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The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography. John A. Agnew and
James S. Duncan eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011. xv and 603 pp., maps,
illustrations, index. $199.95 (ISBN 978-...
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DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2013.766839
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The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human
Geography. John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan
eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011. xv and 603
pp., maps, illustrations, index. $199.95 (ISBN
978-1-4051-8989-7)
Audrey Kobayashi
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Geography. John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011. xv and 603
pp., maps, illustrations, index. $199.95 (ISBN 978-1-4051-8989-7), The AAG Review of Books,
1:1, 7-9, DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2013.766839
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John A. Agnew and James 
S. Duncan, eds. Malden, 
MA: Blackwell, 2011. xv and 
603 pp., maps, illustrations, 
index. $199.95 (ISBN 978-1-
4051-8989-7).
Reviewed by Audrey 
Kobayashi, Department of 
Geography, Queen’s 
University, Kingston, ON, 
Canada.
There is a small set of materials 
that I consider essential reading 
for all my graduate students who 
call themselves human geogra-
phers; this collection has now be-
come one of them. This volume 
sets out to capture the objectives, 
subject matter, theories, and 
methods of the pluralist discipline of human geography. 
Forty-two chapters written by a range of extremely well-
qualified geographers, mainly from the English-speaking 
world, are organized into three sections: Foundations, 
The Classics, and Contemporary Approaches. The au-
thors are all well chosen for their knowledge, their critical 
abilities, and their ability to tell a dynamic, nondogmatic, 
and contextual story. The result is authoritative, compre-
hensive, and a compelling read throughout.
The first two historical sections comprise nine chapters 
that take us from the earliest beginnings of geographi-
cal enquiry to approximately the 1970s, culminating in 
two sets of discussions of the major disciplinary issues of 
the mid-twentieth century: “Landscape Versus Region—
Parts I and II,” and “From Region to Space—Parts I and 
II.” The approach is developmental rather than strictly 
chronological (although there is enough chronology 
to avoid confusion). It portrays the human qualities of 
geographers in their search for knowledge, rather than 
their descriptive biographies. It conveys the major intel-
lectual controversies that have animated our discipline’s 
development, rather than simply 
organizing its content. By pairing 
two contributions to these im-
portant controversies, the editors 
have realized not only somewhat 
different perspectives on the is-
sues, but also the relational dy-
namics of a discipline contested, 
contingent, and controversial. 
The combined result is a histori-
cal perspective on the discipline 
that is as comprehensive as any 
single available text, with some 
enticing new information from 
the archival research of a num-
ber of the authors, but also with 
a fresh perspective on what Howe 
calls some of the “exegetically ex-
hausted texts” (p. 119) by major 
figures in the discipline such as 
Sauer and Hartshorne. Nor do the 
authors shy away from some of the 
personal predilections of those in-
tellectual giants. They convey the discipline as an emerg-
ing, politically laden project in which (mostly) men con-
tested and defended their scholarly ground and the most 
powerfully persuasive theories won out. This history of 
the discipline emerges as a very human practice indeed.
The last section, “Contemporary Approaches,” takes 
up more than two-thirds of the book. All the entries in 
this section are also paired with two chapters devoted 
to each of the following concepts: nature, landscape, 
place, territory, globalization, world cities, governance, 
mobility, scale and networks, class, race, sexuality, gen-
der, geopolitics, segregation, and development. One 
could quibbleabout what should or should not have 
been included. I would have liked to see sections, for ex-
ample, on social justice, art and representation, health, 
capitalism and neoliberalism, and postcolonialism. 
On the other hand, one recognizes that choices have 
to be made, and a perusal of the index will show that 
all the topics just mentioned are addressed somewhere. 
Capitalism, for instance, is mentioned in twelve of the 
sixteen pairings.
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion 
to Human Geography
The AAG Review OF BOOKS
The AAG Review of Books 1(1) 2013, pp. 7–9. doi: 10.1080/2325548X.2013.766839. 
©2013 by Association of American Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
8 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS
I conducted a very informal quantitative analysis of the 
references in the index, to discover a rather telling indi-
cation of how the authors as a group view the most im-
portant influences within and on human geography over 
time (Table 1). Of course the art of indexing is an in-
complete and sometimes subjective process, but a quick 
check back and forth shows that to be included in the 
index a work had to be discussed for its contribution to 
or a controversy within the discipline, rather than simply 
included in a parenthetical reference.
With the caveat that this information tells us as much about 
the choice of contributors to the volume as it does about the 
geographers cited, I think the stories behind these numbers 
are more important than the numbers themselves. Among 
the hundreds of geographers cited throughout the volume, 
only these eleven are discussed more than ten times and 
only two, Hartshorne and Massey—for very different rea-
sons—by more than nine authors. All the discussions of 
Hartshorne occur in the first nine (historical) chapters of 
the collection, and they refer at some length to the often 
acrimonious disputes between Hartshorne and other hu-
man geographers, including Sauer. Behind those disputes 
lurk questions of personality, but also epistemological ques-
tions concerning the stuff of the discipline, the competing 
roles of ideas of landscape and region, and the influence of 
a range of European, especially German, geographers such 
as Kant, Hettner, Ratzel, and Ritter. Harvey, in contrast, 
is cited both for his historical contributions (in the rise 
of quantitative geography and the transition to Marxian 
geography) and his contemporary influence on questions of 
globalization and class. Smith, on the other hand, is cited 
for his contribution to a critical history of the discipline 
as well as his influence on contemporary ideas, including 
class, scale, and networks. It is strikingly obvious that only 
one of these oft-discussed individuals is a woman. Massey’s 
influence is one of the most comprehensive, however, in 
relation to class, gender, place, regions, and space. The 
numbers point toward a more complex story of the disci-
pline in which a few iconoclasts have influenced scholarly 
directions by the force of their ideas, their personalities, 
and their positioning within the institutional structures 
through which we create geographers and negotiate geo-
graphical ideas. I cannot help but imagine, however, what 
the discipline—and this volume—would look like if we 
were to create a different biography, tell ourselves different 
stories, and structure different institutions.
Ironically, it is just such different stories that we have 
learned to tell about our research from the two most-cited 
nongeographers in the volume, Marx and Foucault. Table 
2 presents a similar profile for nongeographical theorists 
(I have included Kant in Table 2 notwithstanding that he 
was officially a geographer).
Not surprisingly, all references to Foucault and most 
of those to Marx are in the contemporary section, and 
the number of chapters discussing each (twelve) is more 
than the number discussing any single geographer. Do 
these citations indicate that Foucault is the single most 
Table 1. Geographers cited ten or more times in the index of Human Geography
Name
No. of cites in the 
historical section 
(nine chapters plus 
introduction)
No. of cites in the 
contemporary sec-
tion (thirty-two 
chapters)
Total no. of cites in 
the index
Total no. of 
chapters citing 
this individual
Richard Hartshorne 27 0 27 10
David Harvey 6 15 21 9
Carl Sauer 18 0 18 8
Doreen Massey 5 9 16 10
Alfred Hettner 15 0 15 9
Halford Mackinder 13 2 15 7
Freidrich Ratzel 15 0 15 7
Neil Smith 5 8 13 9
Nigel Thrift 4 8 12 8
Peter Haggett 7 4 11 4
Carl Ritter 11 0 11 4
SPRING 2013 9
influential thinker on the discipline of human geography 
today with Marx a close second? An interesting question. 
Nor it is a surprise that discussion of Kantian influences is 
mostly, but not completely, historical (his contemporary 
references are to issues of race and mobility), although it 
might be argued that his influence on Western thought in 
general—for better or worse—far exceeds that of Foucault 
(but I do not enter into that debate here).
I do not want to push this admittedly sketchy analysis too 
far, but would like to add that once I had completed the 
very messy table on which my numbers were spread out, 
I noticed that the last three sections of the volume—six 
chapters devoted to geopolitics, segregation, and develop-
ment—had almost no references to the nongeographers 
and only a few to the geographers. Hmmm. There is 
clearly a set of patterns here that indicate some signifi-
cant intellectual trajectories and epistemological choices 
according to which we organize our discipline.
Turning to the substantive content of the book, the work 
is erudite and maintains a high critical standard. The the-
oretical discussions that make up the vast majority of the 
volume are intellectually challenging and will provide for 
students a compelling introduction to their intellectual 
heritage. Nearly all of the authors adopt a poststructural-
ist position on the ways in which the discipline has been 
socially constructed, and on the intersections of race, 
class, gender, sexuality, and situation as a basis for under-
standing the spatiality of human life. In several chapters, 
the emphasis on intersections of race and gender, sexual-
ity and race, or class and spatiality (to name some of the 
most prominent) provide a provocative sense of social life. 
Most of the authors also interweave questions of power, 
positionality, governmentality, and scale as foundational 
concepts through which a human geographical perspec-
tive has formed. They tell us as much about the social 
life of geographers as about the concepts that define us. 
Overall, this book is an intellectual tour de force. I found 
it extremely informative and challenging.
Nonetheless, there is always a “but” and here it is: This 
collection, in both the assemblage of authors and the ways 
in which they present the work of geographers, is shock-
ingly white. By my reckoning, eleven of the forty-eight 
authors, editors, and co-authors are female; but only one 
(I could be a little off here) is nonwhite. To be fair, this 
balance is a pretty good reflection of the demographics of 
the discipline, and the editors could not be expected to 
find people who are not there. What I find more telling 
is that the collective authors rely so strongly on the works 
of white geographers and social theorists to tell the story 
of the discipline. Again to be fair, geography and social 
theory have been the territory, by and large, of white men, 
and it is only recently that we have seen any significant 
diversity in our population. But the voices countering the 
power and positionality of white men have definitely not 
been silent. The legacy of African American geographers, 
for example, is extremely rich, and I found only fleeting ref-
erences to that tradition. The work of geographers of color 
in the developing world likewise provides a fresh, strong, 
and compassionate perspective on questions of colonial-
ism, globalization,and development, and their voices, too, 
are hardly more than a whisper. There are also indigenous 
geographers (again, few in number) who have much to say 
about nature, environment, colonialism, and development. 
Given the huge gestures from so many of the authors of this 
collection toward postcolonial theory, antiracist, feminist, 
and queer theory as well as anti-oppression in general, I 
find it terribly ironic that the impression conveyed is that 
only powerful white scholars can opine about these things. 
I do not single out either the editors or any of the authors 
for giving this impression, because it is pervasive. If my stu-
dents come away from this book, therefore, with the im-
pression that geography remains the domain of whiteness, 
they are sadly correct.
Table 2. Nongeographers cited ten or more times in the index of Human Geography
Name
No. of cites in the 
historical section 
(ten chapters)
No. of cites in the 
contemporary section 
(thirty-two chapters)
Total no. of cites 
in the index
Total no. of chapters 
citing this individual
Karl Marx 2 19 21 12
Michel Foucault 0 17 17 12
Immanuel Kant 12 3 15 8
Bruno Latour 0 14 14 8
Raymond Williams 3 8 11 6
Gilles Deleuze 0 10 10 7
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