Derek Gregory'sGeographical ImaginationsDialogic Invitation

Abstract

This Annals Forum is the second in an ongoing series devoted to the sustained analysis of significant new books. In this installment, the focus is Derek Gregory's Geographical Imaginations (1994). By way of contextualizing the rationale behind this selection, and against the risk of exaggeration, I want to first suggest that the history of modern geography's attempts at self-definition often neglected currents of thought perceived to be outside its boundaries. This is not to claim that geography has been unaffected by concurrent developments in other disciplines. Indeed, as Gregory's book makes plain, geography is situated within a constellation whose elements are historical, spatial, social, political, and intellectual. My point, rather, is that many past attempts to define the discipline's objects of inquiry and its methodologies rested upon the conviction that geography as a discipline inand-of-itself already offered all of the legitimacy necessary to undertake these tasks. What seems clear today is not only that this insularity from disciplinary reflection has dissolved, but also that it began to do so in the early 1 970s. At that time, geography witnessed a number of reevaluations animated by Marxism and humanism that contested what would ultimately pass as in the discipline. Upon rereading this body of work, one is sometimes struck by the sense that it too was often inwardly focused, as if the only task necessary was one of reworking geography from within by importing novel perspectives into the field. Still, these were at least deliberative and reflexive engagements, and their cumulative effects on retheorizing space and geographic methodology cannot be overstated. Moreover, these efforts, far from attempts to philosophize needlessly about the discipline and thereby detract from its ability to grapple with the real world, were directed at central questions regarding how such worlds could and should be studied. To fast forward this lineage to the contemporary period-one marked by geography's theorization-is to witness the emergence of a rapid set of interconnected developments: the extensions to Marxism brought by the socio-spatial dialectic; the spatialization of structuration theory; the theorization of localities through scientific realism; and the more recent challenges that arise from linking spatial theory to literary and cultural studies, postmodernism and poststructuralism, and feminist, gay, lesbian, race, and postcolonial theories. Yet inversely parallel to my earlier historical recording, the role of social theorists in these geographic projects has been, with the exception of a few dozen participants, largely that of spectator. For Gregory, this situation poses the challenge of furthering imaginations that are both spatial and social-theoretical. Regarding the former, he navigates the epistemological coordinates that have permitted geography, deploying along the way many of the moments of critique noted above in order to dislodge contemporary spatial theory from some of its moorings. For the latter, his persistently geographical soundings chart a further spatializa-

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