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The rhetoric of racism
Book Reviews landscapes, and of the varied roles of rural landscapes as recuperative resources for a harried and stressed urban society. Given the overwhelming centrality of the urban experience in the creation of Anglo-American cultural values, the importance of these phenomena to the establishment of rural values cannot be ignored, or overemphasized. Of particular interest are the last few pages of the Conclusion, where the author, with little prior discussion, depicts contemporary Anglo-American rural society as exhibiting 'an agenda set by a dominant rural non-farm population and supported by a broad environmental and heritage conservation movement' (p. 210). This conflict over what Bunce terms 'consumptive and appreciative activities' (p. 125) and the countryside as a space of agricultural production and extraction forms the heart of a contemporary struggle over landuse, cultural identity and indeed, the symbolic meaning of the countryside as a discursive formation. And it is here that the work is the least satisfying. For a work of geographical scholarship, Bunce's book strays across the dangerous boundary between Cultural Geography and Cultural Studies. Although the argument is strong on historical analysis, there is little specificity of place or of people. The countryside appears a blank field upon which is written the cultural symbols and aspirations of generations of urbanites desperate to escape the monster they have created and serve. This is a one-way process where 'the countryside has been both appropriated and refashioned to match its symbolic associations' (p. 128). Nowhere does he offer a view of the opposite - how country residents appropriate and refashion urban resources and meanings to their own advantage. The overwhelming sweep of urban dominance of the creation of a discursive formation of rurality obliterates such local resistances. Missing too, are the (often frequent) failure of urban migrants in the face of rural difficulties and the faces and aspirations of rural inhabitants whose identities are constructed out of multi-generational lives living on, and working the land. Overall, this is a useful text, collecting and summarizing various strands of thought about the role of the rural in the collective imagination, and particularly upon the relationships between the urban and the rural. Left unexplored are the specific geographic questions that must be asked in order to come to terms with today's countryside: questions on the relationship of rural economies and rural culture; the implications for rural inhabitants of urban in-migration; the specific formations of identity politics in the countryside; and the actual processes of rural change from the point of view of those in the countryside, not those moving into it. RHYS EVANS
School for Policy Studies University of Bristol References
Meinig, D. W. (1979) Symbolic landscapes. In The Interpretations of Ordinary Landscapes, ed. D. W. Meinig. Oxford University Press, New York. Relph, E. D. (1981) Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography. Croom Helm, London. Tuan, Y.-F. (1974) Topophilia. Prentice-Hall, New York.
453
The Rhetoric of Racism, Mark Lawrence McPhail, 158
pp., 1994, University Press of America, Maryland, $36.50 hbk, ISBN 0-8191-9180-9 Racism has historically been and continues to be one of humankind's most insidious sociocultural problems. With the growing internationalization of the world community, the discussion and impacts of racism have moved away from being principally a 'black-white' issue to one of categorizing and responding to anyone who is 'other'. Social scientists continue to grapple with understanding the underlying causes and impacts of racism in attempts to affect change in perceptions, policy, culture and rhetoric. In his book, The Rhetoric of Racism, Mark Lawrence McPhail poses the argument that it is language that constructs our social reality, and that in order to affect change concerning racism, we must change the rhetoric with which we describe the one who is 'other'. McPhail bases his text on his doctoral dissertation in the field of communication studies completed at the University of Massachusetts. The book consists of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion, and includes references and an index. McPhail frames his work within coherence theory, positing that through a coherent rhetorical analysis, one is able to see racism as a socially constructed discourse reified through argumentation and persuasion (p. 31). His first chapter reviews the discourse of negative difference, the language and argumentation upon which the rhetoric of racism is built. McPhail traces the epistemological roots of racism in Western culture to the writings of Plato, arguing that the 'Socratic quest for an essential reality was grounded in a negative dialectic', a language of contrasts which 'undergirds the discourse of racial difference' (p. 27). On this premise, he discusses various paradigms of rhetoric of class, gender and race, presenting the role of negative difference and negative value attached to one who is 'other'. In the following three chapters, he deconstructs a series of writings and speeches by members of both the black and white communities, giving evidence of the use of racist rhetoric to dichotomize power relations, victimization and privilege. Even those striving to function within paradigms claiming to be more inclusive can be shown to be using a language of negative difference. McPhail includes evaluative paradigms in his analysis. Postitivism, for example, attempts to create objective measures in measuring the use and meaning of words. However, positivist rhetorical research requires giving measurable values to words and their usage, reinforcing the role of negative difference. McPhail argues that the one paradigm which offers an effective solution is coherence because it focuses on similarity in difference, allowing one to move from a language of oppression to one of equality. McPhail closes by concluding that a societal and particularly a scholarly shift to a language of coherence will lay the foundation for moving away from a culture of negative difference. If it is language that forms our social reality, then a change in language must precede resolution of conflicts rooted in negative difference. While a very informative text, The Rhetoric of Racism has two serious weaknesses. First, it continues to read like a dissertation within a very focused field of study, thus limiting its audience. This is compounded by the extensive
454
B o o k Reviews
use of a post-modernist deconstructionist lexicon which deters the 'uninitiated' from benefitting from McPhail's otherwise insightful arguments. Second, and perhaps more importantly, by couching the question of racism entirely within the field of rhetoric, social scientists studying issues and impacts of racism may find McPhail's writings to be too simplistic. If one believes that language forms our social reality, then this book will have great applicability. However, if one believes, as I do, that language represents underlying values, many of which are culturally rooted in ideas of negative difference, then McPhail's conclusions seem naive. It will be when we can make measurable changes in society away from actions of negative difference that a rhetoric of equality will be freely expressed. INES M. MIYARES Department of Geography Hunter College - - CUNY
European Tourism: Regions, Spaces and Restructuring, A. Montanari and A. M. Williams (eds), 284 pp., 1995, Wiley, Chichester, £40 hbk ISBN 0-471-95286-9 This book reports much of the work of the tourism research programme, RURETOUR, which developed out of the broader Regional and Urban Restructuring in Europe research programme funded by the European Science Foundation in the early 1990s. As such it takes as its main aim 'to investigate how changes in the production and consumption of tourism have contributed to a reorganisation of economic and social spaces in Europe at a number of different geographical scales'. The introductory chapter by the editors provides a very useful overview of the major themes, setting tourism in the wider context of restructuring before exploring such issues as regional and local development; tourism, capital and labour and tourism and state intervention. Despite the potential which this chapter has to set the scene and offer some common frameworks, these themes are explored in different ways and in varying degrees by the authors of subsequent chapters which hang together only very loosely around the structure that the editors have tried to impose. The next four chapters have been grouped together in a section on 'Regional development and population systems' and deal in turn with the Alpine region (Zimmerman), the Mediterranean (Montanari), the British Isles (Williams and Gillmor) and Scandinavia (Nyberg). While there is no apparent logic in the sequence of these regions and the coverage is selective, the regional approach adopted here provides an interesting and useful complement to other recent books dealing with tourism in Europe on a country by country basis by showing the commonality of processes at work and issues emerging. Nyberg's contribution on Scandinavia is particularly welcome as it provides an interesting and thoughtful synthesis on tourism in a region which has previously received little attention in the English language literature. Moreover, his discussion goes beyond the mere presentation of statistics which characterizes some of the other chapters, in part by necessity due to the paucity of tourism figures in the Nordic countries, to develop some of the broader themes of the book, notably questions of peripherality and regional development. Williams and Gillmor's analysis of recent trends in the United Kingdom and Ireland is less macroregional in scale but offers a very interesting drawing together of the regional effects of the increase in international tourism and the decline in domestic demand. Hall's chapter on recent changes in Central and Eastern
Europe, including an analysis of emerging patterns of competition, might have fitted more usefully in this section where it would have allowed the reader more readily to place these changes in a broader context, rather than appearing in a more isolated fashion as the second last chapter in the book. The second section on the 'Spatial reorganisation of tourism' includes chapters on tourism in three different spaces: coastal areas (Marchena G6mez and Vera Rebollo), rural tourism (Cavaco) and metropolitan areas (Shachar). These deal less with the spatial reorganization of tourism in these areas but more with changing patterns of demand and, to a lesser extent, development processes. The chapter on rural tourism, perhaps of most interest to readers of this journal, provides a reasonably wide-ranging review of recent demand trends but fails to take sufficient account of policies to foster this activity, state intervention being one of the introductory themes of the book, nor of the difficulties which successfully marketing this form of tourism often presents. Similarly, the concentration on demand by Shachar ignores many important supply-side issues which one might expect to be examined in a volume which has urban restructuring as a major theme. Transnationalism is the title of the third section which contains two chapters. That by Williams on capital and the transnationalization of tourism explores the theme by reference to hotels, airlines and tour companies in a discussion which covers some interesting points but which often needs taking much further, for example the impact of the creation of a single aviation market within the European Union by 1997. King's chapter makes some very useful links between tourism and the restructuring of international migrant labour by firstly trying to show the share of such labour in employment in tourism and then by focusing on the migrant source areas to assess the role of return migrants in the sector. The fourth section, entitled 'New tourism product and social change' is the loosest but contains some thoughtful papers. Carreras interprets mega-events in terms of a local strategy for internationalization, but as his review of the host cities of the Olympic Games and international expositions shows, this is hardly a new phenomenon. Becker offers some useful insights into new attitudes to the environment, but concludes with regard to soft tourism that environmentally friendly action has yet to follow such attitudes in many cases. Becker raises the question can mass tourism be softened and in so doing also demonstrates the lack of continuity which occurs from one chapter to another, for the earlier discussion by Marchena G6mez and Vera Rebollo offers an insightful appraisal of attempts to do just that in Spanish coastal areas. Claval's concluding chapter makes some passing reference to the earlier ones but his review of 'The impact of tourism on the restructuring of European space' offers little in the way of synthesis and concentrates more on providing an historical overview of the emergence of the major tourist regions in Europe. Although uneven in quality and adherence to the reputed themes of the book, this volume contains some very interesting, topical and thought provoking chapters. By making some very explicit links to broader patterns of restructuring this is not just another book on European tourism but one which attempts to integrate research on tourism into a broader context, As such it deserves to attract readership from a wide audience.
School for Policy Studies University of Bristol References
Meinig, D. W. (1979) Symbolic landscapes. In The Interpretations of Ordinary Landscapes, ed. D. W. Meinig. Oxford University Press, New York. Relph, E. D. (1981) Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography. Croom Helm, London. Tuan, Y.-F. (1974) Topophilia. Prentice-Hall, New York.
453
The Rhetoric of Racism, Mark Lawrence McPhail, 158
pp., 1994, University Press of America, Maryland, $36.50 hbk, ISBN 0-8191-9180-9 Racism has historically been and continues to be one of humankind's most insidious sociocultural problems. With the growing internationalization of the world community, the discussion and impacts of racism have moved away from being principally a 'black-white' issue to one of categorizing and responding to anyone who is 'other'. Social scientists continue to grapple with understanding the underlying causes and impacts of racism in attempts to affect change in perceptions, policy, culture and rhetoric. In his book, The Rhetoric of Racism, Mark Lawrence McPhail poses the argument that it is language that constructs our social reality, and that in order to affect change concerning racism, we must change the rhetoric with which we describe the one who is 'other'. McPhail bases his text on his doctoral dissertation in the field of communication studies completed at the University of Massachusetts. The book consists of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion, and includes references and an index. McPhail frames his work within coherence theory, positing that through a coherent rhetorical analysis, one is able to see racism as a socially constructed discourse reified through argumentation and persuasion (p. 31). His first chapter reviews the discourse of negative difference, the language and argumentation upon which the rhetoric of racism is built. McPhail traces the epistemological roots of racism in Western culture to the writings of Plato, arguing that the 'Socratic quest for an essential reality was grounded in a negative dialectic', a language of contrasts which 'undergirds the discourse of racial difference' (p. 27). On this premise, he discusses various paradigms of rhetoric of class, gender and race, presenting the role of negative difference and negative value attached to one who is 'other'. In the following three chapters, he deconstructs a series of writings and speeches by members of both the black and white communities, giving evidence of the use of racist rhetoric to dichotomize power relations, victimization and privilege. Even those striving to function within paradigms claiming to be more inclusive can be shown to be using a language of negative difference. McPhail includes evaluative paradigms in his analysis. Postitivism, for example, attempts to create objective measures in measuring the use and meaning of words. However, positivist rhetorical research requires giving measurable values to words and their usage, reinforcing the role of negative difference. McPhail argues that the one paradigm which offers an effective solution is coherence because it focuses on similarity in difference, allowing one to move from a language of oppression to one of equality. McPhail closes by concluding that a societal and particularly a scholarly shift to a language of coherence will lay the foundation for moving away from a culture of negative difference. If it is language that forms our social reality, then a change in language must precede resolution of conflicts rooted in negative difference. While a very informative text, The Rhetoric of Racism has two serious weaknesses. First, it continues to read like a dissertation within a very focused field of study, thus limiting its audience. This is compounded by the extensive
454
B o o k Reviews
use of a post-modernist deconstructionist lexicon which deters the 'uninitiated' from benefitting from McPhail's otherwise insightful arguments. Second, and perhaps more importantly, by couching the question of racism entirely within the field of rhetoric, social scientists studying issues and impacts of racism may find McPhail's writings to be too simplistic. If one believes that language forms our social reality, then this book will have great applicability. However, if one believes, as I do, that language represents underlying values, many of which are culturally rooted in ideas of negative difference, then McPhail's conclusions seem naive. It will be when we can make measurable changes in society away from actions of negative difference that a rhetoric of equality will be freely expressed. INES M. MIYARES Department of Geography Hunter College - - CUNY
European Tourism: Regions, Spaces and Restructuring, A. Montanari and A. M. Williams (eds), 284 pp., 1995, Wiley, Chichester, £40 hbk ISBN 0-471-95286-9 This book reports much of the work of the tourism research programme, RURETOUR, which developed out of the broader Regional and Urban Restructuring in Europe research programme funded by the European Science Foundation in the early 1990s. As such it takes as its main aim 'to investigate how changes in the production and consumption of tourism have contributed to a reorganisation of economic and social spaces in Europe at a number of different geographical scales'. The introductory chapter by the editors provides a very useful overview of the major themes, setting tourism in the wider context of restructuring before exploring such issues as regional and local development; tourism, capital and labour and tourism and state intervention. Despite the potential which this chapter has to set the scene and offer some common frameworks, these themes are explored in different ways and in varying degrees by the authors of subsequent chapters which hang together only very loosely around the structure that the editors have tried to impose. The next four chapters have been grouped together in a section on 'Regional development and population systems' and deal in turn with the Alpine region (Zimmerman), the Mediterranean (Montanari), the British Isles (Williams and Gillmor) and Scandinavia (Nyberg). While there is no apparent logic in the sequence of these regions and the coverage is selective, the regional approach adopted here provides an interesting and useful complement to other recent books dealing with tourism in Europe on a country by country basis by showing the commonality of processes at work and issues emerging. Nyberg's contribution on Scandinavia is particularly welcome as it provides an interesting and thoughtful synthesis on tourism in a region which has previously received little attention in the English language literature. Moreover, his discussion goes beyond the mere presentation of statistics which characterizes some of the other chapters, in part by necessity due to the paucity of tourism figures in the Nordic countries, to develop some of the broader themes of the book, notably questions of peripherality and regional development. Williams and Gillmor's analysis of recent trends in the United Kingdom and Ireland is less macroregional in scale but offers a very interesting drawing together of the regional effects of the increase in international tourism and the decline in domestic demand. Hall's chapter on recent changes in Central and Eastern
Europe, including an analysis of emerging patterns of competition, might have fitted more usefully in this section where it would have allowed the reader more readily to place these changes in a broader context, rather than appearing in a more isolated fashion as the second last chapter in the book. The second section on the 'Spatial reorganisation of tourism' includes chapters on tourism in three different spaces: coastal areas (Marchena G6mez and Vera Rebollo), rural tourism (Cavaco) and metropolitan areas (Shachar). These deal less with the spatial reorganization of tourism in these areas but more with changing patterns of demand and, to a lesser extent, development processes. The chapter on rural tourism, perhaps of most interest to readers of this journal, provides a reasonably wide-ranging review of recent demand trends but fails to take sufficient account of policies to foster this activity, state intervention being one of the introductory themes of the book, nor of the difficulties which successfully marketing this form of tourism often presents. Similarly, the concentration on demand by Shachar ignores many important supply-side issues which one might expect to be examined in a volume which has urban restructuring as a major theme. Transnationalism is the title of the third section which contains two chapters. That by Williams on capital and the transnationalization of tourism explores the theme by reference to hotels, airlines and tour companies in a discussion which covers some interesting points but which often needs taking much further, for example the impact of the creation of a single aviation market within the European Union by 1997. King's chapter makes some very useful links between tourism and the restructuring of international migrant labour by firstly trying to show the share of such labour in employment in tourism and then by focusing on the migrant source areas to assess the role of return migrants in the sector. The fourth section, entitled 'New tourism product and social change' is the loosest but contains some thoughtful papers. Carreras interprets mega-events in terms of a local strategy for internationalization, but as his review of the host cities of the Olympic Games and international expositions shows, this is hardly a new phenomenon. Becker offers some useful insights into new attitudes to the environment, but concludes with regard to soft tourism that environmentally friendly action has yet to follow such attitudes in many cases. Becker raises the question can mass tourism be softened and in so doing also demonstrates the lack of continuity which occurs from one chapter to another, for the earlier discussion by Marchena G6mez and Vera Rebollo offers an insightful appraisal of attempts to do just that in Spanish coastal areas. Claval's concluding chapter makes some passing reference to the earlier ones but his review of 'The impact of tourism on the restructuring of European space' offers little in the way of synthesis and concentrates more on providing an historical overview of the emergence of the major tourist regions in Europe. Although uneven in quality and adherence to the reputed themes of the book, this volume contains some very interesting, topical and thought provoking chapters. By making some very explicit links to broader patterns of restructuring this is not just another book on European tourism but one which attempts to integrate research on tourism into a broader context, As such it deserves to attract readership from a wide audience.