Extreme Geography

Extreme human geography is a critique that celebrates odd juxtapositions; it is not to be confused with extreme physical geography, which has its own distinct cabinet of remarkable curiosities. Extreme geography as a recurring subversive idea in the history of geographic thought manifests as fantasy mapping, counterfactual geographies, science fiction spaces/places, and other imaginative social critiques. As an identifiable critical “tradition” in modern Western geographic thought, its convoluted heritage is cross-disciplinary and can [Page 1074]be traced in fits and spurts from Homer, through Diogenes of Sinope, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Athanasias Kircher, to Guy Debord, Ursula K. Le Guin, and recently a conspiratorial core of radical cartographers at Pennsylvania State University, the founders of Globehead! Journal of Extreme Geography.

In March 1994, a graduate student, Nikolas H. “Ni4k,” Huffman described himself in Globehead!'s founding editorial as a shameless communist who will say anything, especially for money. Huffman and fellow maverick editors exhibited anarchic glee while parading Globehead!'s outrageous, often incendiary maps, essays, illustrations, photographs, recipes, and classified ads. The editors invited contributors to push the limits of their own geographical imaginations and, in the manner of extreme sports, to brave the boundaries of the geographical and think the unthinkable. Globehead!, spearheading the extreme geography idea, thus set itself out to be geography's problem child by “aping the Game” and its counterfeit seriousness and playing up to irony and indignation.

By posturing themselves as extreme geography thinkers and practitioners against disciplined academic solemnity and reveling in ridicule and the ridiculous, Globehead! participants exuded hyperradical postmodern attitudes at a time in the history of geographic thought when the bloom was new on the rose of the epoch of postmodern geographies. In spite of the initial enthusiastic endorsements and contributions by several prominent academic geographers, including Peter Gould, Michael Dear, and Yi-fu Tuan, Globe-head!'s second issue was fatally over the top for an academic geography journal in its time. Globe-head! published the irreverently illustrated article “Fucking Geography” in its second and last issue, proving that extreme geography is forever born a doomed lark destined to become victim to its own exuberance.

Michael Dear, in his epigraph to the founding issue of Globehead!, claimed that it was the best idea since postmodernism “came along to confuse everyone.” Yi-fu Tuan wrote that he initially ventured into Globehead! because he felt that he belonged there: His own extremism at that time hardly ever touched base with any of the pillars of late-20th-century geography—Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, and so on—all of which, from his point of view, were by then recognized (and easily labeled) positions and hence mainstream.

Position-less, dysrational, devoid of lasting appeal, and self-destructive, Globehead! extreme geography played a brief nihilistic game at Penn State, in odd juxtaposition to its rational surroundings. However, as a recurrent social critique in the history of geographic thought, the absurdist extreme geography idea—much like radical relativism—is easily refuted though never long retired.