ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will outline the crux of the issues that were battled over as various intellectual heirs fought over the proper “reading” of speech act theory and performatives following the death of J.L. Austin in 1960. I will also sketch out the expansive migratory dispersal of these theories as they gradually impacted almost every discipline within the humanities and the social sciences during the last fifty years. As I navigate through this terrain, I will indicate ways in which these theories inflected geography as well as reference some of the works in which geography utilized these theories.
