A Sign of the Times: Scandinavian Town Directories as Sources for Urban Historical Geography

The position of town and trade directories as sources for the reconstruction of former urban geographies of Scandinavia is discussed. Scandinavian directories have a long history which, in the case of major urban centres, can be traced back to the eighteenth century. They contain valuable information with respect to the social, economic, political and demographic organization of modern Scandinavian urban environments through extensive listings of names and addresses. Despite the wealth of information contained therein, directories remain an underused and unresearched data source due mainly to their perceived incompatibility with the themes pursued by research in urban historical geography and the diversity of alternative high quality sources available. Admittedly, the use of directories is not without problems and an assessment of the accuracy, availability and reliability of directory information is presented in this paper. Nevertheless, to dismiss directories represents a serious oversight: the continued history, rapid rate of update and spatial ubiquity of publication across the region after the onset of industrialization make directories a powerful source for comparative urban historical geography research in Scandinavia. Moreover, directories are highly versatile data sources and represent powerful artefacts of modernity insofar as they function as mirrors of cultural change and consumption.     

Book reviews

Plans, Pragmatism and People: the Legacy of Soviet Planning for Today's Cities. R. Antony French. London, UCL Press, 1995, 233 pp. US$19.95 pb, ISBN 0 82296 106 7

The Politics of Decentralisation: Revitalising Local Democracy. D. Burns, R. Hambleton and P. Hoggett. London, Macmillan, 1994, xvi + 304 pp., £12.50 pb, ISBN 0 333 52164 1

Environmentally Sustainable Business: a Local and Regional Perspective. P. Roberts. London, Paul Chapman, 1995, 271 pp., £16.95, ISBN 1 85396 240 6

International Perspectives in Urban Studies 3. Ronan Paddison, John Money and Bill Lever (Eds). London, Jessica Kingsley, 1995, 284 pp., US$37.50 pb, ISBN 1 85302 311 6

British Planning Policy in Transition: Planning in the Major Years. M. Tewdwr‐Jones (Ed.). London, UCL Press, 1996, 262pp., £14.95 pb, ISBN 1 85728 422 4, £40.00 hb, ISBN 1 85728 421 6     

Gao and Igbo-Ukwu: Beads, interregional trade, and beyond

Recent excavations in the city of Gao in eastern Mali have uncovered a sizable assemblage of imported and locally produced beads which are similar in many ways to the beads excavated at the site of Igbo-Ukwu in Nigeria. The similarities between the two assemblages suggest that they are indicative of interregional trade along the River Niger. As the likely source of many of the beads is Fustat in Egypt, Gao may well have been the middleman between Igbo-Ukwu and the former site. This route, it is argued, is more satisfactory than a direct east-west trade across the Sudannic zone, which has been argued for previously as a channel of international trade for Igbo-Ukwu.     

The Matabeleland Massacres: Britain's wilful blindness

This article explores an episode of post-colonial state violence in the newly independent Zimbabwe, namely state-sanctioned atrocities by the army unit known as Fifth Brigade, perpetrated against the Ndebele of Matabeleland and Midlands region. This episode of political and ethnic violence that occurred between 1983 and 1987 is referred to as both the Matabeleland Massacres and Gukurahundi. Members of the British government in Zimbabwe, which included a British Military Advisory Training Team (BMATT) on the ground, were intimately aware of the violence that resulted in the death of between 10,000 and 20,000 people. This article analyses official British and US government communications between the British High Commission, Harare, and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Defence, London, as well as between the US Department of State and the US Embassy in Harare. Analysis of the documents dated between January and March 1983 sheds a critical new lens on Gukurahundi, establishing what knowledge was available to the British and US governments about the persistent and relentless atrocities taking place; the diplomatic approaches pursued by both governments in response; and their rationale for same. The hitherto unavailable material presented here was obtained by Freedom of Information requests to various British Government offices and to the US Department of State. Analysis establishes that the British High Commission, Harare, had detailed knowledge of events unfolding in Matabeleland from an early stage of Gukurahundi, yet senior members of BMATT and the British diplomatic team in Harare, in contrast to their US counterparts, were consistent in their efforts to minimise the magnitude of Fifth Brigade atrocities. That the British government chose to adopt a policy of wilful blindness towards the atrocities undoubtedly constituted naked realpolitik.     

Literatura y realidad histórica en Las conversiones de Martín Recuerda

Abstract

Kathleen M. Glenn and Mercedes Mazquiarán de Rodríguez, eds. Spanish Women Writers and the Essay. Gender, Politics, and the Self. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. 294 pp. $34.95.

Watson, Janell. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust. The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 227 pp.

Anne J. Cruz. Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 320 pp.     

Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this article we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and ‘real’ politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined.