832

Book Reviews face of the insistence by political pundits and politicians that identity and nations are unproblematic categories simply requiring forceful reafrmation in the face of cultural critiques from minorities and intellectuals determined to muddy the waters. But the waters of social change are turbulent and muddied, and this work eloquently makes the case that postfoundational theories that refuse to work within the taken-for-granted spatialities of politics are necessary to grapple with these matters. This engaging volume of critique shows both the importance of working with geographical categories and how this can be done by challenging these crucial foundational assumptions that are so obvious that they usually pass without comment. As such, this volume is a major contribution to critical political geography, moving it forward precisely by how it contests the key conceptualizations of a wide range of contemporary political and social theory. But much more than a study in a narrowly dened political geography, this volume is signicant because it transcends disciplinarity and brings a geographic critique to central themes in contemporary social and political theory. Thus In the Space of Theory highlights the current intellectual maturity of the subdiscipline precisely because it transcends such a categorization. It deserves a wide readership beyond the discipline as a powerful engagement with political and social theory that should stimulate considerable reection on the presumed spatialities of politics.
Key Words: nation-state, postfoundational critique.

neoliberalism and the relations of states and power on the largest scale of world politics, and linking this discussion to that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris (2000) formulation of Empire with a capital E. Sparke joins many critics of this work in pointing to the inadequacy of the formulation of the post-1968 period as one of decentered Empire in contrast to earlier periods of more direct imperial power. But he does so by focusing on the inadequate geographical formulation in much of the contemporary discussion, linking his arguments to the critique of globalization and imperialism on the grounds of the undertheorized spatial dimensions of both. Consistent with his theme of the spatialities of the nation, he is especially trenchant in his exposure of the simplistic assumption of such a thing as a unitary American power in the neoconservative rearticulation of U.S. hegemony undergirded by military capability. This nal chapter is probably the best, but insofar as it is effective, to a substantial degree it is so because it builds on the prior problematizations of the implicit geographical formulations in political discourse. This theme runs through the whole text and, as such, delivers precisely the critique of contemporary political theory on the grounds of its failure to adequately reect on its own geographical formulations that the introduction promised. In this sense the debate about postethnicity and multiculturalism might be read as a reection on the failure of the spatial categories that structure this discussion to adequately deal with the complexity of contemporary life much more than they are either a new development or a failure of states to accommodate difference. Long before globalization was the preferred term for debate, the assumption of the state as the container of political community was looking very shaky. Indeed, it is precisely because this is clear that the conservative rearticulations of politics in the aftermath of 9/11 invoke once again an unproblematic specication of the nation as the locus of ethical life and the bedrock of human identity. But as this volume makes clear, the intellectual grounds for such edices have already been undercut. Hence the ironic and key message of this book is not only that geography matters, but that if it is taken sufciently seriously it provides a resource for critique in the

References
Bhabba, H. 1994. The location of culture. New York: Routledge. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hollinger, D. 1995. Post ethnic America: Beyond multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books. Laclau, E., and C. Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. New York: Verso. Mitchell, T. 1991. The limits of the state: Beyond statist approaches and their critics. American Political Science Review 85 (1): 7796. Tully, J. 1995. Strange multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an age of diversity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. Laura Pulido. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xv and 346 pp. maps, tables, gs., notes, bibliog., and index. $21.95 paper (ISBN 0-520-24520-2). Reviewed by Don Mitchell, Department of Geography, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. As I write, the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq has just been marked by massive demonstrations around the world; more than a 100,000 protesters in Chicago, a half million in Los Angeles, and tens of

Book Reviews thousands elsewhere around the United States have taken to the streets to show their opposition to a racist immigration bill working its way through Congress; students and unions in France are staging walkouts, followed by strikes, followed by walkouts protesting changes in labor laws that will hand employers a great deal of exibility at the expense of living wages, while doing nothing to address the stunning levels of unemployment and racist practices that led to rioting by immigrants a couple of months earlier. At the same time, leftist governments are taking power throughout Latin America, prompting elites in Washington to turn once again to a language of containment, and small bands of student activists all over the world are seeking out alternatives to the bland life promised to us by the cor` porations. It feels like deja vu all over again. Maybe that is why geographers seem to be engaging in a comprehensive reevaluation of the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and especially of the radical organizing that was at the heart of them. Studies of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Situationists, the rise of radical feminist organizing, and the likeFstudies of their spatial practices and spatial politics, their geostrategies and their shortcomingsFare appearing at a rapid clip. Into this mix comes Laura Pulidos exciting new book, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left. Pulido sets as her task a thorough reevaluation of the Third World Left in the Los Angeles Basin. For her, and drawing on a careful analysis of how radical activists positioned themselves during the 1960s and 1970s, the Third World Left comprised those organizations that explicitly identied as revolutionary nationalist, Marxist, Leninist, or Maoist and had a membership of at least half people of color (p. 5). Because even this seemingly restrictive definition led Pulido to a bewildering array of organizations (p. 5), she decided to focus her in-depth analysis on three particularly important ones: the Black Panthers, CASA (El Centro de Accion Social y Autonomo), and East Wind, representing, respectively, African Americans, Chicanas/os, and Asians (especially Japanese). Pulido justies this choice on the basis of overall inuence in the movement, access to materials, comparability, and so forth. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left begins with a threechapter overview of theoretical, historical-geographic, and political context (Part 1: Race, Class and Activism). Theoretically, Pulido shows how what she calls differential racialization (p. 24) is critical to the form that radical activism took (chapter 1: Race and Political Activism). The experiences of race and racism for Blacks, Chicanas/os, and Japanese in Los Angeles were

833

different, and so their activism was differently inected, and their modes of operating and their ways of engaging their opponents and comrades were oriented toward different goals. Yet Pulido also shows that there was a great deal of solidarity, as well as emulation, among groups. What bound the Third World Left in Los Angeles, Pulido convincingly argues, is that differential racialization was the modality by which people of color lived class, to use Stuart Halls classic formulation (p. 33). Pulido further asserts the crucial, and often (positively) disruptive, importance of gender struggles within the organizations she examines. Historical-geographically, Pulido shows, in a sweeping and effective overview in chapter 2, Differential Racialization in Southern California, just how differential racialization functioned in, and as a crucial determinant of, the political-economic landscape of Los Angeles. This chapter ought to be read by anyone seeking to understand the rapid transformation of American cities in the postwar era, whether they are interested in radical politics or not. Pulido demonstrates just how important racial hierarchicalizationFthe establishment of complex hierarchies of race that functioned politically, economically, and culturallyFwas to the construction of postwar Los Angeles. Politically, Pulido examines how African American, Chicana/o, and Japanese activists were radicalizedFor politicized . . . how one becomes politically consciousFthrough their experiences of the differentially racialized landscape and political economy. As Pulido argues in chapter 3, The Politicization of the Third World Left, it is a strange fact that the social movement literature has been relatively uninterested in the phenomenon of politicization (p. 61), and part of her goal in this volume is to put the process of politicization right at the center of social movement research. In this she succeeds brilliantly by drawing on in-depth interviews with movement activists, and by linking those to her historical-materialist account of Los Angeless differential racialization, key political moments (e.g., the Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War in 1970; the Third World Strike in the Bay Area in 1968; the Watts uprising of 1964; and the general transformation of the Civil Rights Movement after the legislative victories of 19641965), and the radicalization of college campuses. Part II (The Third World Left) comprises ve chapters that examine various aspects of the movement and the differences and similarities among the three main radical organizations that are the subject of this book. Chapter 4 (Serving the People and Vanguard Politics: The Formation of the Third World Left in Los Angeles) explores the development of vanguardist

834

Book Reviews a site for men and women to engage in questions of gender equality and for women to develop as political leaders. The nal chapter (chapter 8: The Third World Left Today and Contemporary Activism) traces some of these women (and men) as they have become legislators of various stripes, community activists still struggling for transformation, and progressive professors (for many, Third World activism was exactly the education that got them through the gates and into the groves of academe in the rst place). If the revolutionary politics of the Third World Left seems to have been, in the wake of the Reagan-Clinton-Bush retrenchments, only minimally transformative of society, it has been radically transformative for those who were involved in it. But, in fact, to see the Third World Left as minimally transformative of society is itself to see it wrongly and to miss how it continues to reverberate in all those movements for immigrant rights, against the war and racism, and the anticapitalist movement that marks the present day. Pulido notes some of the ways it continues to reverberate: in the focus on gender and sexuality, in the centrality of democracy (rather than vanguardism), in solidarity movements, and, intriguingly, in the rise of a deep spiritualism, a kind of future-dreaming that Pulido argues is, or at least ought to be, at the heart of contemporary movements for social change. An important, deeply researched, and compellingly written book, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left is not without its aws, or, perhaps more accurately, its inconsistencies. For example, Pulido chastises the Old Left for its lack of commitment to antiracism (with, in fact, no supporting evidence), a view that simply ignores the history (troubled though it may be) of the Community Party USA (CPUSA) in the elds of California and among the sharecroppers of the South (p. 93). On the other hand, she contends that to understand racist social formations it was hardly surprising that Third World Leftists, feeling that the white left had not adequately addressed questions of race, would turn to Marxism, as well as their own history and experiences to develop their own analyses (p. 124). Nowhere does Pulido explain why this is hardly surprising. Indeed, given her arguments above and elsewhere about Marxist theorizing and activism, both within and beyond the CPUSA, it is, at least on the evidence given in the book, deeply surprising. Part of the problem is that Pulido takes an overly narrow view of the white left during the 1950s and 1960s, a view too heavily inuenced by Todd Gitlins (1987) score-settling account of radical student and leftist politics of the era, an account that deeply mis-

organizations among people of color, including their fraught relationship with white radical organizations, and traces especially the roots and eventually blossoming of the BPP CASA, and East Wind. Chapter 5 (Ideologies , of Nation, Class, and Race in the Third World Left) examines the three organizations struggles over how to theorize about and act on politics of nationalism, race, and class, showing that Black, Chicana/o, and Asian nationalisms were both critical resources for activists and difcult obstacles to solidarity. As Pulido makes clear, connections between various [nationally or racially dened] groups are not inevitable or automatic but must be articulated (p. 144). What she shows, importantly, is just how challenging this articulation is. Even among putatively ideologically similar organizationsFthose linked by Maoism or Marxism-Leninism, for exampleFthe suturing together of solidarity, the articulation of difference into a collective front, is exceedingly difcult, and for the Third World Left was a constant source of friction, debate, and, after all, sometimes remarkable success. Those successes, the difcult struggle toward them, and the frequent failures of articulation are the specific focus of chapter 6, The Politics of Solidarity: Interethnic Relations in the Third World Left. Solidarity, Pulido shows, required a direct confrontation with whiteness (and thus with the role of white people in Third World movements), with the legacies of differential racism, and with the relationship between class and race as it was lived in the various communities of the city. Indeed, Pulido hints (a fuller exploration would certainly have been welcome) that geography in its most basic senseFthe geography of transportation, segregated housing markets, and just the vast distances that mark Los AngelesFmight have been one of the most important determinants of how solidarity was (and was not) articulated. Chapter 7, Patriarchy and Revolution: Gender Relations in the Third World Left, shows how all too often, even in the midst of forceful struggles by women activists, gender was treated as if it were contained, rather than mutually constituted by the social formation, which allowed the male leadership to maintain gender as a separate realm (p. 198, original emphasis). This was crucial because it meant that the BPP CASA, and East Wind rarely undertook the sort of , analysis of gender articulations that it did of articulations of race and class. If the starting point of these organizations radical theorizing was that race and class were inseparably bound (even if differently articulated for each group), they tended at the same time to fail to see how gender was also inseparable. Even so, the very struggle over these issues created the Third World Left as

Book Reviews represents the complexity of the Progressive Labor faction and its struggles over race and class. Similarly, although Pulido (correctly) critiques the Third World Left for failing to theoretically (and practically) examine the articulation of gender with race and class within capitalism, she also takes it to task for failing to appreciate gender and sexuality on their own terms, which, oddly, led to gender being abstracted from everyday life (p. 195). Perhaps these contradictions between articulation, relative autonomy, and abstraction were crucial to how gender was understood and lived within the movement, but Pulido does not treat them as contradictions but rather as a lack of awareness (p. 195). Such a claim is analytically insufcient and historically anachronistic, attributing to activists a lack that is only visible because of the long, later history of struggle over gender and sexuality that arose, in part precisely because such activists had to learn (through struggle) how to appreciate, or, really, understand, the contradictions of gender and sexuality in their articulated complexity. It is customary to end a review like this by saying, but these quibbles aside. . . But these are not quibbles; they are in fact crucially important theoretical and practical problems, and it is very much to Pulidos credit for raising them within the context of such a powerful and

835

enlightening book. They are exactly the sorts of issues, Pulido shows, that geographers and other progressive scholars are actively engaged in debating and theorizing, and their salience is every bit as important now, among those millions marching for immigrant rights or those other, perhaps more quiet, millions working, as many of Pulidos informants are, in community organizations dedicated to the ongoing struggle against capitalist imperialism at home (e.g., manifest in appalling rates of mortality among men of color, chronic food insecurity even in the wealthiest cities, or continued gender oppression). Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left is a crucial book at a critical time. It helps make clear why this turn among geographers and others toward understanding the historical geography of earlier moments of radicalism is not just an exercise in political nostalgia, but is vitally important for understanding how we must move forward, and what resources are available to do so.
Key Words: historical geography of Los Angeles, racialization, radical activism, Third World Left.

Reference
Gitlin, T. 1987. The sixties: Years of hope, days of rage. New York: Bantam.

Urban Schools: The New Social Spaces of Resistance. Mickey Lauria and Luis F. Miron. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. xiii and 195 pp., tables, appendixes, refs., and index. $69.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8204-76439); $29.95 paper (ISBN 0-8204-4048-5). Reviewed by David R. Reynolds, Department of Geography, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. The noble moral aims of social equality and societal integration, the twin pillars of the Great Society programs of the 1960s, have apparently been lost in what was to be one of its principal sites, the urban public school. They are victims of de- and reindustrialization, middle-class ight, and the emergence of new forms of multiethnic urban politics. It is against this backdrop that Lauria and Miron set their empirical study of student resistance and identity construction in four innercity high schools in New Orleans. The study adopts a comparative multiple-case study approach. The cases consist of four quite different innercity high schools. Two have relatively high, test-based admission standards, draw their students from the entire city, and have as their explicit goal preparing students for four-year colleges. One of these, reputedly the school that black middle-class families send their children to if they have hopes of enrolling them in elite four-year colleges, has an entirely African American student body, the majority of its students coming from lower-middle class families. The other city high school attracts a culturally diverse student population. Although less prestigious, it is reputed to provide excellent instruction for good, but not necessarily exceptional, college-bound students. The other two schools included in the study are district high schools drawing their students from their respective districts. In one the students are racially and ethnically diverse (but predominantly African American), in the other all are African American. Both districts are comprised of low-income neighborhoods that have been devastated economically by the loss of inner-city jobs. Both schools have reputations for being easy schools from which students are said to graduate without being able to read, where few graduates go on to college, and where violence is an everyday occurrence. In each school, two categories of students were interviewed: the academically successful (those with an A or B grade averages) and the relatively unsuccessful (those