The peninsular of submerged hope: Ben Reitman's social geography

Dr Ben Reitman was a social reformer, hobo, doctor, lover of Emma Goldman and anarchist activist in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1910 he gave a lecture in New York titled "Social Geography" in which he used a diagram picturing an imaginary peninsular, ocean and archipelago illustrating a series of points relating to the exclusion of a number of groups in Chicago during the early twentieth century. In this paper I consider the exclusion of Dr Reitman's unconventional knowledge of the excluded from mainstream social science. 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 forces that produce marginalisation in the first place. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.