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in this place I call Manje Kundi” (p. 219). Questions about disciplinary exchanges arealso present in Joan Kerr’s essay on “Past Present: The Local Art of Colonial Quotation”.Her account of the colonial roots of contemporary Australian ‘quotation art’ exploresthe role of art historians in bringing to light the creative potential of certain historicimages. Taking her cue from Bernard Smith, she also flies the flag for a “less Eurocentricbackground for Australian art” (p. 232). In reflecting on his own artwork, GordonBennett thus evokes “a kind of ‘psycho-topographical’ map” (p. 252), in which iconsof ‘mainstream’ Australian culture—tall ships, Captain Cook, stereotyped images ofthe Aborigine—and his consciousness of his Aboriginal inheritance can both be found,informing his sense of identity and his ‘place’ in the world.

Double Vision concludes with an illuminating afterword by Peter Brunt, entitled“Clumsy Utopians”. Levi-Strauss’s lament at the corruption of the adventure of travelin Tristes Tropiques (“A proliferating and over-excited civilisation has broken the silenceof the seas once and for all”, p. 257) provides the thread of Brunt’s argument. Hepoints to the paradoxical nature of Double Vision’s project, “caught Janus-faced betweenthe past and what is to come” (p. 259), and reflects on its ambivalence, which he linksto Habermas’ and Benjamin’s reflections on modernity. Two main tensions throughoutthe volume are identified: “an opposition between utopian social imaginings and thatwhich threatens to undermine them”, and the “ambiguous power [of images] to enchantand disenchant” (pp. 260–61). In the process, different political visions emerge: oneemploying a “rhetoric of inclusion, equality and recognition”, the other “of borders,capture, seizure and negotiation” (pp. 265–66). For Brunt, there is no ‘third way’. Theessays in Double Vision display a variety of interpretative and methodological approachesto visual images, which is itself to be welcomed. In a collection in which ‘space’ playsa key role in understanding the limits and extensions of colonial encounters, however,it is rather disappointing that none of the contributors is a geographer. This absenceshould give us cause for thought, for perhaps it tells us something about the limitationsof recent geographical work in this field, in which ‘vision’ has too readily been associatedwith the figure of the ‘monarch of all I survey’, and novelty too often reduced torepetition. Bernard Smith’s work, for all its one-sidedness, offered a different perspectiveon the creativity of encounters: as Greg Dening recently puts it, perhaps the eyes oftravellers “sometimes see things that they did not expect to see” (Readings/Writings,1998, p. 76). Double Vision shows us that in reading colonial art across the grain, avariety of visions can be disclosed, bringing us nearer to the complexities of seeing; anessential step for those seriously engaged in rewriting the historical geographies ofcolonialism.

Royal Holloway, University of London L M

doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0363, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

B C, Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluenceof Cultures in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (Vancouver: University of BritishColumbia Press, 1998. Pp. xxi+200. £22.50 paperback)

Through an analysis of one missionary’s engagement with Native Americans in BritishColumbia, Christophers addresses a wide range of issues preoccupying historicalgeographers of colonialism. John Booth Good was Anglican missionary to the Nlha7-kapmx in the Fraser Canyon between 1867 and 1883. Christophers uses the archiverelating to Good dexterously to narrate his ambivalent roles, first in bringing Anglicanism

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to ‘Native’ society, and then in seeing it selectively accommodated. Beginning withGood’s acceptance of an invitation to establish a mission, Christophers traces themissionary’s travails through a period in which the mission flourished, to the pointwhere Good’s failure to protect Native land rights prompted widespread disillusionment.One of the many strengths of the book is its attention to the insecurities of colonialmissionaries like Good. Not only could they never be sure that their converts hadadopted Christianity for the ‘right’ reasons, they were also perpetually struggling toease the tensions involved in promoting both material ‘civilization’ and spiritualredemption. Christophers is adept at pointing out the ironic intricacies of this struggle.For instance, he argues that many converts professed to have sought baptism simplybecause they considered their initial conversion as a pledge to respect Good’s wishes.Just at the moment, then, when Good achieved an impressive power over his converts—the power to have his will obeyed—he also failed in his ultimate endeavour: to prompta new volition for reformation, upwelling from within the soul of the convert. In tracingGood’s interventions, Christophers is ever mindful of the need not to be complicit incolonial discourses’ own effacement of Native histories and voices. As far as the archiveallows, he takes pains to emphasize the effects of Nlha7kapmx men and women uponGood’s mission as well as those of Good upon Nlha7kapmx society. Christophers isalso sensitive to the gendering of Good’s work and engages fruitfully with debatesconcerning gender and colonial settlement more broadly. Relationships between the re-ordering of space and different kinds of colonial power, however, are a more particularconcern of the book. Christophers explores them primarily through an adaptation ofFoucault’s work on pastoral and governmental power. He indicates the ways in whichmissionaries pursuing a vision of pastoral care adopted strategies of spatial containmentassociated with governmentality. This response was forced upon them by Nativemobilities that frustrated the missionaries’ attempts to find concentrated audiences. Inthis way, indigenous spatiality is itself shown to be a mode of cultural resistance.

The book is an excellent study of missionary practice and indigenous appropriationin one part of the colonized world, but Christophers is also making a more generaltheoretical point. This is addressed to a constituency of postcolonial critics who tendto characterize colonial discourse in ways that Christophers describes as “undulyambitious and terribly reductive” (p. 34). Taking up the concerns of analysts such asAnne Stoler, he successfully brings our attention to bear on differentiated colonialinterests with competing positionalities. Good’s Anglican discourse, with its orderingbased upon distinctions of sin and virtue rather than race, was reproduced in considerabletension with other colonial discourses propagated by settlers, administrators and,indeed, other missionaries. Christophers’ analysis of it thus leads one to be wary of themore homogenizing assertions about colonial discourse that saturate postcolonialtheory. The examination of the Anglican colonial project is sophisticated, not leastbecause Christophers takes its religious logic seriously, devoting many pages to theo-logical exegesis. However, I felt that his complication of postcolonial generalizationscould have been yet more useful if a similarly nuanced approach had been taken tothe analysis of those competing discourses against which evangelical colonialism wasdefined. Whereas Christophers is willing to question the assertions of postcolonial‘stars’ such as Homi Bhabha over their neglect of missionary specificity, he is perhapstoo willing to take their generalizations at face value when it comes to other colonialprojects. To comprehend particular episodes of colonialism, I would suggest thatwe should explore the intersection and interplay between settler, administrative andmissionary projects, each one of them considered in all its complexity, specificity andambivalence. We can simultaneously retain a broader perspective by exploring theconnections that were forged between these projects across a more global terrain—onethat, in this case, linked British Columbia to other colonies and to the metropole.

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The ultimate decline of Good’s mission, for instance, might usefully be seen as onemanifestation of a much more general shift in imperial discourse. This shift wasencouraged by the triumph of differentiated but globally interconnected settler interestsover missionary and indigenous resistance in many parts of the empire at around thesame time. A critique of what this book does not do, however, is too harsh a way toconclude a review. The book contains enough insight into the complicated relationsbetween colonizer and colonized, and enough food for thought about the state ofcolonial discourse analysis, for any one volume. I would thoroughly recommend it forscholars working on and teaching about the historical geographies of colonialism, notjust in British Columbia, but at any colonial site.

University of Sussex A L

doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0364, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

S M, Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Move-ment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Pp. viii+210. £25.00 hardback)

Considering that there have been only two garden cities that even loosely conform toEbenezer Howard’s original blueprint, the range of literature on the subject is remarkablyextensive. Reasons why the subject has attracted so much interest are because of theoriginality of the concept; because the garden city movement is sometimes seen toembrace a wider field of activity, to include garden suburbs if not the whole suburbanphenomenon, and because the movement was international in scope. However, evenallowing for these reasons and the continuing interest of readers, one has to lookcritically at fresh works in an already well covered field. Can new research lead todifferent interpretations, or reveal the findings of a hitherto undiscovered archive? Domodern circumstances call for a redefinition of perspectives more attuned to the valuesof contemporary readers? In many ways, Standish Meacham offers little that is new.Successive chapters deal, in turn, with Bournville and Port Sunlight, as exemplars ofplanned settlements; with Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City Association; withthe contributions of the architects, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin; with Letchworth,the first garden city; and with Hampstead Garden Suburb. The accounts of each arewell researched and clearly described, but they offer nothing new. Stanley Buder, RobertBeevers, Mervyn Miller, and Stephen Ward are just a few of the authors who havealready produced authoritative texts on these subjects. Both in terms of sources and ininterpretation it is hard to see what Meacham adds to this stock. There is, however,one possible difference, the clue being in the book’s sub-title, Englishness and the earlygarden city movement.

Englishness, argues Meacham, was a theme that informed not simply the garden citymovement but also wider attitudes towards social reform in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries. He sees it as a vision of an imaginary past projected into anideal future; to regain paradise, he asserts, it helps to have a vision of paradise lost.Thus, the vision was essentially anti-urban, steeped in a sentimentalized image of a lostage of virginal landscapes and a peasant idyll. Society was hierarchical but orderly. Itwas this sense of order that appealed especially to reformers, offering an alternative tothe threat of urban hordes and class conflict. In such a setting, the very idea ofEnglishness had a calming influence, and what better to exemplify this than the gardencity itself. The very name of this new panacea conjured up images of cottages andgreenery, unthreatening and consensual. Howard spoke of the middle way, and reformers

2001 Academic Press