THE PENINSULAR OF SUBMERGED HOPE - REITMAN,BEN SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY

Dr Ben Reitman was a social reformer, hobo, doctor, lover of Emma Gold man and anarchist activist in the United States in the late 19th and e arly 20th centuries. In 1910 he gave a lecture in New York titled ''So cial Geography'' in which he used a diagram picturing an imaginary pen insular, ocean and archipelago illustrating a series of points relatin g to the exclusion of a number of groups in Chicago during the early t wentieth century. In this paper I consider the exclusion of Dr Reitman 's unconventional knowledge of the excluded from mainstream social sci ence. Remarkably, Reitman's Peninsular of Submerged Hope points to the poststructuralist cultural/social geography of the 1990s, emphasising marginalisation, amplifying marginal voices and pointing to the force s that produce marginalisation in the first place. (C) 1998 Elsevier S cience Ltd. All rights reserved.