Cultural geography: anti-racist geographies

In Ceri Peach’s recent and final report on social geography for this journal, he returns to a theme that framed his first. That is the contrasting approaches of social geography and cultural geography, particularly with regard to work on race and ethnicity. The contrast he draws is between empirical work on migration and ethnic residential segregation in Britain, other European countries, Canada, the USA and Australia that makes use of census data, and a cultural geography ‘that teaches us that everything is nuanced, plastic and fluid, so that the analysis of census-given ethnic or racialized categories may be represented as static and empiricist’ (Peach, 2002: 252). He reads the critique of superorganic versions of culture to suggest that cultural geographers are uncomfortable with attributing socio-economic differences between ethnically defined groups to ‘cultural’ factors (Peach, 1999: 284).1 Cultural geographers are presented as both unhappy with essentialist categories and unwilling to use cultural explanations. In contrast, social geographers sensitive to the construction of racial and ethnic categories within and beyond the census, he suggests, do consider cultural differences in explaining the socio-economic position of different ethnic groups. His argument is that a critical and politically effective human geography must make pragmatic use of data based on racial and ethnic categories despite their problematic status. ‘ “Ethnicity” and “race” ’, he writes, ‘are dangerous topics to discuss in geography. Use them and you are in danger of denunciation by cultural geographers as an essentialist. Don’t use them and you abandon the debate to the Sun on the one hand or cultural geography’s fragmenting, reflexive self-obsession on the other’ (Peach, 2002: 260). In this report I decline this challenge to defend cultural geography or to narrowly delimit subdisciplinary differences, especially since doing so can end in parody.2 Despite their purpose and their usefulness, writing these progress reports constantly throws up both the restrictions of disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries and the impossibility of summarizing a boundless body of work except thematically. This problem could be resolved practically by confining the review to work published by Progress in Human Geography 27,5 (2003) pp. 637–648