radical approach based on defining social justice,
nor a conservative approach based on idealizing
spatial justice, could provide a social geography
of ‘black people’ that would resonate for the
racialized people who would become the objects
of research. For both approaches involve consti-
tuting people as problems, rather than seeking
direct engagement with their lives; and neither
approach involves enhancing the power to
change people’s lives. For radical geographers,
the desire for social change was certainly appar-
ent, but the theoretical focus of the early radical
works was not on understanding ‘race’ or the
process of racialization, but on situating the
production of colonial and class relations in
the operations of capital. As radical geography
became more and more sophisticated in its analy-
sis throughout the late 1970s and 1980s – the
continued work of a few people such as Jim
Blaut notwithstanding – its focus shifted dramat-
ically away from questions of racism. The expla-
nation for racial inequality as an effect of class
relations presented by subsequent Marxist analy-
sis cut short an understanding of the phenomenon
of ‘race’.
At this point in the history of the discipline, a
very different and, as it turns out, more sustained
approach to issues of ‘race’ was adopted within
the rapidly developing subfield of humanistic
geography. Humanistic geography was also
established as a radical approach fuelled by the
‘relevance debate’, but over the course of the
next decade it took a very different theoretical
road that was, at least initially, much less
engaged than the Marxist approach in advocating
change in everyday conditions of living. I am
concerned here only with those aspects of the
humanism in geography that contributed to an
understanding of the concept of ‘race’.
In 1981, Ceri Peach was to argue that Marxist
perspectives had been unable either to describe
accurately or to explain the phenomenon of
racial segregation, while positivist empirical
methods based on ‘facts and observation’ that
address ‘social forces over and above those of the
economic structure’ can more effectively provide
not only understanding but social solutions
(1981: 31–32). Humanistic geography, he
argued, is simply an extension of established
positivist analysis, extending deeper into the
realm of the personal lifeworld, to describe lived
conditions.
Peach was clearly conflating ‘positivist’ with
‘positive’ analysis, and isolating Marxist theory
and methodology from its normative epistemol-
ogy. Moreover, he was implicitly buying into the
notion that instrumental knowledge could be a
powerful agent in providing ideal solutions towhat were widely seen as social problems. This
position is untenable, both theoretically and
ethically. Nonetheless, what is more important
about Peach’s work is the inspiration that it
helped to engender in a new generation of social
geographers, whose work began to document the
everyday experiences of racialized communities
(Peach, 1975). For example, David Ley’s The
Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost(1974),
while as yet uncritical of the concept of ‘race’,
represents another frontier between disembodied
spatial pattern and the embodiment of the every-
day lifeworld. In a later statement that marks the
major debut of humanistic perspectives within
the discipline, Ley and Samuels (1978) stress the
need to shift towards a normative interpretation
of human experience, and the need to understand
human experience and the products of human
action – such as, for example, the city – as social
constructions. Although this early humanistic
work does not problematize ‘race’ as a social
construction, it does contain the implicit theoreti-
cal underpinnings for such an understanding.
But humanistic geography has not easily
shaken its Enlightenment beginnings. In a collec-
tion of writings on Social Interaction and Ethnic
Segregation, Peter Jackson and Susan Smith
(1981: 2) draw a strong connection between
Robert Park’s (1926) deeply Kantian notion of
the relationship between social and physical
distance, and the possibility for geographers to
understand human relations as patterns of inte-
gration and segregation. Most of the papers that
comprise this edited collection adopt such a
‘social physics’ approach. Jackson and Smith,
however, were part of a generation that wanted to
cast spatial understanding in much more com-
plex philosophical terms (see also Entrikin,
1980), and who recognized in the work of Park
and other American pragmatists the basis for a
more relational understanding of the concept of
‘race’ that incorporates notions of power and
conflict, ideology as popular knowledge, and the
negotiation of social meaning and identity. While
these concepts had some way yet to go in incor-
porating a broader poststructuralist perspective
and a fully critical analysis of racialization, they
nonetheless provide the most fully developed
critique at that time of the various formulations
of the concept of ‘race’.
Marxian and humanistic geography, which
began with common roots in the relevance
debates of the early 1970s, diverged for the next
decade and a half (Kobayashi and Mackenzie,
1989) until the deliberate attempt to learn from
both occurred in the development of critical
geographies of the late 1980s and the 1990s. The
‘critical turn’ that resulted is perhaps the most548 SPACES OF KNOWLEDGE3029-ch30.qxd 03-10-02 11:09 AM Page 548