Roots of Radical Geography Clark Akatiff (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution In memory of Jim Blaut, birder, calypsoean, geographer, freedom fighter, friend. Part One Introduction I’m Clark Akatiff. I was a pioneer of radical geography—out of the academy for 45 years. I was employed as a professor of geography during the decade 1966–1976, at the end of which time I entered the hourly working class.1 Thanks to the advocacy of Bill Bunge and the editorial judgment of John Fraser Hart, my “March on the Pentagon” was published in 1974 in the Annals2—a capstone to my truncated career. It was the fact that Don Mitchell cited that article in his summary of current radical or critical geography3 that has led me to present this memoir; that, and the fact that the AAG was again meeting in my hometown of San Francisco.4 [End Page 258] Click for larger view View full resolution Issued at San Jose State University, 1971. I came of age in the late ’50s, having discovered Marxism5 and geography at essentially the same time. As an undergraduate at San Jose State College, I was an organizer of student antiwar and civil rights demonstrations—activities that, as the ’60s progressed, became known as the “New Left.”6 Once I had entered graduate school at UCLA, I found myself in a position of leadership of the then-burgeoning student protest movement, since my experience and continuing relationship with the Bay Area movement gave me a certain caché. I taught a class in socialism and Marxism on campus in 1961.7 This brought me a certain notoriety, and it became an issue that almost cost me admission to the Ph.D. program in Geography. [End Page 259] At that time, there was a revolution gestating in professional geography. Geography was a stodgy old study, dominated by orthodoxy and exclusivity. Also down on its luck, it was being retired at Harvard, then Stanford, and also substantially inhabited by government hacks, often with military and intelligence connections. Empirical to the extreme, suspicious of theory. I played a small but critical role in the transformation of geography. It is especially my relationship with William Bunge that provides the fulcrum upon which this narrative transpires. No one person is more important to radical geography than William Bunge. A giant of a man, overwhelming in his assumptions and presence. A Communist then and until his death. A tireless battler for the cause of both theoretical advances in geography and the political relevance of the discipline.8 I met Bunge during my tenure as an assistant professor at Michigan State University. I had been told, indirectly, that I would be hired as long as I didn’t establish a working relationship with the notorious Dr. Bill Bunge, who was stirring up trouble for geography in Detroit. And I guess I was a disappointment, because I did. Establish a relationship, that is. While a student at UCLA, I had learned about Bunge. His Theoretical Geography9 had everyone talking, though we were decidedly anti-quantification. More importantly, I had heard, through left-wing channels, that he was a Communist.10 He was the only geographer I knew of who, like myself, had a real karmic wedding to the left-wing radical movement that was coming into full focus in the late ’60s. And like him, I was deep into geographical theory, but not mathematical. It took me years to realize that there was and always had been “left geography” because it had been so successfully stifled. Bill is of the old left, an aristocrat by birth and by temperament. He could play the piano like Jelly Roll Morton but he did not dig the sixties scene. Maybe he knew a little about Bob,11 but I doubt he ever listened to The Beatles, and I’m sure if he’d ever even heard of the Dead it would have been years later. He drank, but he was down on drugs. Bunge thought drugs were a plot by the CIA to enslave the working class and keep the vanguard distracted. (Seems like he may have been...