Following a post earlier this week about Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics – one of the latest titles in the Antipode Book Series – here we’ve a new ‘mission statement’, and invitation, from Book Series editors Sharad Chari and Vinay Gidwani…

The Antipode Book Series explores what it means to think radical geography, broadly considered, ‘antipodally’ as in opposition and from various margins, limits or borderlands.

An Antipode book provides insight ‘from elsewhere’, across boundaries rarely transgressed, with internationalist ambition and located insight. We want manuscripts willing to step outside the comfort of regional, national and disciplinary boundaries to think across comparative and connected insights from elsewhere.

An Antipode book confronts and sharpens the stakes in a set of issues. This does not amount to polemics, or clear lines between enemy and friend. Rather, an Antipode book diagnoses the ways in which grounded critique emerges from particular instantiations of contradictory social relations in order to change them. We seek manuscripts driven by this practical socio-spatial imperative, rather than a purely ideological commitment to ‘radical geography’.

An Antipode book might look to revise larger and interdisciplinary scholarly debates by pushing at their boundaries, or by showing what happens to a problematic as it moves or changes. Equally, an Antipode book might think with binaries we instinctively dismiss, to think in complex ways about the ways in which such binaries are mobilized and boundaries maintained.

An Antipode book investigates the specific density of power and struggle in one or more sites, but with lessons that might travel internationally, to provide surprising echoes elsewhere. Indeed, we seek books written with this deliberative communicative intent, theoretically bold and empirically rich but also intended for critical renovation and re-use in other sites of critique.

Finally, an Antipode book will be written in lively, accessible prose that does not sacrifice clarity at the altar of sophistication. We seek books that are not necessarily from the discipline of geography, but which push the boundaries of geographical critique to understand our fractured world in order to change it.

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A list of all titles in the series is available here. Authors or editors with ideas for Antipode books should contact the Book Series editors with an idea or full proposal which will be subject to review by the editors and two anonymous referees:

Sharad Chari
Centre for Indian Studies in Africa and Department of Anthropology
University of the Witwatersrand
36 Jorissen Street, Private Bag 3 Wits 2050
Johannesburg, South Africa

Vinay Gidwani
Department of Geography and Institute for Global Studies
University of Minnesota
414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Avenue S.
Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA