cities were produced, both symbolically and
materially. (1998b: 204–5)According to Bonnett (1996c), in a comprehen-
sive review of the study of ‘race’ by mainly
British geographers, the constructionist approach
has become the dominant paradigm, by con-
tributing both an interdisciplinary understanding
of racialization, and a specifically geographical
understanding of how ‘space’ is racialized. We
need to understand urban areas as places of race-
based conflict and as specific sites in which the
construction of the meaning of place varies
according to history, experience and cultural
practice, making it highly mutable and subject to
sometimes rapid redefinition and reformation
(1996c: 876–7, in reference to Keith, 1993).
The constructionist approach in geography has
come under criticism, however, both for its
limited success in ‘relating the cultural and mate-
rial aspects of race and race-based inequality in
such a way as to demonstrate their mutual struc-
turing’ (Anderson, 1998b: 204) and for its failure
to go beyond the understanding of ‘race’ as a
social construct to understand it as a political
construct (Kobayashi and Peake, 1994). Bonnett
attributes the problems with the constructionist
approach to disciplinary fetishism, claiming that
geographers have never been ‘completely confi-
dent that space really does “matter” ’, and that the
importance of geography ‘may only be made
fully visible when “the geographical perspective”
is finally abandoned’ in favour of one in which
‘geography, history and sociology are woven
together as equally necessary components of a
fully interdisciplinary account’ (1996c: 880–1).
Elsewhere, Bonnett supports the contention,
increasingly popular especially among North
American scholars, that a more effective
approach must take a position of anti-racism,
which ‘refers to those forms of thought and/or
practice that seek to confront, eradicate and/or
ameliorate racism’ (2000: 4). Anti-racism is dif-
ferent from non-racism because it involves an
active commitment to the project of overcoming
racism and its effects. While anti-racism is
diverse, sometimes contradictory, always com-
plicated, it always also involves a specifically
political project. Not satisfied with a critical
understanding of racism, or whiteness, as histori-
cal constructions, the anti-racist seeks to place
her or his scholarship within a historical context,
with the express purpose of intervening politi-
cally, and of shifting the academic discourse
from a synthetic analysis of the process of racial-
ization to a diachronic analysis of the relation-
ship between historical constructions and
ongoing risks to the physical and emotionalwellbeing of racialized peoples (Kobayashi and
Ray, 2000).
Anti-racism requires a high level of reflexivity
(Kobayashi, 1994; 2001), perhaps going so far as
to establish political action and social change as
the goal to which adequate theories are a tool,
rather than the other way around. Reflexivity
involves not only new knowledge, but also a new
mode of engaged knowledge, abandoning faith
in positive science and in the ability, necessity or
desirability of the researcher to remain detached
from his or her investigation. Reflexivity is not
simply an improved form of methodology, there-
fore, but a normative, moral stand. While con-
structivist theories may have contributed to the
recent move towards reflexivity on the part of
geographers, therefore, they are by no means
sufficient to the development of political com-
mitment or social action. To put it simply, anti-
racist geography is about caring about the
conditions of life for specific living individuals,
more than it is about theorizing ‘race’.
But reflexivity is also contradictory, espe-
cially in a situation where the field of anti-racism
studies – in geography, in particular – is domi-
nated by white scholars, for whom reflexivity
means on the one hand moral introspection both
about their role in reinscribing racist relations
and about their effectiveness as anti-racist
activists, but on the other the risk of appropriat-
ing the moral ground of anti-racism with con-
cerns about their own position. Reflexivity is a
necessary aspect of contemporary scholarship,
therefore, but one that must be constantly on
guard against smugness, or against turning the
anti-racist project itself into a white project.
There is a growing list of recent examples of
work undertaken, especially, by geographers of
colour who bring personal experience, commit-
ment and passion to their work. Ruth Wilson
Gilmore (1998–9) weaves a complex linkage
between racism and globalization, anti-terrorism
and the growth of prison networks in the United
States to provide not only a compelling scholarly
analysis of the processes that have targeted
immigrants and prisoners in racialized ways, but
also a sense of her own commitment to the cause
of deracializing the criminal system, and of
working directly with the people whose lives are
most affected. Laura Pulido’s (2000) work on
environmental racism brings not only a commit-
ment to anti-racism, but also deep environmental
concern, and one of the strongest justifications
for the dual role of academic and activist in
bringing about social change. Clyde Woods’
(1998) erudite treatment of the role of the blues
in the southern USA emphasizes the recursive
relationship between culture and politics, butTHE CONSTRUCTION OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE 5513029-ch30.qxd 03-10-02 11:09 AM Page 551