Editorial Mission Statements

The power of numbers

Certain numbers have an uncommon hold over us: we regard them as talismanic, iconic, emblematic or otherwise loaded with significance. For Antipode and its readers, two must inevitably command attention in 2009. This August the journal will be forty years old. Measured in the span of a human life – or at least an affluent Western one – it is now entering middle-age. We are thus prompted, willingly or not, to ponder what ‘turning forty’ means for Antipode – though in a way, one hopes, that’s immune from the clichés, homilies and banalities so often uttered to mark this particular rite-of-passage. This is, we should immediately add, no ordinary 40th birthday. Antipode was, of course, a child of ‘the 60s’ and its first issue appeared a few short months after the end of that most memorable of years: 1968. The journal’s name, then as now, says something important about the umbilical connection between its time of inception and its identity. Like so many other journals of the Left – but unlike most geography journals – Antipode’s character is inseparable from the historical moment of its creation. Reflections on what it means to enter a fifth decade of existence must thus inevitably be dovetailed with reflections on what ‘1968 and all that’ signifies for Antipode and its readers today. Since much of the voluminous, retrospective discourse on the 60s is as simple-minded as that about ‘turning forty’, it’s important to avoid glib or sweeping assessments. For Antipode, the power of these two numbers is entirely dependent upon how intelligently we inquire into their significance.

Here the all-too-familiar clichés and canards do, in fact, come in handy – but as foils rather than things to be taken seriously. There is, of course, the line that ‘life begins’ once thirty nine years have elapsed. Its antinomy is the notion that forty marks the end of all that’s supposedly characteristic of youth: namely, energy, idealism and the belief that things can be altered for the good. Neither view of reaching forty is of much use in assessing what Antipode now is, so many years after some committed faculty and graduate students in the United States brought it into existence. The first invites far too much self-congratulation. It would be unthinkingly easy to point to things like a record number of submissions to the journal, a new website, and a burgeoning book series as evidence that Antipode is a vibrant and expanding journal. Adopting the second view would be equally facile. It would entail dismissing much of what the journal now does as an ersatz version of a more committed political time. Antipode is not the upstart child it was in 1969, but nor is it a middle-aged apostate quietly taking revenge on its younger self.Something other than complacent self-congratulation and searing auto-critique are called for.

This is all the more plain if we relate Antipode’s fortieth birthday to some of the dominant narratives about ‘68 and all that’. These narratives – well rehearsed in 1978, 1988 and 1998 – have, with a predictable turn of the decimal wheel, been given an ample airing in numerous books, essays and documentaries appearing as the noughties draw to a close. On the Left, a narrative of failure bulks large. If one reads the retrospectives penned by the likes of Tariq Ali and Todd Gitlin the message is clear: ’68 was the ‘revolution that failed’, a year of turmoil and heady bedlam that, paradoxically, marked both the highpoint and endpoint of post-war Left politics. By contrast, on the Right – and particularly among US neoconservatives – an equally elegiac narrative dominates discussions of the legacy of ‘sixty eight’: a narrative of success. The likes of Roger Kimball, David Horowitz and Gertrude Himmelfarb have railed against what they see as the moral-aesthetic relativism and crass populism unleashed by the 60s counter-cultural movements. Reacting against these plenary judgements, some on the Left have offered a more ambivalent assessment. They both recognise and celebrate the cultural legacy of the 60s (contra Kimball et al.), but insist that this decade resulted in subsequent political economic failure: after all, within a decade of les evenements it was the likes of Reagan and Thatcher who were calling the shots, not the soixante huitards. As Dissent coeditor Michael Walzer (2008) recently opined: “Next time, we have to do better”.
If we were to take seriously any of these assessments of what ‘the 60s’ has bequeathed us, then we’d probably have little good to say about a journal like Antipode. The unqualified narrative of failure would suggest that Antipode’s birth was its defining moment, since when the journal has progressively become an unthreatening part of the sort of class-divided, sexist, racist, homophobic, morally intolerant world that ‘sixty-eighters’ wished to demolish. The assessment of the Right, in all its reactionary absolutism, would depict Antipode as one place where cultural entropy has been given free-play in the university system. Meanwhile, seen in light of the qualified Left narrative, one might say that Antipode has usefully challenged its readers to diversify and complicate their own cultural politics, even as it’s been home to political economic analyses that have exerted virtually no influence in the Dickensian world of neoliberal capitalism.

Putting aside our obvious disagreements with the Kimball et al. view, the problem with evaluating Antipode at forty in light of all three narratives is, hopefully, obvious. Equally and together they essentialise a decade, its ‘defining year’ and their aftermath as if there is a single history and geography at issue. What is more, the propensity of ‘sixty eighters’ to dominate the discourse of ‘the sixties’ tends to blind us to the obvious fact that they are no better qualified than older or younger commentators to pronounce on ‘what the 60s means for us today’. As Michael Watts (2001) has insisted in a superbly nuanced analysis, the legacy of ‘68 and all that’ is open to multiple interpretations: it was ever the case that the ‘facts’ of the matter do not speak for themselves, but instead become resources in the service of contingently shifting discourses about our present and future reality. In short, we are bound neither by convention nor history when it comes to assessing what the numbers ‘forty’ and ‘sixty eight’ mean for Antipode. Their symbolic charge offers us a useful opportunity to reflect on the journal’s history, present condition and possible trajectories. But they do not dictate to us the nature of these reflections: it is for Antipode’s contributors and readers, as well as us editors, to decide what lessons and challenges attach to the journal being forty in 2009, having begun life in an historical-geographical conjuncture that now seems a world away.

The first issue of Antipode appeared in August 1969. As David Stea made clear in his mission statement, the intention was not to create ‘another Geography journal’. Instead, the aspiration was to produce geographical knowledge that might connect to a larger project for the transformation of economy, society and environment. As such, Antipode was very much a product of its time: it arose from, reflected and sought to inform a global Left movement with seemingly revolutionary potential – albeit from the very particular outpost of Clark University, Massachusetts. For those too young to remember or to know, a resumé of the events of 1968 readily conveys the sense of a world turned upside down. Students and workers brought Paris to a stand-still in May; the Mexican government gunned down hundreds of students and other social justice activists in the October 2nd Massacre of Tlatelolco; there were major protests in London, Delhi, Tokyo, Berlin, Berkeley and numerous other cities; there was ‘socialism with a human face’ in Prague, Warsaw and Belgrade; there were the anti-Vietnam and civil rights protests in the United States, the former spurred on by the Tet offensive and the Mai Lai massacre; there were the stirrings of the feminist and environmental movements in several Western countries; the Chinese Cultural Revolution was in full-swing; and there were the mass factory occupations by Italian workers during the ‘Hot autumn’. ‘Sixty eight’ was, as many commentators have noted, about street politics, about direct action and about democracy from below. It was spontaneous, it was global and, for the most part, it pitched the forces of a youthful, non-institutionalised Left against the forces of what C. Wright Mills famously called ‘the military-industrial complex’. This ‘new’ Left worked as much around, as with, an older workerist Left that, in the West, had bought into Keynesian welfare-state capitalism and, in the East, was in the stultifying grip of Stalinist communism.

We can respond to ‘the events’ in any number of ways. We can be inspired by them: they remind us that, however bad things may seem, there is always the possibility of progressive change – given the right conditions. Though not world-changing in the short term, we might point to a series of small, long revolutions that followed in the decades subsequent to the 60s. The ‘long march through the institutions’ yielded significant improvements for hitherto marginalised groups, such as women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals and many more besides. These improvements eventuated because of patient and persistent efforts on the part of ‘sixty eighters’ as they settled into paying jobs in government, the charities, non-governmental organisations, the universities and business. Alternatively, we can choose to learn some positive lessons from the apparent ‘failure’ of ‘the events’ to change the world for the better. One might be that ‘68 and all that’ was long on rhetoric and passion but short on strategy and program. Seen thus, it may appear to us now to have been a rather childish outburst of emotion rather than the sort of hard-nosed politics required to really make a difference. Another lesson might be that progressive change is extraordinarily difficult – so difficult that even protests on the scale of 1968 cannot dislodge the powerful. It’s worth remembering here that ’68 was a year of two halves. Take the United States: by the time new year’s eve came around Republican Richard Nixon had been elected to office, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and the anti-Vietnam movement had been out-manoeuvred at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. A final lesson – one close to home for Left academics – might be that ‘68 initiated a retreat of radical thought into the bunker of the university, where it has flickered in the hopes of striking a flame in the wider society.

None of these interpretations are any more or less valid than the others. Which ones we entertain depends very much on who we are and the nature of our political values. But to relate any of them to an assessment of Antipode at forty, we need to inventory the journal as it presently is.
The realities of Antipode today are as follows. It has two editors responsible for papers and for oversight. It has an international editorial board to whom, along with the editors, the journal belongs. It is published by Wiley-Blackwell, after a twenty three year relationship with Basil Blackwell which recently merged with Wiley. It appears five times per annum, one issue being a ‘double length’ or ‘book issue’ devoted to a topical theme. The journal awards graduate scholarships and runs biannual Summer Institutes for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early career faculty. Antipode has its own website, with a dedicated editor-manager, where all back content is available without subscription. Aside from publishing research essays, the journal has an Interventions section which is home to short political or polemical pieces about current affairs within or without the university. It has, until recently, had a What’s Left? section designed to reflect on this ever-important question. It publishes book reviews (with an editor responsible for these and the Interventions). It also has a book series, with over ten titles. The journal offers financial support to the International Critical Geography conferences, and sponsors annual lectures at major academic meetings. Antipode enjoys good institutional subscription rates – comparable with ‘established’ Geography journals such as the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. The journal has a healthy citation impact relative to these other journals. It is a place where younger scholars happily submit their work, unconcerned about any negative effects on their promotion prospects. Antipode is also read by the whole spectrum of Left geographers: it is an ecumenical journal, and its contributors’ politics range from social democratic reformism to anarchistic autarchy to revolutionary transformation. Finally, Antipode belongs to an extended family of Left academic journals, with many family members being similar in age – think of Capital and Class and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

So, not only has Antipode made it to forty, it is now a multifaceted, established journal that continues to exert real intellectual influence in the world of academic Geography and in critical social science more generally. What Antipode is and does is now rather wider than the journal proper. These facts notwithstanding, there are many reasons to reflect seriously on what ‘radicalism’ for Antipode at 40 means, as the journal has undoubtedly become, at some level, a commodity within commercial publishing and a cog in the wheel of higher education. Pricey subscription charges and the now entrenched emphasis on the ‘impact factor’ certainly raise some paradoxes for a Left journal that began life as an anti-establishment publication. But there are other, equally valid views on what Antipode has become. ‘Radicalism’, which is still rightly part of Antipode’s moniker, is a relative not an absolute term (so too the word ‘critical’, which is now the descriptor of choice for most Left geographers). Its meanings are contingent on site, situation and audience. What it is to be ‘radical’ in word and deed has a complex and manifold historical geography, today as much as yesterday. Accordingly, the ‘work’ that Antipode today performs on its readers is thoroughly overdetermined. While it’s obviously true that Antipode is not the journal it was in 1969, we must surely offer contextually sensitive assessments of what it now is rather than assume that issue 1 set an inviolable standard for all time. The journal’s identity has altered over its four decades of existence, reflecting the preoccupations of its successive editors, its numerous contributors and its many readers – young and not so young. The forty volumes of Antipode thus constitute a permanent record of change within a now larger and internally debated community of ‘radical geographers’ and the world as they have perceived it.

Since we cannot presume to know the myriad specific contexts in which the journal’s many different readers find themselves, let us offer some personal perspectives of our own. Antipode is a peer review journal whose contributors are almost exclusively academics – members of universities – and its readers are, again almost exclusively, other academics or degree students. Most of its subscribers are Western universities, and most of these universities engage in mass education as part of the drive to create ‘knowledge societies’. In the wider world, there is far more to worry about than to celebrate. Disease, starvation, malnutrition, hunger, poverty, torture, unlawful imprisonment, poverty, marginalization, racial discrimination, cultural chauvinism, ethnic prejudice, gender inequality, religious intolerance, sexual discrimination, and environmental destruction are all signature features of the early 21st century. Democracy, in its various imperfect actually-existing forms, is something that only a small minority of the world’s people enjoy. Material wealth exists in abundance, but is commanded by a minority of the global population, and disproportionately so by an elite of financiers, land developers, property tycoons, commodity traders, and owners of various transnational corporations. Sexism, racism, homophobia and other forms of hatred are rampant plagues around the world.  ‘Uneven development’ is, today, extreme in both social and geographical terms. The worth of a human person, and their life chances, depend almost entirely on where they are born and their ascribed status.  Domestic violence is at an all time high across the globe. Equality of opportunity (never mind outcome) is a utopian dream in most of the 21st century world. Militarism is also writ-large: the legal and illegal trade in weaponry helps to sustain the economies of supply countries and to sustain seemingly endless conflagrations in the global South. Geopolitical tensions bubble under the surface where they are not already made manifest. Virtually all of the world’s problems have an international dimension to them, yet cross-governmental efforts to enact joined-up policy – such as the Kyoto protocol – are routinely foiled or attenuated. On top of this, the new powerhouses of capitalism – such as China and India – seem to be following a Western road to development, with all this implies for the world’s ecology. One could be forgiven for thinking that hell-on-earth is more than just a colourful metaphor. It seems obvious that the great organizing concepts of the Left past and present – for instance, ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ – are as relevant now as they ever were.

In light of all this, it may appear urgent for Antipode to rediscov-er the spirit of ’68: to become an active part of movements for progressive change. Since Antipode is no more or less what its contributors and readers make it, another way of saying this is that it may seem especially urgent for radical (or critical) geographers to get their hands dirty (or dirtier), or to fend off the conservatism that can accompany tenure and the paraphernalia of academic success. This sentiment has been played out in the pages of this and other journals in recent times: witness the debates about ‘public’, ‘participatory’, and ‘activist’ geographies. The key underlying question here, it seems to us, is not whether but how Left geographers, and Left journals like Antipode, should make their impact felt. In our view, the ‘can do’ hopefulness of ’68 remains very inspiring, so too the precedent of making universities sites of politics not only teaching and scholarship conventionally understood. But 2009 is not the world of 1969. The many people who today make Antipode what it is are not, in the main, activists or political organizers. There are plenty of such activists and organisers out there, and numerous highly purposeful movements of a more-or-less radical variety that are seeking to address the problems enumerated above. These movements and the individuals who lead and support them need evidence, new ideas and even external criticism in order to (better) do what they do. This is what a journal like Antipode can and does supply. Its contributors and many of its readers engage in the careful, rigorous pursuit of the sort of understanding of the world that might just create openings for its improvement. Without the sort of knowledge published in its pages, and those of the larger family of Left academic journals, the wider world of Left politics and activism would surely be a much poorer place.

Some might retort as follows: Antipode, notwithstanding its ‘radical’ credentials, is just too removed from the world it studies and seeks to shape to ‘make a difference’. This sort of criticism, which has come as much from within the journal as outside, rests on the assumption that only direct and immediate intellectual influence counts. It partakes of a now common discourse among sections of the Left that even radical academics have become institutionalised and professionalised by the modern university system. Without denying the importance of constantly engaging with this critique, we also believe that indirect and non-immediate forms of progressive scholarship are immensely important. This is the sort of influence exerted upon the movers and shakers of tomorrow as they pass through university degree programs and read material published in a journal like Antipode. Universities are not divorced from the wider society. Arguably, they are more important than ever before. In their book Knowledge monopolies: the academicisation of society (2006) the educational analysts Alan and Marten Shipman suggest that university professionals are greatly underestimating their social importance. The Shipmans’ argument is that Western universities have become more not less significant within the 21st century ‘knowledge society’, even though they must now compete with other research and teaching institutions for clients, funding and kudos. According to the Shipmans, universities have become very adept at ‘capturing’ stakeholders and students who might previously have gone elsewhere to fulfill their need for knowledge, training, education, wisdom or foresight. In this light, the sort of research we conduct and publish can be seen not only as a key part of degree-level pedagogy (insofar as it’s integrated into undergraduate and postgraduate course syllabi); it also, more widely, has real (if not easy-to-measure) effects on various users outside the university who are reliant on academic expertise and the legitimacy it confers. However esoteric our research may be, it acts as a material force within the wider society rather than being – as many of us habitually think – enclaved in obscure journals and monographs. None of this is to suggest that we can somehow control the influence that we do or do not exert through our activities. We are simply saying that teaching and research are, equally and together, forms of public pedagogy not merely ‘academic’ undertakings whose effects are, for the most part, confined to the campus environment. Just because the wider effects of our collective labours are impossible to quantify, we should not assume them to be minimal or inconsequential.

The world in 2009 is not necessarily a better place than it was forty years ago; it is just as troubled and troubling now as it was then, possibly more so. Like ’68 there is plenty of passionate fury and barely contained discontent out there, but much of it is reactionary and animated by frighteningly simplistic moral absolutisms. There are also numerous Leftist political parties, pressure groups, non-governmental organisations, new social movements, charities, think tanks and foundations out there – probably more than forty years ago. These have not congealed into something as coherent as a ‘movement’, but they share many common foes and have many shared goals. In 2009, the value and outlook of a journal like Antipode is surely this: it seeks patiently but persistently to keep Left ideas live and kicking in the academy and, thereby, in the wider world of Leftist thought and action. Antipode occupies a small, specific but nonetheless meaningful place in the broader landscape of Left ideas and politics. As such, it honours the example set by its founding editors without reproaching itself for not being something more than it can reasonably aim to be.

Let us conclude by looking ahead, not so much to the next forty years as to the immediate future of Antipode. From August 2009, we will be ringing the changes editorially. A new, enlarged editorial team will be taking responsibility for the journal. There will be new powers resulting from new numbers. The expanded team will comprise two people already involved with Antipode and three new faces. Nik Heynen, of the University of Georgia, is currently editor of the book reviews and Interventions sections, and can be credited with inaugurating Antipode’s Summer Institutes. Paul Chatterton, of Leeds University, is currently editor-manager of the journal’s website (http://www.antipode-online.net/). Both Nik and Paul will become full editors in August,in Paul’s case continuing on with his existing role. They will be joined by Wendy Larner (University of Bristol and a coeditor since August 2008) as managing editor, Vinay Gidwani (University of Minnesota) and Rachel Pail (Durham University). Rachel will also take responsibility for the Antipode Book Series, Vinay for book reviews.

It will be for Nik, Paul, Rachel, Vinay and Wendy to decide, in consultation with the editorial board, how Antipode should evolve. For our part, we believe that they comprise a wonderful team-in-the-making. Their combined expertise, their intellectual differences, and their extended professional networks, will be invaluable in ensuring that Antipode remains a vibrant journal that publishes original, rigorous and significant work. The move from two to five editors will help to spread a growing workload and will initiate a ‘flat, non-hierarchical, collective way of working that is in keeping with Antipode’s heritage. We hand over the reigns to the new editorial team with a sense of pride but also, it must be said, some relief. It’s been a privilege to help steer the ship that’s Antipode. After five years, hundreds of submissions, twenty five issues and several new initiatives (like the website and Summer Institutes), we feel we’ve done our bit. Refitting anew while still at sea has been both the challenge and the accomplishment. We look forward to seeing Antipode prosper with new editors at the helm.

Noel Castree and Melissa W. Wright (September 2008)

References

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 (November 2004)

References

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