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Geographies, Critical and Marxist, and Lessons from South Africa

Analysis in human geography has shown persistent tendencies of a pluralistic sort: a view of the world as the product of numerous independent and interacting forces. The advent of Marxist geography in the 1970s promised a path in a more totalizing direction. This emphasized the contradictory unity of the world, while placing production as the point both of departure and of return. The social process was conceived as a unity and its different moments as production relations. Society and space represented a further move in a pluralizing direction. Since then critical impulses in human geography have tended to be subordinated to that view. Critical human geography is a product of this. Engaging in research from the standpoint of one particular social moment – the institutional, the cultural and the discursive, among others – is emblematic. It is not enough, however, to criticize this by invoking the generalities of Marx's method. More convincing are actual empirical studies. In this paper I explore the case of South Africa prior to 1990 as a way of demonstrating how constructions of race, space, and gender, along with institutions must per necesita be interpreted as production relations and how this can shed light on particular geographies; a light, I will maintain, that is necessarily beyond the reach of critical human geography.