______________ ___________________ Afterword: The Geographical Sublime Noel Castree School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, UK; noel.castree@man.ac.uk In his essay ‘‘The sweatshop sublime’’, Bruce Robbins (2002) recounts the feeling of power and disappointment routinely experienced by left-wingers engaged in the ‘‘profession of thought’’. The feeling of power, he argues, derives from the application of a critical intelligence to make visible what ordinary people are rarely able to see. The feeling of disappointment, he continues, derives from the recognition that the moment of insight is unlikely to result in action. Taking the case of the Marxist-feminist heroine of David Lodge’s novel Nice Work, he likens this uneasy combination to the Kantian sublime. As she flies to a conference, the heroine reflects upon all the invisible determinations that govern the lives of the people on the ground beneath her. Yet her capacity to identify and represent these hidden hands of history leaves her strangely unsettled. As Robbins explains, her ‘‘sudden heady access to the global scale is not access to a commensurate power of action upon the global scale’’ (2002:181). This feeling of power and incapacity is, Robbins goes on to argue, what Kant called the sublime: that is, the moment when ‘‘the imagin- ation reaches its maximum and, in striving to surpass it, sinks back into itself … ’’ (Kant 1951:91). This shocking return to ourselves in our everyday smallness is, one supposes, all too familiar to those on the left of contemporary human geography. If anything has united an otherwise heterodox community of left-leaning geographers this last decade, it is surely a commitment to disclosing and sometimes challenging the myriad geographical imaginations that have a constitutive role in everyday life. To borrow David Harvey’s (1973:298) memorable words, this community has asked not whether geographical imaginations are ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘false’’ but rather ‘‘what it is that produces them and what they serve to produce’’. In answering this pointed question, left-wing geographers of diverse intellectual persuasions have together accented the material- ity of knowledge. They have shown that geographical imaginations are consequential, whether they be those of powerful institutions (like the World Bank), those of oppositional movements (like the Ó 2004 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA