from the ‘North American ’ Container

Antje Schlottmann is one of a growing number of young German-speaking scholars who, while fully steeped in their own linguistically-specific traditions, also have substantial mastery of the English-language human geography of the last three or four decades. Like their Anglophone counterparts, these geographers have delved ever more deeply into the literatures of critical social theory, feminism, poststructructuralism, postcolonialism, and so on, in order to search out relevant and useful insights and arguments. However, given the different starting points and ongoing problematics orienting their research, they have done different things with these ideas. Making a more serious effort at dialogue, as the present forum aims to do, will not only broaden our sense of what is being done elsewhere. It can also provide a healthy sense of the contingency of the trajectories taken in Anglophone human geography. To take an example relevant to Schlottmann’s book, it is not too much of an over-simplification to say that in the UK, North America and the Antipodes, the rise of feminist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, critical race and non