key: cord-034084-b1biu6fm
authors: Tolia-Kelly, Divya; Carvalho Cabral, Diogo de; Legg, Stephen; Lane, Maria; Thomas, Nicola
title: Historical geographies of the 21st century: Challenging our praxis
date: 2020-10-21
journal: J Hist Geogr
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2020.08.002
sha: 
doc_id: 34084
cord_uid: b1biu6fm

nan

Historical geographies of the 21st century: Challenging our praxis On the 4 th July 2020 the statue of black anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass was torn down in Rochester, New York. It celebrated Douglass's campaigns against the inequality that persisted in nineteenth century US society despite constitutional commitments to liberty and fundamental rights. On the 5 th of July 1852 Douglass emphasized this persistence in an address to the women of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, regarding the anniversary of American Independence:

'I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn'. 1 The destruction of Douglass's statue, an 'anarchic' and likely racist act, was conducted in the context of global calls for scores of statues across the world to be torn down, in the main monuments to the great white men of commerce and colonisation. 2 The killing of 46 year old George Floyd by US police in Minneapolis on the 25 th June 2020 ensured an eruption of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, rallies and gatherings mourning brutality against black bodies and the lack of human rights and civil liberties of black citizens the world over. 3 The cultural landscape inscribes the negations of black history, heritage and space and belies a fuller, inclusive memorialisation of all citizens and all humanity.

Public monuments to colonial governance, slavery or the values of imperial military control are daily experienced by black bodies traversing public space in Bristol, Washington DC, Kolkata or Pretoria. These commemorations of violence within landscapes of national heritage have been re-identified as monuments to erasures, violences, racisms and negations of black life, black contributions to civil society and indeed black intellectual contributions to modernity itself.

The removal of Douglass's statue, however, was an aggressive assertion of the status quo of the dominant whiteness of US narratives and the privileging of white histories as materially represented in heritage monuments. The space was alleviated of one of the most prominent anti-slavery voices of the US and the removal a demonstration that history could be white-washed yet again in representation, in space, in national memory and national heritage.

For historical geographers witnessing the last months of protest, the long struggle of the anti-racism movement has been ever present, as evidenced by the removal of Douglass's statue. Many, however, have gained renewed hope that this moment will produce a critical change in the landscapes of injustice. Within the last century the historical geography community has contributed to several paradigm shifts within the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Many are marked in the Journal of Historical Geography. 4 We are in an age of another shift in intellectual atmosphere, a metaphorical quake calling us to rethink and revise our intellectual foundations, scholarly orientations and ethical praxis. In 2020 the changed JHG editorial team reflected and recognised the shift to decolonising the sub-discipline, recognising questions of race and racisms in scholarship, intellectual institutions, education curricula, networks, research and the economies of research posts and publications. 5 This editorial marks a cultural and political tuning-in to the risks of racial complacency and an acknowledgment of the role of race https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-orderprotecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminalviolence/last accessed July 10, 2020. Not all dialogues around public memorialisation are linked to white men, see also discussions around e.g. 'Ghandhi must fall'. 3 See: The Black Lives Matter campaign for racial justice which began as a movement to end to extra-judicial killings of black citizens in public space in the US and beyond, https://blacklivesmatter.com/last accessed 10 July 10, 2020. 

Journal of Historical Geography j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v ie r . c o m / l o c a t e / j h g and racisms in shaping disciplinary and academic practices and publications.

The editorial team are currently in the process of reviewing the publication cultures and practices associated with the journal. This review responds to the directional change signalled by the JHG Editorial Board and publisher's ways of enlivening, elaborating and extending its methods and boundaries of work through the appointment of an expanded editorial team. We are currently working with a discussion document that asks the team to reconsider every element of JHG's existing spheres of engagement, and to also imagine how the journal should work for the broadest community of historical geography. This includes being conscious of potential prejudicial practice, and the effects of the values and inheritances of imperial and colonial paradigms of thought that are skewed towards a particular geopolitical hierarchy of what, who, and where, counts as sites of production for valuable historical geographical scholarship.

Our institutional structures of being are embedded with praxis which may effectively marginalise, annihilate or indeed diminish an international ethos to valuing scholarship and including scholarship from all corners of global historical geographical research. The team have witnessed how this has shaped the journal as we review the country of origin data of author location when publishing in the journal. The majority of JHG authors reside in UK, North America and Europe, of the 157 authors published in the journal in the last 5 years, only 3 authors had positions in Brazil and Mexico, 2 in China, 4 in Israel. 6 While this imbalance is indicative of the Anglo-American history of the sub-discipline, it by no means reflects the balance of the contemporary international community who attend conferences such as the International Conference of Historical Geography. It also does not reflect the wide diversity of authors' countries of origin who submit papers for review.

Embedded in our current journal review process is a call to arms to re-evaluate the presence of (and perhaps unintended parameters of) blocs, institutional borders, obstacles and exclusionary habits of editorial and reviewer praxis. We are in the process of understanding what the form of a strategic culture change will look like. One which propels us towards a mindful practice that goes beyond the usual assumed grammars and performances of practice in academic publishing. We are working with this as a mindful, antiracist, inclusive approach which works through how we work with, and ultimately shed the risks of practices that present as perhaps unconsciously anachronistic and ultimately antiintellectual in their habits and myopic tendencies.

The editorial team are working with current submissions to the journal testing our emerging collective editorial manifesto. What does it mean in practice to embrace an explicit, anti-racist agenda that recognises, structural, systemic, conscious and subconscious bias on the grounds of race, ethnicity, culture and geopolitical location? Reviewers are being asked to look at some papers that might previously have been returned to the author with a desk-based rejection as the editorial team address the gate-keeping challenges of this decolonising process. We are thinking through ways of supporting authors to have positive review experiences by giving greater editorial feedback before sending out to review. This often entails formally 'rejecting' an author's work as demanded by the Elsevier editorial management system, but writing to the author with detailed instructions which will support the development of their article, with an invitation to resubmit. These are practices which were seeded within the previous practice of JHG editors, but are now essential if we are to support an anti-racist editorial praxis. The JHG/British Academy sponsored writing workshops for scholars in Latin America is a more proactive programme of work which enables us to co-learn how to work with authors in regions which are poorly represented in the journal. This programme is being re-shaped as a result of COVID-19 restrictions, but in being reshaped, promises to open out a virtual platform that will have more reach and depth for the wider international community of historical geographers.

This editorial approach is looking to take a step beyond assumptions about already being 'good professional practitioners' to embodying anti-racist values and becoming anti-racist activists within the discipline and parameters of a Journal of Historical Geography. This shift is not simply about the positive discrimination towards representation of others but about creating an arena for a fully enfranchised historical geographical community that recognises the evidence that we do not have recognition of all the historical scholarship that is rightfully situated within our disciplinary economies of knowledge production, exchange, intellectual reflection and higher education populations. There continue to be obstacles to 'international' scholarship that includes scholars both within and without the spectrum of historical geography as is currently constituted. Geographically, intellectually and morally beyond reaffirming the familiar well-worn geographies of knowledge exchange between nodal points (and related bodies) in Europe and North America. 7 The editorial team have sought to clearly outline what benefits and 'to what end' this shift towards a decolonising and anti-racist praxis serves.

What is hoped for is an expansion of the notion of practicing inclusive scholarship, towards building bridges for a fuller and more comprehensive participation of the 'others' within and beyond the usual grammars, archives, and moral geographies of historical geography publication. It is not the case, as is often cited, that moves towards inclusivity in the constituency of the JHG automatically ensures a rupture with a commitment to quality and excellence in scholarship, but that we attentively seek to learn from subaltern historiographies, and treat knowledge production as internationally present and dialogic. 8 We engage debates about epistemic justice, in terms of what has delineated accounts of what are 'credible historical geographies' and who are considered 'credible historical geographers'. In 2002, Peake and Kobayashi argued succinctly for a shift in academic culture towards an antiracist geography.

'As we enter the new millennium, geographers have a momentous opportunity to reflect upon the historical development of our discipline and the academic culture within which it thrives, with the aim of setting out an antiracist agenda. We advocate a fundamental refashioning of the discipline… (O)ur agenda for antiracist geography also involves three aspects of institutional change: to build up on and extend traditional geographical scholarship; to change the basis of the discipline by extending the principles of antiracism throughout our institutional practices, particularly in the classroom; and to change the face of the discipline by increasing the participation and contributions of geographers of color. '. 9 This call reflects much of the shift envisaged by the new editorial team and their individual portfolios hope to express some of the practices that may help to actualise change, improvement and material effects in producing a radical anti-racist template in academic journal publications. As Ruth Gilmore Wilson has argued (2002), a radical awareness and acknowledgment of 'the fatal couplings of power and difference signified by racism… demands examination of the subjective and objective nature of power and difference as articulated and naturalized through racism; one can follow the reasoning, and adjust the methods, for studying interrelated fatalities. In other words, we must change aspects of both the forces and the relations of knowledge production in order to produce new and useful knowledges.'. 10 These acknowledgements of power and difference are reaffirmed in the circulation of an email to editors from JHG's publisher, Elsevier, on July 3rd , 2020. In the spirit of the responses to the Black Lives Matter movement, Elsevier have firstly called upon editors to reflect on the goal of '(r)aising the participation of women and individuals from underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups on Editorial Boards and as editors, reviewers and authors'. Secondly, they are '(p)roviding and developing additional resources to assist editorial teams to assist with incorporating greater diversity, inclusion and equality in your journal'. And thirdly they are '(d)eveloping opportunities and resources for you to engage in productive discussion about inclusion & diversity issues and actions across the research community'. 11 These outline the fact that diversity and inclusion are fundamental to the futures of commercial academic publishing, as much as any other public institution. The lens is on those systemically outside, at the edge or indeed unconsciously 'lost' to research publication. We are left searching for the figures of historical geography that are outside the core, at perhaps the margins, or to be found in spaces where historical geography scholarship has flourished within a different disciplinary homes. 12 The JHG editorial collective purposefully brings a team of people together with skills, knowledge and experience of diverse and divergent scholarship and praxis. The team's asynchronous dialogues around this editorial and wider journal review reveal the gaps, fissures and flaws as we work towards a praxis that 'fits' with the politics and struggles for inclusion experienced by authors located in, for example, Latin America, India and Africa. We have considered the ways in which our thinking continues to cause epistemic violence, and how we (inadvertently) continue to silence or misrepresent alterities by narrowing a focus to a specific intellectual movement or region. We see the future space of the journal as a site where the questions we can been asking ourselves might be reviewed. How do we think about the overlaps but differences between the decolonial movement and the various issues and campaigns circulating around Black Lives Matter? How do these movements themselves intersect with longer established traditions such as postcolonialism, subaltern studies and black history? What geographies are at play here, for example the dialogues within Central/South American and Asian engagements with BLM compared to decolonial agendas? How do these questions, seemingly focusing on urban, social and cultural questions in historical geography, also intersect across environmental, ecological and physical geographical realms?

This editorial is a signal that we welcome and hope to contribute to this dialogue. To offer an invitation to the community, we focus the final section of this editorial as a reflection on the intersection of our new JHG editorial manifesto with the Black Lives Matter movement. Decolonising the academy and publication is doing more than including 'black' historical geography, but as a starting point, let us see what this partial figure would look like.

At the heart of the current Black Lives Matter movements (and their connected constituents advocating for a decolonising of the academy) is a challenge to the systemic, daily annihilation of black citizenry; in body, spirit, mind, space and the economies of everyday life. The figure of black however is dynamic, shifting historically, politically and culturally, a point that Cedric Robinson makes so powerfully in Black Marxism. 13 This shifting account of what we are 'saving' leaves the door constantly open to challenge from those that oppose the recognition of racisms in daily life including academia. Who are we claiming ground for? And how do we justify opening the door, if it, in a meritocracy, it has always been ajar? This leaves us with an inherent political problem as articulated by Stuart Hall: 'The fact is that 'black' has never been just there either. It has always been an unstable identity physically, culturally and politically. It, too is a narrative, a story, a history … Black is an identity which had to be learned in a certain moment.'. 14 In this moment, the identity of 'Black' scholarship is a political positioning of scholarship identified as other to core of academic cultures, or what can be considered academic mainstream in historical geography. It is a moment where self-determined accounts of what is, can be and what futures historical geography could look like, embody a sensibility of democratic access to the community. 'Black' scholarship is a political identification of knowledge production of research that is considered sitting outside 'the centre' of intellectual righteousness, or that which is yet to find an intellectual seat at the table, or that which is deemed 'uncultured', 'uninviteable' simply because of the geography of production, or the language of thought from which research emerges. There is much 'Black' historical geographical research already making that which is negated, present, most notably in the work of Caroline Bressey. 15 But there is much ground, space and research space still to cover.

In response to this the JHG editorial collective's responsibility as we review the journal is to ensure that the praxis we champion does not close, but enables a flourishing culture of radical, international dialogue which might be uncomfortable, challenging, 10 R.W. Gilmore, Fatal couplings of power and difference: Notes on racism and ge-different in tone, presentation, style and content. We have started this process with a commissioned response by Lara Choksey reflecting on the removal of the statue of slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol UK, June 2020. This will soon appear in the Historical Geography at Large section of JHG and marks the shift which we are hoping to deepen. Needless to say, it will be our collective responsibility, as a community of editors, reviewers, authors and readers to shape this culture. We hope as an editorial collective we will put in place a praxis that opens up new norms which enables broader constituencies to find their home in the journal. 

Editor Briefings: In support of equity, inclusion and diversity

The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

The Real Me: Postmodernism and the Question of Identity

Forgotten histories: Three stories of black girls from Barnardo's Victorian archive. Women's History Review

) 47e61; C. Bressey, It's Only Political CorrectnesseRace and Racism in British History


