Neucha ˆtel OLA SO ¨DERSTRO ¨M Architecture and nature: creating the American landscape. By Christine Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison. London and New York: Routledge. 2003. 372 pp. £65.00 cloth; £27.50 paper. ISBN 0 415 28358 2 cloth; 0 415 28359 0 paper.

Reviews in brief


In search of the rain forest. Edited by Candace Slater. Durham NC, and London: Duke University Press. 2003. 318 pp. US$22.95 paper. ISBN 0 8223 3218 3.

Tropical rainforests are places where interests converge, and often collide. For hundreds of indigenous groups they are a home, for ecotourists a place to visit, and for multinationals a source of primary commodities. For others they are fragile environments in need of protection, a safe haven for illegal activity or reservoirs of as yet undiscovered medicines. Far beyond their confines they are a source of inspiration, concern and even fear. In search of the rainforest ably explains how various actors appropriate, manipulate and reproduce images of rainforests as part of dynamic, ongoing narratives -or bioscripts -that influence perceptions, attitudes and policies about how they should be used and managed. A recurring motif consists of how rainforest icons -simplified representations embodying an array of associated mean- ingsare constructed and transmitted through photographs, brochures, newspapers, books and movies. Although various groups may draw from a common environmen- talist ideology, they do so in opposing ways, sometimes disseminating one discourse while attempting to silence others.

One chapter demonstrates how a company operating in the Ecuadorian Amazon publicizes the implementation of innovations that purportedly allow for the harmonious coexistence of oil extraction and the biological diversity of a vast, untouched forestwhile obscuring the deliberate disruption of indigenous organizations or the use of state violence to suppress resistance. Here and elsewhere, the authors show how depictions of rainforests shape notions about the relationships between people and nature, and how these in turn can lead to quite different outcomes. For example, if forests are thought of as ancient and pristine, they will warrant strict protection; if they are anthropogenic, better understood as 'gardens gone to seed', they may in fact require resident populations to maintain certain ecological processes. As another chapter illustrates, the long-standing policy of removing villagers from reserves in India - developed in collaboration with international conservation organizations -is not merely unjust, but can ultimately result in the devastation rather than protection of wildlife populations.

This book provides valuable insight into the dynamics of competing social constructions of nature. A limitation, perhaps, is an asymmetrical emphasis on the perceptions and representations of rainforests among outsiders (e.g., colonial administrators, an expatriate natural medicine guru -not to mention the contributors themselves) rather than those who are most affected by them. What are some of the icons that resident peoples use? What are some of their distinct cultural interpretations of the rainforest? These questions receive much less attention. Nevertheless, this remains an engaging, thought-provoking volume rich in ideas grounded in real-world cases, and may alter to some degree the way many of us see the rainforest ourselves.

Department of Geography


published or not. The documents may come

tions here hint at possible and interesting answers, they are -perhaps inevitably - circumscribed by the tradition from which the collection emerges.

School of Geography, University of Southampton DEREK MCCORMACK

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

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

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

7The globalization ofsexuality is a timely intervention in current debates around the relationship between sexuality, globalization, national agency, GLQ rights and sexual citizenship, forcefully demonstrating the interpenetration and mutual constitution of (local and global) sexual cultures and transnational economic formations, and thus providing a much-needed counter-argument to the economic reductionism of recent work on queer globalization from a political economy perspective.

Department ofHuman Geography, ANDREW GORMAN-MURRAY Macquarie University, Sydney

Five billion years of global change: a history of the land. By Denis Wood. New York: Guilford Press. 2004. 336 The 'five billion years' of Denis Wood's title is in fact a dramatic understatement. Wood argues that that if we are to understand the current global predicament we need a long run-up. A very long one. In fact, he takes us all the way back to the earliest nanoseconds of the Big Bang, which, as I now know, took place about 11 billion years ago (for those in the Anglo orbit -those are American billions). Then Wood works his way, step by step, aeon by aeon, to our globalized present.

It's not easy to get critical purchase on a work that offers an integrated theory of just about everything. One way we might characterize Wood's book is as a counterpoint to a tendency in recent social thought -both popular and academic -to treat life in a globalized world in a kind of horizontal or flattened-out manner. Although, as far as I am aware, only one author has actually resurrected the term 'flat earth', a great deal of the writing which addresses the processes of 'globalization' and the condition of 'globality' treats the earth as a kind of static, featureless arena on which ever more frenetic social mobilities and interconnectivities play themselves out. Ironically, the uptake of environmental concerns in the humanities-with all its attention to novel forms of trans-border seepage and flow-often compounds this sense of dynamic socio- technical change stirring up the surface of a passive, or merely reactive, planetary body. What Wood impresses upon us is the necessity of understanding the deep formative processes that have made the earth and all its life forms, including Homo sapiens, what they are today. His take on the 'global' reaches beyond the many mobilizations associated with what we call 'modernity' into earlier, sometimes much earlier, movements of our species across the planet. And further still into the wanderings and interminglings of other species, the couplings of life and its physical environments, and the dynamic interactions between rock, air and water. What we have come to think

  pp. $19.95 paper. ISBN 157230 958X.


to the agency of nation-states, cities and queer subjects vis-a-vis processes of globalization. Queers are not merely passive consumers of 'global gay', but are active producers of local sexual cultures which articulate in different ways with transnational sexual cultures, both influencing and influenced by 'global gay' consumer culture.

7The globalization ofsexuality is a timely intervention in current debates around the relationship between sexuality, globalization, national agency, GLQ rights and sexual citizenship, forcefully demonstrating the interpenetration and mutual constitution of (local and global) sexual cultures and transnational economic formations, and thus providing a much-needed counter-argument to the economic reductionism of recent work on queer globalization from a political economy perspective.

Department ofHuman Geography, ANDREW GORMAN-MURRAY Macquarie University, Sydney

Five billion years of global change: a history of the land. By Denis Wood. New York: Guilford Press. 2004. 336 The 'five billion years' of Denis Wood's title is in fact a dramatic understatement. Wood argues that that if we are to understand the current global predicament we need a long run-up. A very long one. In fact, he takes us all the way back to the earliest nanoseconds of the Big Bang, which, as I now know, took place about 11 billion years ago (for those in the Anglo orbit -those are American billions). Then Wood works his way, step by step, aeon by aeon, to our globalized present.

It's not easy to get critical purchase on a work that offers an integrated theory of just about everything. One way we might characterize Wood's book is as a counterpoint to a tendency in recent social thought -both popular and academic -to treat life in a globalized world in a kind of horizontal or flattened-out manner. Although, as far as I am aware, only one author has actually resurrected the term 'flat earth', a great deal of the writing which addresses the processes of 'globalization' and the condition of 'globality' treats the earth as a kind of static, featureless arena on which ever more frenetic social mobilities and interconnectivities play themselves out. Ironically, the uptake of environmental concerns in the humanities-with all its attention to novel forms of trans-border seepage and flow-often compounds this sense of dynamic socio- technical change stirring up the surface of a passive, or merely reactive, planetary body. What Wood impresses upon us is the necessity of understanding the deep formative processes that have made the earth and all its life forms, including Homo sapiens, what they are today. His take on the 'global' reaches beyond the many mobilizations associated with what we call 'modernity' into earlier, sometimes much earlier, movements of our species across the planet. And further still into the wanderings and interminglings of other species, the couplings of life and its physical environments, and the dynamic interactions between rock, air and water. What we have come to think of as 'our' global condition, Wood asserts, only makes sense in the light of a more encompassing 'globality' that has been doing its thing for billions of years.

These are timely and welcome insights. But, of course, this is also far from an original story, as the author is well aware. Wood makes it clear from the outset that this is a work of synthesis. It is equally apparent that the book seeks to appeal to a popular audience, as well as students of all levels. But while the quest for accessibility may be admirable, I suspect that many will find that Wood's chatty, chummy and often frat-boy-flavoured prose can grate. To be sure, there are moments of great charm and eloquence throughout the book. But a pace and style that seems to assume the reader has some kind of attention deficit rarely leaves room for the kind of quiet awe and contemplation that such observations invite. Too frequently, clumps of anecdote and clusters of association intrude on what could have been an elegant integration of social, biophysical and cosmological history.

Department of Geography, The Open University

NIGEL CLARK

The planting of New Virginia: settlement and landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. By Warren R. Hofstra. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. 432 pp. US$49.95 cloth. ISBN 0 8018 7418 1.

In this richly textured settlement history of the Shenandoah Valley, the author meticulously reconstructs the complex forces that shaped the cultural landscape of this important frontier region in the 18th century. Hofstra's narrative traces the evolution of settlement within this region from discrete open-country neighbourhoods to the 'town and country' landscape that in many ways characterized later western settlement. Through the use of impressive original sources, Hofstra brings this period of history to life, providing a window into the daily lives and ambitions of these frontier men and women. More than 50 illustrations, ranging from original maps and town plans to photographs of barns and homes, will particularly appeal to historical geographers with interests in the material culture of this region.

The planting of New Virginia adds to our understanding of this frontier period in three key areas. First, Hofstra goes beyond traditional explanations of settlement that rely heavily on the role of land speculation. The author instead focuses on imperial pressures that encouraged settlement within the Great Valley as a strategic buffer zone designed to keep France from expanding its influence between Canada and Louisiana and thereby surrounding Britain's North American colonies. Settlement in the valley was also beneficial for Britain because it prevented the wilderness from providing a haven for runaway slaves. Second, the author weaves the involvement of Native Americans throughout the narrative -an aspect of the story noticeably lacking in many earlier American histories. The misunderstandings and occasional hostilities between Native Americans and Europeans helped shape the landscape of the Great Valley, and perhaps had more of an influence than imperial forces. This conflict was a centralizing force, which encouraged settlers to establish towns and organize militias. The third key

  pp. $19.95 paper. ISBN 157230 958X.


The planting of New Virginia: settlement and landscape in the Shenandoah Valley

of as 'our' global condition, Wood asserts, only makes sense in the light of a more encompassing 'globality' that has been doing its thing for billions of years.

These are timely and welcome insights. But, of course, this is also far from an original story, as the author is well aware. Wood makes it clear from the outset that this is a work of synthesis. It is equally apparent that the book seeks to appeal to a popular audience, as well as students of all levels. But while the quest for accessibility may be admirable, I suspect that many will find that Wood's chatty, chummy and often frat-boy-flavoured prose can grate. To be sure, there are moments of great charm and eloquence throughout the book. But a pace and style that seems to assume the reader has some kind of attention deficit rarely leaves room for the kind of quiet awe and contemplation that such observations invite. Too frequently, clumps of anecdote and clusters of association intrude on what could have been an elegant integration of social, biophysical and cosmological history.

Department of Geography, The Open University

NIGEL CLARK

The planting of New Virginia: settlement and landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. By Warren R. Hofstra. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. 432 pp. US$49.95 cloth. ISBN 0 8018 7418 1.

In this richly textured settlement history of the Shenandoah Valley, the author meticulously reconstructs the complex forces that shaped the cultural landscape of this important frontier region in the 18th century. Hofstra's narrative traces the evolution of settlement within this region from discrete open-country neighbourhoods to the 'town and country' landscape that in many ways characterized later western settlement. Through the use of impressive original sources, Hofstra brings this period of history to life, providing a window into the daily lives and ambitions of these frontier men and women. More than 50 illustrations, ranging from original maps and town plans to photographs of barns and homes, will particularly appeal to historical geographers with interests in the material culture of this region.

The planting of New Virginia adds to our understanding of this frontier period in three key areas. First, Hofstra goes beyond traditional explanations of settlement that rely heavily on the role of land speculation. The author instead focuses on imperial pressures that encouraged settlement within the Great Valley as a strategic buffer zone designed to keep France from expanding its influence between Canada and Louisiana and thereby surrounding Britain's North American colonies. Settlement in the valley was also beneficial for Britain because it prevented the wilderness from providing a haven for runaway slaves. Second, the author weaves the involvement of Native Americans throughout the narrative -an aspect of the story noticeably lacking in many earlier American histories. The misunderstandings and occasional hostilities between Native Americans and Europeans helped shape the landscape of the Great Valley, and perhaps had more of an influence than imperial forces. This conflict was a centralizing force, which encouraged settlers to establish towns and organize militias. The third key contribution is how the author frames the formation of traditional institutions such as towns and county governments within the broader context of global economic and political pressures. Rather than being influenced solely by local markets and opportunities, the men and women of the Shenandoah Valley felt the same pressures for social, economic and political change that were sweeping the entire Atlantic world.

Today, as the rapid pace of globalization, trade deficits and job outsourcing dominates the nightly American news, The planting ofNew Virginia provides a useful reminder that such global connections have always existed, and were perhaps just as dynamic and disruptive then as they are now.

Department of Geography, Geology and the Environment LANGDON SMITH Slippery Rock University ofPennsylvania Carleton University La citta incompleta. By Giulia de Spuches, Vincenzo Guarrasi and Marco Picone. Palermo: Palumbo. 2002. ISBN 88 8020 487 4. £23.

Palermo is a peculiar city hosting a peculiar group of geographers, working within the Institute of Cultural Anthropology. La cittd incompleta (the incomplete city) is a collaborative piece of work produced by Giulia de Spuches, Vincenzo Guarrasi and Marco Picone. It is a textbook useful for classes in geography and architecture, based on research by the authors on Sicily and the city of Palermo.

La cittd incompleta is divided into 14 chapters. The first are mainly theoretical and conceptual, while the following ones are grounded on empirical material and develop particular issues like urban mapping, the peripheries of Palermo, or the legacy of the Italian National Exhibition 1891-92 in the urban form of the city. The book discusses a series of important contemporary issues in geography: mapping (in the broad sense used, for instance, by Denis Cosgrove), performative geographies, or time-space compression. It also bears the very peculiar mark of the Palermitan 'school of geography', made up by the intertwining of international discussions and home- brewed modes of thought related to interpretive anthropology and Russian semiotics of culture (Lotman and Uspenskij). Empirically, the book comes out of nearly three decades of research, often within national and international networks: on local territorial systems (with the Turin-based Giuseppe Dematteis), landscape planning in Sicily, urban peripheries, or GIS (with the critical companionship of the Bologna-based Franco Farinelli).

The result is both very stimulating and open to discussion. Stimulating because, despite the diversity of its theoretical references, it works as an organic whole, expressing the long and fruitful collaboration of its authors, rather than being an odd patchwork. It is also open to discussion, but in an interesting way. The book is as incomplete as the spaces it refers to. Sicily is, as most readers will know, an ever-changing and labile reality. Palermo, in particular, manifests a (sometimes


archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt

La città incompleta

contribution is how the author frames the formation of traditional institutions such as towns and county governments within the broader context of global economic and political pressures. Rather than being influenced solely by local markets and opportunities, the men and women of the Shenandoah Valley felt the same pressures for social, economic and political change that were sweeping the entire Atlantic world.

Today, as the rapid pace of globalization, trade deficits and job outsourcing dominates the nightly American news, The planting ofNew Virginia provides a useful reminder that such global connections have always existed, and were perhaps just as dynamic and disruptive then as they are now.

Department of Geography, Geology and the Environment LANGDON

SMITH

Slippery Rock University ofPennsylvania Carleton University La citta incompleta. By Giulia de Spuches, Vincenzo Guarrasi and Marco Picone. Palermo: Palumbo. 2002. ISBN 88 8020 487 4. £23.

Palermo is a peculiar city hosting a peculiar group of geographers, working within the Institute of Cultural Anthropology. La cittd incompleta (the incomplete city) is a collaborative piece of work produced by Giulia de Spuches, Vincenzo Guarrasi and Marco Picone. It is a textbook useful for classes in geography and architecture, based on research by the authors on Sicily and the city of Palermo.

La cittd incompleta is divided into 14 chapters. The first are mainly theoretical and conceptual, while the following ones are grounded on empirical material and develop particular issues like urban mapping, the peripheries of Palermo, or the legacy of the Italian National Exhibition 1891-92 in the urban form of the city. The book discusses a series of important contemporary issues in geography: mapping (in the broad sense used, for instance, by Denis Cosgrove), performative geographies, or time-space compression. It also bears the very peculiar mark of the Palermitan 'school of geography', made up by the intertwining of international discussions and home- brewed modes of thought related to interpretive anthropology and Russian semiotics of culture (Lotman and Uspenskij). Empirically, the book comes out of nearly three decades of research, often within national and international networks: on local territorial systems (with the Turin-based Giuseppe Dematteis), landscape planning in Sicily, urban peripheries, or GIS (with the critical companionship of the Bologna-based Franco Farinelli).

The result is both very stimulating and open to discussion. Stimulating because, despite the diversity of its theoretical references, it works as an organic whole, expressing the long and fruitful collaboration of its authors, rather than being an odd patchwork. It is also open to discussion, but in an interesting way. The book is as incomplete as the spaces it refers to. Sicily is, as most readers will know, an ever-changing and labile reality. Palermo, in particular, manifests a (sometimes depressing and in other occasions beautiful) 'genius of unfulfilment': devastated houses can stay empty for generations, a marvellous opera house remains closed for 23 years (for obscure reasons) and places of cultural rebirth are unfinished, still used but already fading. Precariousness and instability are, for obvious reasons, part of the trademark of the city, but so is openness to a diversity of influences (in all senses of the word).

These features of the city also characterize La cittd incompleta. No wonder: because the book is inspired not only by the above-mentioned references but also by the idea of open, auto-poietic systems such as developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.

It is also incomplete in the sense that it is a work in progress, a snapshot of the collective intelligence of this group of geographers taken at the beginning of the 21st century. They are now certainly somewhere else, thinking differently, working with other references, building new and voluntarily incomplete thought-houses. This movement is to be welcomed, I would argue, because some of the theoretical positions used are more limiting than creative today. The idea of auto-poietic systems in particular leads to an exceedingly abstract and actor-less conception of territorial processes. Under the heading of this biological metaphor, the city tends to become (I use the authors' words here) the 'nervous system' of the territorial body. How this nervous steering system really works (in Sassen's terms for instance), and to whose benefit, are questions that remain somewhat obscure in this book due to the reliance on such theoretical models. But, the references to theory being many and the empirical work substantial, the volume also contains careful analyses of single and strategically important actions (such as the Florio family and the Palermo exhibit at the end of the 19th century).

On the whole, then, La cittd incompleta makes very thought-provoking reading, demonstrating how a relatively marginal (but maritime!) geographical position can be creatively used. It will be of interest to all those who are curious about the diversity of contemporary human geography.

Institut de geograpbie, Universite de Neuchbatel OLA SODERSTROM

L'


but, curiously, also the most personally revealing section of an otherwise somewhat distanced memoir.

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

Department of Geography J. NiCHoLAs ENTRIKIN University of California, Los Angeles The past is not dead: facts, fictions, and enduring racial stereotypes. By Allan Pred. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. 2004. 280 pp. £49.50 cloth; £16.50 paper. ISBN 0 8166 4405 5 cloth; 0 8166 4406 3 paper. 7Te past is not dead continues Allan Pred's excoriating critique of Swedish racism, begun in his previous work, Even in Sweden (2000). His new book focuses on two interlocking montages: a study of an African-Caribbean slave, Badin, who was brought to the Swedish court from St Croix in 1758 and who died in Stockholm in 1822; and a (shorter) study of present-day racial stereotyping, illustrated by the public exhibition of Hartkopf's Wax Cabinet, originally displayed in Stockholm in the 1890s, at the National Historical Museum in December 1999. Pred uses the techniques of montage and juxtaposition throughout the book, with comments from contemporary refugees and immigrants set alongside fragments from Badin's nineteenth-century recollections and other historical extracts. The author has made great demands of his publisher through the use of different typefaces and font sizes, indented passages and italics -and they have responded with aplomb. This is a scholarly work, with over 60 pages of notes, infused with a quiet rage as Pred relentlessly demonstrates the persistence of earlier styles of racist thinking in the present day. While Pred has scoured the archives to establish as much as can reasonably be deduced about his subject's biography, Badin remains a somewhat ghostly figure (also known as Adolph Ludvig Gustaf Albrecht Couschi, his birth date never accurately established). Badin featured in a play by Strindberg and in a number of popular novels. His portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Stockholm. He was a contemporary of Linnaeus and participated in contemporary debates about racial character and climatic determinism. But, with so little hard evidence to hand, much of the book relies on historical reconstruction and conjecture, signalled by the repeated use of interrogatives ('Was it not more than likely that ... ?', 'Is it not very possible ... ?'). Yet it is precisely such ambiguity that is central to Badin's place in the racist imaginary, where the combination of desire and dread, fear and fascination, play off these 'fictionalised facts and factualised fictions', reinforcing the power of collective memory and selective amnesia. The book closes with a discussion of the lack of public outcry over the 1999 exhibition which included the horrifying display of the skin of a black African 'native' and an encased 'Negro penis', evoking memories of the 'Hottentot Venus' (Sarah Baartmann). Pred's work is a courageous assault on the 'unspeakable unspoken'. As a case study of historically and geographically specific racisms, the book demands to be read, its message taken to heart. Department This important book examines changes in conceptions of identity at the individual and countrywide level in the nineteenth century during Japan's transition from the early modern to the modern period. In the early modern period (1603-1868), an individual's identity was a function of occupation, which was determined largely by heredity, and served to demarcate one's place in the status system established by the Tokugawa military regime. The status system functioned to allow the small number of samurai to be sustained by the larger population of commoners, most of whom were tax-paying peasants. These status groups, though separated from each other by sumptuary laws, shared customs (fuzoku) such as hairstyle which collectively set them apart as 'civilized' in contrast to the 2-3 per cent of the population of 'outcasts', historically discriminated groups within Japan who engaged in polluting occupations, and 'barbarian' peoples on Japan's geographical periphery including the Ainu of Hokkaido and the Ryukyu Islanders.

Howell traces the effects of the dismantling of the status system in the Meiji period , shedding light on the popular violence perpetrated against the newly emancipated outcasts. The Meiji regime redefined civilized behaviour by rigorously enforcing new customs such as short hair, which it derived from its observation of Western society, in its attempts to create a modern, unified citizenry. Japan, which had once premised its relations with the Ainu and Ryukyu Islanders on cultural differences, now sought to expunge those differences as it claimed direct territorial control over Hokkaido and Okinawa. The actions of the Meiji government to try to erase Ainu culture in its efforts to equate Japanese ethnicity with a national identity has as its legacy the mindset of the contemporary state, which recognizes only Japanese ethnicity as having any political meaning, fostering the notion that Japan is a homogeneous country despite the existence of other ethnic groups within it (p. 203).

David Howell presents a compelling argument for the role of institutions in naturalizing customs that become integral to perceptions of one's place within society and the world. Howell introduces several fascinating characters from the Ainu and outcast communities to put his argument in human terms; his analysis is based on primary research and a comprehensive survey of secondary literature, especially on the topics of discriminated groups and the Ainu. This book is certain to be a reference for


Peter Jackson

David L Howell

Venus' (Sarah Baartmann). Pred's work is a courageous assault on the 'unspeakable unspoken'. As a case study of historically and geographically specific racisms, the book demands to be read, its message taken to heart.

This important book examines changes in conceptions of identity at the individual and countrywide level in the nineteenth century during Japan's transition from the early modern to the modern period. In the early modern period , an individual's identity was a function of occupation, which was determined largely by heredity, and served to demarcate one's place in the status system established by the Tokugawa military regime. The status system functioned to allow the small number of samurai to be sustained by the larger population of commoners, most of whom were tax-paying peasants. These status groups, though separated from each other by sumptuary laws, shared customs (fuzoku) such as hairstyle which collectively set them apart as 'civilized' in contrast to the 2-3 per cent of the population of 'outcasts', historically discriminated groups within Japan who engaged in polluting occupations, and 'barbarian' peoples on Japan's geographical periphery including the Ainu of Hokkaido and the Ryukyu Islanders.

Howell traces the effects of the dismantling of the status system in the Meiji period , shedding light on the popular violence perpetrated against the newly emancipated outcasts. The Meiji regime redefined civilized behaviour by rigorously enforcing new customs such as short hair, which it derived from its observation of Western society, in its attempts to create a modern, unified citizenry. Japan, which had once premised its relations with the Ainu and Ryukyu Islanders on cultural differences, now sought to expunge those differences as it claimed direct territorial control over Hokkaido and Okinawa. The actions of the Meiji government to try to erase Ainu culture in its efforts to equate Japanese ethnicity with a national identity has as its legacy the mindset of the contemporary state, which recognizes only Japanese ethnicity as having any political meaning, fostering the notion that Japan is a homogeneous country despite the existence of other ethnic groups within it (p. 203).

David Howell presents a compelling argument for the role of institutions in naturalizing customs that become integral to perceptions of one's place within society and the world. Howell introduces several fascinating characters from the Ainu and outcast communities to put his argument in human terms; his analysis is based on primary research and a comprehensive survey of secondary literature, especially on the topics of discriminated groups and the Ainu. This book is certain to be a reference for scholars ofJapan concerned with the politics of identity in the premodern and modern periods. For space is the seemingly inevitable outcome of Massey's vocation, her passion for encouraging many disciplines and key thinkers to think more seriously about 'space'. Massey describes 'space' as the sphere of possibility, produced and disrupted through multiple, sometimes overlapping stories, heterogeneous historical and geographical trajectories that are embodied and become relational to each other, often spanning local-global connections. Being careful not to reduce her complex argument to spatial fetishism, she systematically demonstrates that we are therefore 'responsible' to (implicated in the production of) the practised relations that give meaning to space.

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

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

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

  space. By Doreen Massey. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2005. 232 pp. £60.00 cloth; £18.99 paper. ISBN 1 4129-0361 0 cloth; 1 4129 0362 9 paper.


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

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

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

Despite the inclusion of one or two distracting pieces, On the border is an insightful contribution to border studies. In drawing from an interdisciplinary mosaic of academic perspectives and alternative methodologies, Andrew Wood has compiled a volume that begs a fresh look at the development of the social and political relationship between the US and Mexico. Ultimately, the book succeeds in that it encourages even those with a strong background in border studies to reconsider their own perceptions of the region.

Department of Geography

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

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

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

In conclusion, Hosagrahar returns to the idea of colonial translations of modernity and local resistance. While these trends are made empirically obvious throughout the book, some theoretical considerations would have made the chapters cohere more clearly in line with the book's title. However, the clarity of archival analysis articulates


HAL is

Reviews in brief many of these points, and establishes this text as an important contribution to the study of East and West in the muddled and contested spaces of everyday colonial interaction.

School of Geography STEPHEN

LEGG University of Nottingham

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

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

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

Queen Mary, University ofLondon DAVID M. SMITH


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

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

Department of Geography

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

Kraidy is clearly well-versed in the literatures he cites, and I found his dissection of the debates on 'cultural imperialism' and 'cultural globalization' (Chapter 2), for example, a real strong point. But the book is weighed down, to my mind, by several important limitations. First, despite claims to the contrary (and fancy new phrases Á Kraidy styles his approach 'critical transculturalism'), there is really little novel in what he is saying. Numerous others have examined the implication of the media in constituting complex cultural identities, have done so in great historical and geographical detail and with explicit consideration of both 'structure' and 'agency', and have offered far more convincing narratives than we find here; Lila Abu-Lughod's Dramas of nationhood (University of Chicago Press, 2005) is one very good example. Second, the book is unbalanced, with the empirics too limited and too scattered to support the theory; and, at times, structurally confusing (Chapter 1 seems to offer merely a condensed and redundant version of what follows in Chapters 2 and 3).

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

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

School of Geography and Environmental Science

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

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

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

  Hybridity, or the cultural logic of globalization. By Marwan M. Kraidy.

	Philadelphia. Temple University Press. 2005. xiv'/226 pp. £52 cloth; £14.95 paper.
	ISBN cloth; 1 59213 144 1 paper.

Reviews in brief