Resistance, Geographies of

Evolution of Geographies of Resistance

The concept of resistance, while having a long intellectual history in the broader social sciences and humanities, is a relatively new field of study for human geographers. Thus, while historians and sociologists have long studied the iconic American and French Revolutions of 1775–1783 and 1789, respectively, geographers’ interest is more recent. While it is possible to locate traces of interest in geographies of resistance before the 1970s, most notably in the work of the 19th-century geographer Élisée Reclus, the so-called radical turn brought the study of class struggle and urban social movements firmly to the fore of human geographical research. Central to this new enthusiasm were the armed struggles in several developing countries, the riots in American ghettos in the late 1960s, and the student riots in Paris—and elsewhere—in the spring of 1968. Against such pressing problems, the abstract mathematical modeling of spatial science seemed extraordinarily socially inert.

Meanwhile, “historians from below,” most notably Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and E. P. Thompson, had, through the application of Marxist theories, blazed a trail in the study of popular movements. Marxism's central acceptance of the Hegelian concept of dialectics positioned social conflict as something central to all societies and thus, by definition, to the study of human geographies. Class conflict, as many Marxists would suggest, is not only the inevitable product of dialectical tensions between [Page 2442]the bourgeoisie and the proletariat but also the result of the dialectical emergence of “antisystems” in opposition to the institutionalized state. This understanding that societies are never inert but always volatile due to their composition of competing social groups and diametrically opposed class interests necessarily places a strong degree of emphasis on revolutionary change and associated social movements. David Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1973), the book that blazed a trail in applying Marxist thought to the study of geographical change, offered a rather more nuanced approach. Indeed, the beauty of Harvey's book—and the key to its huge intellectual influence in the discipline—was that, as it displayed Harvey's structuralist understandings and belief in the pursuit of one united democratic socialist movement, it offered for the first time a geographical take on Marxist thought. Moreover, its analysis of the North American city highlighted not potentially revolutionary actions but, instead, the resistances offered to the white, upper-middle-class political and economic hegemony.

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