What next?

Anglophone human geography has been unusually dynamic this last decade or so. Intellectual change, it seems, is now the only disciplinary constant. Some have experienced the procession of new `isms', `ologies', and `turns ' in human geography as a threat to subject identity. Others are no doubt exhausted by the ceaseless profusion of theories, methodologies, and data sources. Still others, by contrast, have welcomed the multiplication of approaches that now clamour for our collective attention. However it is received, it seems to us that change in contemporary human geography is typically figured as `novelty'. This novelty, to simplify, takes three overlapping forms. First, it features as addition: that is, the introduction of something that just was not there before. Gay and lesbian, disabled, and childrens ' geographies are just a few examples of new topics that have been added to the discipline. Second, some addition takes the form of transformation. That is, several emerging adjectival geographies cannot be `safely ' pigeonholed but instead challenge conventional ways of knowing and doing across the discipline as a whole. Various strands of feminist geography are obvious examples here. Third, novelty in contemporary human geography frequently takes the form of supercession. This entails an attempted `overcoming ' of inherited cognitive and normative habits by claiming the position of a c̀onstitutive outside'. The plethora of postprefixed geographiesöpostmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism, to name but three prominent onesöarguably fall into this third category of newness. They define themselves as `beyond ' the specified postfix, yet do so with direct, agonistic reference to it. This is a complex beyondness, at once relational and ambivalent rather than absolute. We mention all this not as a prelude to some grand survey of where Anglophone human geography as a whole might be going. More modestly, we want to draw attention to a fourth form of novelty that is routinely displaced by the three we have identified: namely, novelty as the return of the old (or the continuation of the recently passë). This may seem a contradiction in terms, so let us be clear about what we mean here. This fourth form of newness is not the phoenix-like rebirth of tried, tested, Old news: representation and academic novelt