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The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. By MARTIN W. LEWIS and KA,REN E. WIGEN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 344. $55 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Martin W. Lewis and Karen Wigen have written a pretentious, preachy book, but an interesting one. The pretentiousness is evident in the title, The Myth of Continents. Surely all historians and geographers are aware that the conventional division of the world into continents is rather arbitrary and somewhat misleading. On the one hand, the separation of Asia from Europe at the Ural Mountains is arbitrary. The identification of sub-Saharan Africa with the African continent as a whole can be misleading. And so on. On the other hand, Africa, South America, and North America are large and discrete chunks of land, and there is nothing inherently wrong about calling them continents. There are problems with this word, but to preach a long sermon against "the myth of continents" is somewhat pretentious. Equally pretentious is the subtitle, "A Critique of Metageography": the word metageography seems to have been coined by the authors as an impressive-sounding synonym for "world cultural geography." But The Myth of Continents is pretentious also in another and more disturbing way. The authors claim that the problems dealt with in the book are of momentous importance; that many of these problems have not been tackled or even noticed by other scholars; and that the way the problems are analyzed in this book is radical and unorthodox. These claims are exaggerated. Some of the problems dealt with in the book are important, but none is earth-shaking. Some of them remain unsolved, but not for lack of scholarly effort. And the way these problems are analyzed in The Myth of Continents is, on the whole, rather conventional and indeed rather conservative.
Most of the book is devoted to criticism of various ways in which the world is carved up and mapped. A long introduction focuses on the idea of the Third World and the idea of the nation-state. Lewis and Wigen remind us that the "second world" no longer exists as a world-scale region, so we no longer have literally a "third" world region. Therefore, they say (correctly) that the Third World "is essentially a political-economic...