Editorial Mission Statements

Home Truths

Even normally sure-footed commentators lose their compass from time-to-time. “A radical,” Terry Eagleton (2001: 101) has observed, “is one who cannot overcome her astonishment that …, by and large, that this is it”. But he’s surely got things back-to-front. For the true radicals are all those individuals and organisations that daily remain unastonished: if you think about it, only an extremist could sleep well at night knowing that famines in the South are as routine as they are preventable; that Bill Gates earns more each hour than all the workers in Liberia do in a week; that sexism is rampant, despite the advances made by feminism; or that murderous discrimination on the grounds of religion, ethnicity and sexual preference remains so common worldwide as to seem a natural part of the human condition. Walter Benjamin was right: that things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe. Power works best when it collapses the distance between the actual and the desirable. Opposition to any established order is most effectively stymied when that order is so naturalised that its arbitrariness comes to seem like ‘common-sense’. Some, of course, have compared the current conjuncture to the now-romanticised late 60s, seeing it as a time of dissent resurgent and resistance unbound. But effective opposition to power’s multifarious operations seems to us notable for its paucity rather than its profusion. Fredric Jameson’s famous quip that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism could well apply to any number of those structured inequalities whose combined operations remain fundamentally unchanged, even if their effects have been ameliorated here and there. As Perry Anderson (2000) wisely observes, the Left cannot afford to entertain hopeful illusions that things are better than they really are. When false dawns are declared disappointment inevitably follows. But despondency is not an option either: the sullen conviction that things can never be improved upon is as debilitating as unwarranted optimism about the tractability of want and suffering.

Speaking truth to power is an exacting business. Precisely because we live in a world of fugitive impressions a considerable effort of intellectual and investigative labour is required to see reality aright. Antipode’s stock-in-trade, as with all journals, is ideas and evidence. Dissentient thoughts and norm-challenging information can, as history shows, be as potent as armies given the right conditions. This is why those in power construct elaborate apparatuses of censorship. As an academic journal, Antipode undoubtedly does less ‘work’ than better-known political publications (like broadsheet newspapers or large circulation magazines). But within Anglophone geography specifically, and the Western social sciences more generally, it remains an important vehicle for the dissemination of oppositional thought. With the possible exception of Society and Space, it’s the only geography journal defined by its politics rather than its topical focus. And within the social sciences, it’s one of a relatively small number of journals whose raison d’etre is to publish Left-wing essays, commentaries and exchanges (well-known others include Capital and Class and Social Text). Now in its fourth decade, the journal’s continued existence is cause for celebration – but also, it must be said, cause for sadness too. For its readers, as well as its contributors, Antipode offers a space where animadversions can be expressed without fear or favour. The regret is that things ‘just go on’ now as much as during that hopeful late-60s moment when Antipode came into existence. The journal, though it has outlived the precise conditions that gave rise to it, responds to the same need today as it did thirty five years ago: the need of some analysts (though by no means enough) to bring the undiscussed into discussion; to stray beyond established perimeters of opinion; and to render the familiar not only strange but, often-times, unacceptable. In an ideal Antipode wouldn’t exist. That the journal is thriving shows just how much grist there presently is for the radical geographer’s mill.

In taking over the editorship from Jamie Peck and Jane Wills, we want to offer a vision of where Antipode might go and what its significance might be. We do so in the full – and happy – knowledge that even editors can exert only limited control on the intellectual life of a journal. Antipode is not like its better-known cousin New Left Review, which has long operated a definite editorial policy. The journal’s contents are largely unsolicited and it thus represents the combined energies of those who choose to submit their work for publication. Given this, our editorial role is to steer the metaphorical ship not decide what goes on in the engine room. Even so, we must ensure that Antipode realises whatever proactive potential it may have. To do otherwise is to make the journal purely reactive: an empty vessel to be filled with whatever happens to come its way. While Antipode undoubtedly needs to reflect the changing landscape of Left-wing thought within and beyond geography, it also needs to lead the way when and where appropriate. If the journal leads an unexamined life, it risks complicity with the unsavoury realities it seeks to render intelligible. The views expressed below do not constitute a manifesto. Instead, they comprise a set of aspirations for Antipode that may (or may not) be realised in the years to come. Though they might easily be dismissed as progressive pieties, we offer them as achievable hopes that will guide our editorial outlook and, perhaps, the sorts of commentaries, papers or book reviews that might be contributed during our tenure.

Any consideration of Antipode’s future must start from its differentia specifica. In what ways is it distinctive as a journal of the Left? None of its sibling journals – from Race and Class to Signs to Rethinking Marxism – share its intellectual focus. Antipode, uniquely in the Anglophone world, is committed to Left-wing analyses of place, space, scale, landscape and environment – five geographical themes too important to be left to geographers alone. The journal is also increasingly interdisciplinary in outlook. Jamie Peck and Jane Wills have made Antipode less of a geography journal than heretofore. Contributors now range across the social sciences and one is almost as likely to find a sociologist or an urban planner publishing in Antipode as a human geographer. Relatedly, the journal subscribes to no one orthodoxy: it is politically non-sectarian and intellectually pluralist. Long gone are the days of its close association with Marxian political economy or certain modalities of feminist geography. Antipode is today an ecumenical journal, a fact that reflects the necessary widening of Left thinking in recent years as much as its fragmentation. Uniquely among geography journals, Antipode also publishes double-issues each year, permitting sustained engagement with particular themes and questions (such as wage-labour and social reproduction, to take two recent examples). Finally, while its contents are largely academic, Antipode offers space for polemic and for the unconventional. The Interventions section and the book review symposia permit frank expressions and exchanges of viewpoint in a way that few other geography journals do. Likewise, theme issues devoted to the life and works of Bennett Harrison and Jim Blaut attest to Antipode’s continued willingness to do more than publish standard academic papers.

In these various ways, Antipode has a distinctive place in the discipline of geography as well as the wider landscape of Left-wing research. What, though, of the years to come? As Anderson (2000: 5) astutely notes in a stock-take of New Left Review, “The life-span of journals is no warrant of their achievement”. Antipode is one of the oldest Left-wing journals in the English-speaking world. Younger than NLR, it is longer-lived than the likes of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism or Historical Materialism. The journal has extended its life beyond the circumstances of its inception through a capacity for auto-critique. It seems to us timely to review Antipode’s aims and ambitions for three reasons. Firstly, as Euan Hague (2001) reminded readers in a terse commentary, Antipode has steadily become more conventional in its format and entry requirements over the years. No longer a mimeographed journal produced by a few willing faculty and graduate students, it is now published by a major press and largely observes the protocols of ‘mainstream’ academic journals. Does this in any way compromise Antipode’s aims and ambitions? Secondly, Antipode – like the academic Left whose work it publishes and steers – is in rude good health at a time when the wider prospects for progressive socio-environmental change seem utterly dismal. The journal is now produced five times per annum; submission rates are high; there’s a backlog of articles to publish; and the citation impact of Antipode essays compares with those in the best-read geography journals. It’s both ironic and paradoxical that Antipode is burgeoning at a time when, outside academia, Left-wing ideas find few receptive constituencies. As Eagleton (2001: 84) notes, “It is a sign of just how bad things are that even the modest proposal that everyone on the planet gets fresh water and enough to eat is fighting talk”. The world is rife with fatality and almost incomprehensible suffering. Yet far too many people have become inured to these obscenities. For all the optimism generated by the anti-capitalist protests and the World Social Fora, the Left is on the back-foot and has been so for some time. Worldwide, many of the hard-won advances achieved by the labour movement, the women’s movement and anti-racists (among others) have been subject to reversal. Compared to the generation of activist-scholars who founded Antipode, today’s radical geographers thus have few objective reasons to be optimistic. Has the journal become what Said (1994: 22) called an “enclave of abstract complaint”, a place where Left-wing academics rail at their bitter inconsequence and glibly list unachievable objectives? Finally, the Left is today far more heteroclite that ever before. Antipode reflects this, as we noted above. But one can ask whether the journal is less than the sum of its parts if it’s unable to identify – in other than insipidly generic terms – what makes the whole enterprise ‘hang together’. Does Antipode embody a thought-through Left project? Or are its varied contents symptomatic of an increasingly multifarious – which is to say divided and incoherent – Left?

The best policy, surely, is to answer this and other exacting questions with cold-eyed honesty. In setting forth a vision of what Antipode should stand for, we first need a sober recognition of what a journal of the Left can realistically achieve. Antipode has long been a platform for the reconstitution of Anglophone geography, and has played no small part in the dissemination of radical scholarship into cognate disciplines. That Left-wing scholarship is today a dominant force in human geography is partly due to the efforts of Antipode’s past editors, board members and contributors. However inhospitable the wider world is to radical ideas, the radicalisation of disciplines like geography matters – not least because thousands of university students are yearly exposed to the sorts of things Antipode publishes before making their mark in the world. Though Hague is right that Antipode is less ‘raw’ than it was in the early 70s, he fails to consider the positive consequences of the journal’s convergence with the norms of academic publishing. Precisely because Antipode papers are acknowledged to be of a standard at least as good as that of conventional disciplinary journals, they have driven a radical wedge into the heart of human geography that could scarcely have been predicted by Antipode’s founding figures.

Beyond the realms of academe, the influence of Antipode and other Left journals is harder to ascertain. Marvin Waterstone (2001) has upbraided Antipode for abrogating its well-advertised commitment to changing the world rather than merely understanding it. It would be dishonest to pretend that countless activists subscribe to the journal or that its many contributors are all busy translating their learned insights into concrete actions. In this sense we think our predecessors were a little too quick to reiterate Antipode’s commitment to practice (Peck and Wills, 2000) when, as Waterstone rightly notes, there is little demonstrable evidence that this commitment is honoured other than in the breach. As Irving Howe once joked, radical academics will storm the Winter Palace – so long as satisfactory arrangements for sabbatical leave have been made first. Is Antipode perhaps an unwitting player in a cunning power game whose rules have been made by others: one where radical academics are disbarred from having any wider influence by focussing their energies on the production of peer review articles that will only be read by other radical academics? This is surely too cynical a judgement. To be sure, the demands of holding-down a full-time academic job do often mitigate against Left academics ‘getting their hands dirty’. And it’s certainly true that Antipode is, inevitably, implicated in the career advancement of its editors, board members and contributors. But we should not underestimate the importance of the academic freedoms afforded us by our university positions. While we cannot determine whether and how our work is read beyond seminar rooms and lecture theatres, we have the licence to create new knowledge about the world – knowledge that might make a difference. A current member of the Antipode board has got it right. “To make a difference beyond the academy”, Don Mitchell (2004: 23, 25) has recently argued, “ it is necessary to go good … work within the academy … [R]adical scholars do themselves, and the myriad activists they wish to connect with, a great disservice when they … spend their time fretting about whether they really ought to be on the front lines instead of in the library …”. Just because we cannot be certain how much what we say matters beyond the precincts of the university we should not assume that our analyses and ideas count for nothing at all. Just because radical scholarship has now become a recognised currency in academic promotions does not mean it is nothing more than this. World-changing ideas – like those of Marx – take time to develop. Antipode’s role is to provide a home for the considered insights and arguments of those who spend most of their time diagnosing the world’s ills and identifying possible remedies.

This still leaves unanswered the question of what makes Antipode a journal of the Left. Once upon a time that question would’ve been relatively easy to answer. Today, a complex response is required. There’s no point pretending otherwise: it’s increasingly difficult to define what, substantively, it means to be a thinker of the Left. To say that Leftists challenge the status quo is as bland as reiterating that Antipode is a ‘radical’ journal of geography. Radical has always been a relative term, and its precise meanings has always required careful explication depending on the context and circumstances. In human geography, the current uncertainty about whether any significance attaches to the distinction between ‘radical’ and ‘critical’ strains of research says much about the loss of a common project. As editors, we have our own views about what, in the current conjuncture, distinguishes Left-wing thinking from that of centrists and conservatives. We would not wish to foist these views on others. We would, though, wish for two things as we look to Antipode’s immediate future. First, we invite contributions that seek to build bridges between erstwhile different schools of radical thought. There’s a real need to halt the fissiparous drift of Left-wing scholarship; without a careful attempt to identify points of commonality the Left will remain less than the sum of its myriad parts. Put differently, we think the Left needs to rediscover some guild values lest it splinter into factions that, if they are not warring, might remain indifferent to one another’s claims. Secondly, we invite responses to a set of forthcoming, commissioned essays on the theme of ‘What’s Left?’. This theme deliberately echoes, without exactly repeating, that of Antipode volume 21, number 2 – one put together during a period in the journal’s history as transitional as the present one may be.

Beyond this, there are several other things we would hope for in our five year stint as editors. Antipode, as Hague rightly notes, is no longer considered an enfant terrible. Because radical scholarship is now an established constituent of human geography and most of the human sciences, it’s arguably lost some of its sting. This is a problem that must be addressed. The normalisation of Left thinking within the academy cannot be allowed to diminish the acuity of its insights. As we noted at the start of this editorial, it’s vital to find ways of shocking people into a recognition of how unacceptable ‘business as usual is’ at home and abroad. To this end, we welcome submissions prepared to risk calumny and anathema, be they Interventions or regular papers. We also welcome papers characterised by the sort of uncompromising realism to which we averred earlier. With the possible exception of its early volumes, Antipode has always put reasoned analysis before incantations, platitudes and euphemisms. This will continue. Papers that offer arresting new interpretations of evidence – like Robert Wade’s (2004) important contribution to World Development – are especially welcome. So are contributions that get beyond the ‘case study lite’ drift of so much contemporary research. We particularly encourage essays that have the potential to define the parameters of debate – the sort of essays that Antipode has published throughout its history (think of David Harvey’s early contributions to the journal) but would welcome more of. We also hope to maintain Antipode’s reputation for unpretentiousness. Clotted prose and enciphered language we leave to other journals. Well written contributions we warmly embrace. Combativeness becomes unthreatening when it’s expressed in a jargon-ridden lingua franca. Antipode will, we hope, remain a place where lucidity wins-out over obscurantism. Finally, it’s our aspiration to make Antipode less parochial in the years ahead. This entails more than publishing contributions from scholars outside the West. At a more fundamental level, it involves relativizing the seeming normality of Occidental knowledge and showing it to be one powerful – in the positive and pejorative senses of this word – worldview.

The world cannot represent itself; it must be represented! Antipode must be willing to speak of and for others – an ineliminable responsibility and risk intrinsic to all social research and teaching. It must resist self-imposed censorship and allow new insights, ideas and points of disagreement emerge even if they offend against received wisdom. Above all, Antipode must be the place where a new generation of radicals with keen geographical sensibilities can look for inspiration. By avoiding the betes noires of glum defeatism and unwarranted optimism, Antipode can continue to make its distinctive mark within and beyond human geography.

In closing, we must thank Jamie and Jane for their peerless efforts on behalf of Antipode this last five years. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude. We also want to acknowledge Neil Brenner’s exceptional contribution as editor of the Interventions and book review sections. James DeFillipis, Neil’s successor, has a hard act to follow. Finally, we wish to thank several outgoing board members for their sterling efforts reviewing and soliciting contributions to the journal. Together with James and new board members, we look forward to seeing Antipode prosper in the years ahead.

Noel Castree and Melissa Wright

References

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© Blackwell Publishing 2008