Federico Ferretti
Biographic Data
| ID | 98660 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Federico Ferretti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Federico |
| FAMILY NAME | Ferretti |
| SIGNATURE | FERRETTI F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bologna |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5446-6522 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 92 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 335 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 91 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
When children’s literature encounters political repression: Brazilian insights for critical geographies of education
This paper addresses a case that is virtually unknown to international readerships. That is, the ban from schools of João Carlos Marinho's children's novel O Caneco de Prata (The Silver Cup) under the Brazilian dictatorship (1964–1985). In 1973, the adoption of Caneco as a reading book for a sixth-level class (10–12-year-old children) at the Rainha da Paz School led to a formal inquiry by the political police into the book's author and the instit…
Decolonisation Versus “Balkanisation”: Radical and Diasporic Geographies of PAI ( Parti Africain de l'Indépendance ) in Paris
This paper analyses the activities of PAI ( Parti Africain de l'Indépendance ) from 1957 to 1963 in Paris and more broadly in France, where PAI was one of the most radical groups fighting for decolonisation, initially taking the form of a transnational and diasporic federation. PAI opposed both the ‘balkanisation’ of colonial territories across national boundaries, and neo‐colonialism understood as the persistence of capitalist exploitation. For …
People’s education ‘was subversive’. Spaces and struggles of Brazilian Movimento de Cultura Popular towards radical and decolonized geographies of education
This paper addresses spaces and struggles of Movimento de Cultura Popular (MCP), participated by famous educator Paulo Freire and inspired by radical geographers Josué de Castro and Manuel Correia de Andrade. This pioneering experience in People’s Education took place in Pernambuco, Northeastern Brazil, and was brutally shut down by the 1964 military coup, as MCP’s endeavours for literacy of workers, peasants, indigenous and Afro-descendant peopl…
Watching Radical Geography: Spaces and Practices of Authoritarian Surveillance in ‘Democratic’ and ‘Dictatorial’ Brazil
This paper addresses stories of surveillance of Brazilian critical/radical geographers, drawing on innovative sources. That is, the folders and reports through which the political police and related institutions watched critical and radical scholars during the 20th century in all Brazilian states and abroad, under both ‘dictatorial’ and ‘democratic’ regimes. Our argument is twofold: first, surveillance is not only a device that characterises ‘aut…
Geographies of meaning and experience
Anne Buttimer was an innovative human geographer who exerted an influence on the discipline from the early 1970s. This chapter explores Buttimer’s commitment to Humanistic Geography, which involved scrutinising and putting to work ethical and social values to make Geography matter beyond just the university and theoretical speculation. Here, Buttimer drew especially on the idea of the “lifeworld”, that is, a person’s subjective lived experience. …
Translations, translocations, and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge
Based on recently opened multilingual archives, this paper addresses relationally three transnational cases of early networking for critical and radical geography that took place in different countries and languages between the 1970s and the 1980s. Addressing materials from the Union of Socialist Geographers (USG, North America and around, 1974–1982), the Unión de Geógrafos Progresistas de México (UGPM, Mexico [involving Latin America], 1978–1990…
Radical Autobiography as Place Storytelling: The Troubled Antiracist Geopoetics of “Wild Bill”
Worlding decolonisation: Rediscovering federalist and pluralist geographies of more-than-national liberation
This paper argues for rethinking the shortcomings of historical decolonisation, commonly opposed to more ambitious decolonial goals. By addressing significant cases of European radical ‘allies’ of anticolonial movements in the years of African and Caribbean independences, this work proposes new geographies of decolonisation based on the study of transnational and multilingual circuits of committed intellectuals who proposed socialistic and/or fed…
Historical geographies: Translating times and spaces
In July 2020 the Journal of Historical Geography published an editorial marking our commitment to a decolonial ethos and praxis. We committed to this not only in our empirical or theoretical interests, but in our functioning as a journal. It was noted in the next editorial that we had, to date, failed to represent the international, multilingual nature of historical geography communities. As part of the continuation of this task, and to mark the …
The Journal of Historical Geography at 50
Introducing liquid worlds: Historical geographies and cartographies of the sea
Resulting from a multi-paper session organized by the International Geographical Union/Division of History of Science and Technology (IGU/DHST) Commission History of Geography, this virtual special issue engages with the challenges that waters and spaces characterized by liquid/solid hybridity pose to geographic thought and mapping practices since the antiquity. The places of the earliest experimentations of ‘rational’ geographical knowledge—as e…
Geopoetics of distance: The anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic Negritude
This paper addresses origins, diasporic networks and main output of Lusophone Negritude geopoetics. Less famous than its French-speaking counterpart, this literary and political movement was inaugurated by 1942 poetry book Ilha de Nome Santo by São Tomé e Príncipe-born geographer and poet Francisco José Vasques Tenreiro (1921 – 1963). It culminated with the 1953 collection Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa that Tenreiro co-edited with anticolo…
Other antiracist geographies: Decentred locations of defiant activism, and Second Abolitions
Based on original archival research, this article discusses early transnational challenges to paternalistic views of 'racial democracy' that took place in Brazilian social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. It analyses the little-known but incredibly relevant work carried out with São Paulo Afro-Brazilian communities by Florestan Fernandes and Roger Bastide, critical sociologists who collaborated with anti-racist activists such…
Voluntary Geographies of Internationalism: The Contributions of a Radical Mexican Family to Global Pacifism, Feminism, and Anticolonialism
This article addresses geographies of internationalism, feminism, pacifism, and anticolonialism, by investigating the case of pacifist and feminist activist Clementina Batalla Torres de Bassols (1894–1987) and her son, geographer Ángel Bassols Batalla (1925–2012). Based in Mexico and involved in global conferencing on pacifism, women’s rights, and geography, this activist and scholarly family provided examples of voluntary commitment to internati…
Pathways Through the Sea: Decolonial Geopoetics of the Mediterranean in Italian Folksong
Extending and connecting scholarship on decolonial geopoetics, critical Mediterraneanism and maritime (wet and more-than-wet) ontologies, this paper discusses Genoese folksinger Fabrizio De André’s political, poetical, and geographical work on the Mediterranean Sea. De André has been considered as a pioneer of “World Music” for his linguistic and historical research on sounds and stories of the Mediterranean. Yet, a socially and politically commi…
Re-imagining the futures of geographical thought and praxis
The question of geography's future has recurred throughout the history of geographical thought, and responses to it often presume a linear trajectory from the past and present to a possible future. Yet one of the major contributions that geographers have made to understanding spatio-temporality is reconceiving both space and time as plural, fluid, and co-constituted through multiple space–time trajectories simultaneously. Amidst the ongoing crise…
Conversations in geography: Journeying through four decades of history and philosophy of geography in the United Kingdom
This article offers a critical appraisal of institutionalised knowledge production and exchange on the history and philosophy of geography in the United Kingdom. We examine broad epistemic trends over 41 years (1981–2021) through an analysis of annual conference sessions and special events convened by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG…
Why the history and philosophy of geography matter: Louise Michel's radical, anticolonial, and pluralist geographies
In this short paper, I contend that the history and philosophy of geography should be considered as an indispensable scholarly field to nourish both theoretical speculations about geography and ongoing scholars' political and social engagement towards critical, radical, decolonial, feminist and antiracist geographies. I argue that rediscovering ‘other geographical traditions’ is paramount to these scholarly and political agendas. After briefly su…
History and philosophy of geography: Looking back and looking forward
This introduction to the special issue Reflections on Histories and Philosophies of Geography discusses the context and content of nineteen articles written to mark the fortieth anniversary of the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG). The group was founded in 1981, two years after the early career researchers who set up the group, Richard T…
The Mediterranean metaphor and Léon Metchnikoff's Great Historical Rivers: Anarchist geographies of water-land hybridity
This paper discusses ideas of anarchist (historical) geographies of rivers and seas. It does so by addressing works of early anarchist geographer Lev Ilich Mechnikov (mentioned here with the more known French spelling Léon Metchnikoff) (1838–1888), which lie at the origin of broader ‘Mediterranean metaphors’ comparing the globalising role of oceanic navigation to early Mediterranean connectedness, mainly discussed by Metchnikoff in his key book L…
For an Anarchist Decolonial Agenda: New Perspectives on Anarchism, Marronage, and Indigeneity from Brazil/Pindorama
This paper proposes new perspectives on anarchism, indigeneity, and Afro‐descendent struggles, by discussing the case of Brazilian anarchists’ commitment to luta afroindígena . They mean by this term the intersection of indigenous and Afro‐descendant resistances for the recognition of land, against the violence of states, agribusiness, and extractivism. I argue that this case offers key insights to radical geographies, and to the broader field of…
Géographicité , material agency and the thickness of the Earth: Rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond ‘nature/culture’ dualisms
This paper reassesses and rediscovers the intellectual legacy of French geographer Eric Dardel (1899–1967). First discovered by geographers in the 1970s and 1980s, Dardel’s book L’Homme et la Terre was considered as a work predating alternatively humanistic approaches and postmodern critiques of positivism, which justifies why it passed substantially unperceived when it was first published in 1952. Yet, most of these authors have manifestly only …
For critical geo-histories of population. Engaging geographically with Massimo Livi Bacci's works
This paper aims at calling geographers' attention to the works of Italian historical demographer Massimo Livi Bacci, who authored fundamental texts on the indigenous genocide in the Americas, on the history of world population, on global migrations and on population's environmental 'sustainability'. In denouncing colonial crimes, critically questioning commonplaces of Malthusian origin and challenging sovereignist prejudices against migrations, L…
Conciliating Subaltern and Liminal Geopolitics: Reggio Emilia's City Diplomacy and the Geographies of Lusophone Africa's Decolonisation
This paper discusses the story of a generous popular mobilisation that made possible a peculiar experience of transnational cooperation since the early 1970s. That is, the campaigns in solidarity with Mozambican anticolonial resistance that made the small town of Reggio Emilia (Italy) a key place in the processes of Lusophone Africa decolonisation, to the point that an often-told anecdote reports that many Mozambican people sympathetic with anti-…
Geography and Geographers in Place and Time: A View from the International Geographical Union’s Commission on the History of Geography
Inventing critical development: A Brazilian geographer and his Northern networks
This paper addresses a corpus of unpublished sources in a first attempt to reconstruct the exile networks of Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, placing his geographical and political work in the context of present-day debates on development, anti-development and critical development. Our main argument is twofold: first, we argue that Santos played important although poorly understood roles in the debates that shaped both Anglophone and French-sp…
Geographies of internationalism: Radical development and critical geopolitics from the Northeast of Brazil
History and philosophy of geography I: Decolonising the discipline, diversifying archives and historicising radicalism
It does so by analysing scholarship published this year (including contributions from outside the Anglosphere), which rediscovers geographical traditions other than Northern ones, diversifies archives and places by including feminist, decolonial and subaltern outlooks, and addresses geographical traditions in radicalism and activism, increasingly connecting this field of studies with wider scholarly and political debates
From the drought to the mud: Rediscovering geopoetics and cultural hybridity from the Global South
This article addresses the notion of geopoetics, arguing for a decolonial rediscovery of ideas and practices associated with this concept through authors, narratives and (geo)poetical traditions from the Global South. For this purpose, I analyse a body of narrative work, poetry and archives by Brazilian geographers Mauro Mota and Josué de Castro, inserting their texts into the cultural and environmental contexts of their region, the Northeast of …
The correspondence between Élisée Reclus and Pëtr Kropotkin as a source for the history of geography
Rediscovering other geographical traditions
In the last few years, a vibrant interdisciplinary and international literature is rediscovering those sectors of the geographical tradition whose exponents did not match the classical stereotype of the Western academic geographer directly or indirectly contributing to colonialism, warfare, and social conservatism. Ongoing research on primary sources has shown that early progressive, dissident, and unorthodox tendencies in the history of the disc…
Evolution and revolution: Anarchist geographies, modernity and poststructuralism
This paper addresses the recent rediscovery of anarchist geographies and its implications in current debates on the 'foundations' of science and knowledge. By interrogating both recent works and original texts by early anarchist geographers who have greater influence on present-day literature such as Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) and Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), I discuss the possible uses of a poststructuralist critique for this line of research by …
History and philosophy of geography III: Global histories of geography, statues that must fall and a radical and multilingual turn
Finishing my triennial series of reports on the increasingly vibrant (and still much neglected) field of the history and philosophy of geography (HPG), I first discuss how some trends that I identified are continuing, such as a growing drive towards internationalisation and multilingualism and an increasing engagement with decolonial themes and histories of radical activism inside and outside the academically defined field of geography. I conclud…
The nation against the State: The Irish question and Britain‐based anarchists in the Age of Empire
This paper discusses the relationship between early anarchism and republican/nationalist ideas. We will focus on the case of British‐based activists grouped around the journal Freedom and their engagement with Irish nationalism during the Age of the Empire. Freedom, founded in 1886, was the most important anarchist journal of the English‐speaking anarchist–communist networks at the time and was the main editorial reference for the worldwide commu…
They have the right to throw us out”: Élisée Reclus' New Universal Geography
The anarchist and geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) argued for the idea of universal brotherhood for all the peoples of the world in his encyclopaedic work the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (NGU) (1876–1894). The nature of Reclus' argument and its representations of Europe, otherness and colonialism, however, are contested today, and it is unclear what insights it might offer to contemporary students of colonialism and post‐colonialism. In t…
Decolonizing regional planning from the Global South: Active geographies and social struggles in Northeastern Brazil
This paper addresses the engagement of critical geographers from Northeastern Brazil with regional planning, aiming at transforming society by acting on their region's spaces. Extending and putting in relation literature on planning theory in the Global South and geographical scholarship on decoloniality, I explore new archives showing how the planning work that these geographers performed from 1957 to 1964 was an example of the 'South' re-elabor…
Decolonizing the Northeast: Brazilian Subalterns, Non-European Heritages, and Radical Geography in Pernambuco
This article addresses histories and geographies of the northeast of Brazil in the works of radical Pernambuco geographer Manuel Correia de Andrade and his main intellectual inspirations, such as Euclides da Cunha and Josué de Castro. Drawing on current literature on subaltern spaces, critical race studies, and the Modernity-Coloniality-Decoloniality project, I especially consider de Andrade's works that address popular revolts by marginalized an…
History and philosophy of geography II: Rediscovering individuals, fostering interdisciplinarity and renegotiating the ‘margins’
Publications in the field of history and philosophy of geography have shown increasing vibrancy and consistent alignments around some key foci. These are, first, a renewed engagement with biographies and autobiographies, which is part of wider rediscoveries of individuals as concrete actors in the construction of knowledge. Second, a draw towards interdisciplinarity in reassessing practices such as exploration, mapping and publishing, in connecti…
The spatiality of geography teaching and cultures of alternative education: The 'intuitive geographies' of the anarchist school in Cempuis (1880-1894)
As part of current studies focusing on geographies of education and spatiality of teaching and learning, this article addresses the didactic experiences of historical anarchist schools, which opened in several countries at the end of the 19th century. The article deals especially with the example of the Cempuis School (1880-1894) in France, which was run by the anarchist activist and teacher Paul Robin. The aim here is twofold. First, the article…
Pioneers in the history of cartography: The Geneva map collection of Élisée Reclus and Charles Perron
Indignation, Civic Virtue, and the Right of Resistance: Critical Geography and Antifascism in Italy
International audience
Other radical geographies: Tropicality and decolonisation in 20th‐century French geography
This paper analyses the anticolonialist commitment of a group of French geographers who variously criticised French colonialism or directly contributed to decolonisation movements in Africa in the central decades of the 20th century. Based on the analysis of works and unpublished archives of these scholars and activists, I argue that their work can be considered as a specific French contribution to early critical and radical geographies, exposing…
Anarchism, Geohistory, and the Annales: Rethinking Elisée Reclus's Influence on Lucien Febvre
It has been hypothesized that the celebrated geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus was a decisive influence on several concepts that are characteristic of the Annales School, the historical French school of the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, such as longue durée, material history, space-movement, and geohistory. Yet no systematic research exists on the topic. In this paper, on the basis of textual analysis and new archival materials r…
A Coffin for Malthusianism: Josué De Castro's Subaltern Geopolitics
Drawing upon archival research on de Castro’s correspondences and scholarly networks and on the editorial history of his key book Geopolitics of Hunger, first I argue that de Castro was a forerunner of the definition of geopolitics in a critical sense and that this nonconformist attitude has been one of the primary reasons for his persistent scholarly neglect. Second, I argue that de Castro’s anti-colonial geopolitics, based on subaltern agency, …
Subaltern connections: Brazilian critical geographers, development and African decolonisation
This article explores the relations to Africa and African decolonisation of three key figures in Brazilian critical geographies and development studies, Manuel Correia de Andrade (1922–2007), Josué de Castro (1908–1973) and Milton Santos (1926–2001). Based on an analysis of their works and unpublished archives, I argue the radical Third World perspectives these intellectuals expressed anticipated later critiques of development as a neocolonial de…
The murderous civilisation: Anarchist geographies, ethnography and cultural differences in the works of Élie Reclus
This article, based on primary sources, addresses the early anarchist ethnography of Élie Reclus (brother of the more famous French geographer Élisée Reclus), placing it in the context of anarchist geographers' elaboration of the theory of mutual aid, as well as in the construction of a scientific discourse opposed to racism, colonialism and Eurocentrism recently addressed by international literature on this group. Drawing on the double critical …
Traveling in Lifeworlds: New Perspectives on (Post) Humanism, Situated Subjectivities, and Agency from a Travel Diary
This article argues for building bridges between humanistic geographical traditions and current posthumanistic approaches destabilizing the centrality and the very epistemological status of the human subject. Extending and putting in relation recent literature highlighting the possible continuities over the ruptures between these traditions and feminist scholarship arguing for the political relevancy of intimate writings and emotional geographies…
Mapping do-it-yourself science
The emergence of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) science movements is becoming a topic widely discussed in academia and policy, as well as by the general public and the media. While DIY approaches enjoy increasing diffusion even in official research, different social actors frequently talk about them in different ways and circumstances. Interaction and negotiation processes amongst actors (e.g. policy makers and DIY communities) define the premises upon whi…
The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation
In 1882, conservative Parisian journalist Abert Delpit commented on the endorsing speech Élisée Reclus pronounced at the “free union” ceremony of his daughters Magali and Jeannie, who publicly celebrated the fact they went to live with two young men without any legal sanction from a mayor or a priest. Given that this event raised a huge scandal in French mainstream press, Delpit tried to explain the contradiction between the generalized praise of…
Decentring the Lettered City: Exile, Transnational Networks, and Josué de Castro’s Centre International pour le Développement (1964–1973)
This paper discusses the relevance of radical scholarship by exploring the case of the Centre International pour le Développement (CID), founded by Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro during his exile in Paris. Drawing upon Latin American works on the “Lettered City” and the evolving role of intellectuals in constructing critical knowledge, I explore new archives revealing the CID’s daily (net)working. My argument is that this case suggests new …
The correspondence between Élisée Reclus and Pëtr Kropotkin as a source for the history of geography
La redécouverte d’Élisée Reclus: À Propos D’ouvrages Récents
Dans la littérature abordant l’histoire et la théorie de la discipline géographique, la figure d’Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) est désormais une référence presque obligatoire, au point que cet auteur redécouvert dans les années 1970 en tant que personnage méconnu et oublié semble être, aujourd’hui, l’un des géographes les plus travaillés par l’historiographie disciplinaire. Cette impression est confirmée par la bibliographie qui lui a été consacrée d…
Pioneers in the history of cartography: The Geneva map collection of Élisée Reclus and Charles Perron
They have the right to throw us out”: Élisée Reclus' New Universal Geography
The anarchist and geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) argued for the idea of universal brotherhood for all the peoples of the world in his encyclopaedic work the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (NGU) (1876–1894). The nature of Reclus' argument and its representations of Europe, otherness and colonialism, however, are contested today, and it is unclear what insights it might offer to contemporary students of colonialism and post‐colonialism. In t…
Eles têm o direito de expulsar-nos: A Nova Geografia Universal de Élisée Reclus
Em seu trabalho enciclopédico Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (1876-1894), o anarquista e geógrafo Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) tentou enfatizar a ideia de uma comunhão universal e fraternal entre os povos do mundo. Reclus era famoso não somente como geógrafo, mas também como exilado da Comuna de Paris. Atualmente, pesquisadores não são unânimes na apreciação da relação entre a Nouvelle Géographie Universelle e o colonialismo contemporâneo, mas pouc…
Un regard hétérodoxe sur le Nouveau Monde: La géographie d'Élisée Reclus et l'extermination des Amérindiens (1861-1905)
La Nouvelle géographie universelle d'Élisée Reclus, un des ouvrages de géographie les plus connus de la seconde moitié du xixe siècle, consacre au Nouveau Monde une place de choix. Comme cet ouvrage eut une diffusion grand public et que son auteur était célèbre comme fondateur de l'anarchisme et exilé de la Commune de Paris, son influence dans l'opinion publique progressiste européenne fut appréciable. Nous nous interrogeons, dans cet article, su…
Inventing I taly. G eography, R isorgimento and national imagination: The international circulation of geographical knowledge in the nineteenth century
This paper addresses the construction of national unity by I talian geographers in the age of the R isorgimento, analysing this process within the context of the international emergence of national representations, identities and imaginaries which was similarly accompanied by geographers elsewhere during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Based on primary sources, focusing on E uropean circulation of knowledge, and drawing on the study o…
Ici commence le Brésil ! Géohistoire d’une frontière compliquée
Un nouvel ouvrage de l’historien brésilien Carlo Romani vient d’apporter une contribution importante à la construction géo-historique de la frontière entre le Brésil et la Guyane française, ainsi qu’à l’étude de ses enjeux politiques et de son impact sur la société locale. Nous analysons ce travail à la lumière du rôle joué par les géographes français, notamment Henri Coudreau, Élisée Reclus et Paul Vidal de la Blache, qui sont intervenus avec de…
A New Map of the Franco-Brazilian Border Dispute (1900)
In the Reclus-Perron cartographical collection held in the Public Library of Geneva, a recently discovered map by the explorer Henri Coudreau seems to have been essential, together with other published and unpublished cartographic materials, in deciding the 1900 Swiss arbitration of the Franco-Brazilian border dispute. These materials provide an opportunity not only to analyse the political power of maps, but also to explore a different European …
The making of Italian agricultural landscapes: Emilio Sereni, between geography, history and Marxism
Anarchism, Geohistory, and the Annales: Rethinking Elisée Reclus's Influence on Lucien Febvre
It has been hypothesized that the celebrated geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus was a decisive influence on several concepts that are characteristic of the Annales School, the historical French school of the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, such as longue durée, material history, space-movement, and geohistory. Yet no systematic research exists on the topic. In this paper, on the basis of textual analysis and new archival materials r…
Reading Reclus between Italy and South America: Translations of geography and anarchism in the work of Luce and Luigi Fabbri
Organisation and formal activism: Insights from the anarchist tradition
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute for the special number Protest and Activism With(out) Organisation. Design/methodology/approach Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) wrote in 1851 that “anarchy is the highest expression of order”. This statement, clashing with the bourgeois commonplaces on anarchy as chaos, anticipated the theories, elaborated collectively by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Pëtr Kropotkin (1842-1921), and Léon Metchnikof…
Arcangelo Ghisleri and the “Right to Barbarity”: Geography and Anti‐colonialism in Italy in the Age of Empire (1875–1914)
This paper addresses the work of early critics of colonialism and Eurocentrism within Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At that time, a minority but rather influential group of Italian scholars, influenced by the international debates promoted by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Mečnikov, fumed publicly at Italy's colonial ambitions in Africa. Their positions assumed, at least in the case of Arcangelo Ghisleri, the character …
Geographies of peace and the teaching of internationalism: Marie‐Thérèse Maurette and Paul Dupuy in the Geneva International School (1924–1948)
Drawing on recent thorough‐going debates on ‘geographies of peace’, this paper addresses the experience of the French geographer Paul Dupuy (1856–1948) and his daughter, Marie‐Thérèse Maurette (1890–1989), in the Geneva International School between 1924 and 1948. Working with primary sources, I reconstruct their teaching of ‘synthetic geography’ and ‘international culture’, which aimed to establish didactic methods for peace education employing c…
Annales, géohistoire et socialisme: Lucien Febvre lecteur et critique d’Élisée Reclus
Plusieurs auteurs ont avancé l'hypothèse que le géographe et anarchiste Élisée Reclus a exercé une influence dans la formation de certains des outils intellectuels de l'école historique des Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, tels que temps longs et longue durée, histoire matérielle, espace-mouvement et géohistoire. Pourtant, il n'existe pas une recherche systématique sur cet argument. Dans cet article, nous interrogeons à ce sujet la lectu…
The spatiality of geography teaching and cultures of alternative education: The 'intuitive geographies' of the anarchist school in Cempuis (1880-1894)
As part of current studies focusing on geographies of education and spatiality of teaching and learning, this article addresses the didactic experiences of historical anarchist schools, which opened in several countries at the end of the 19th century. The article deals especially with the example of the Cempuis School (1880-1894) in France, which was run by the anarchist activist and teacher Paul Robin. The aim here is twofold. First, the article…
Imperial ambivalences. Histories of lady travellers and the French explorer Octavie Renard-Coudreau (1867–1938)
This article addresses the life and works of a virtually unknown lady explorer, Octavie Renard-Coudreau (1867–1938), who continued an Amazonian exploration ‘alone’ after the death of her husband, the maverick French geographer Henri Coudreau (1859–1899). It extends and connects two main bodies of scholarship, the first on women travellers and feminist historical geographies, the second on scientific couples and collaborative partnerships in the h…
Historical Geographies of Anarchism: Early Critical Geographers and Present-Day Scientific Challenges
In the last few years, anarchism has been rediscovered as a transnational, cosmopolitan and multifaceted movement. Its traditions, often hastily dismissed, are increasingly revealing insights which inspire present-day scholarship in geography. This book provides a historical geography of anarchism, analysing the places and spatiality of historical anarchist movements, key thinkers, and the present scientific challenges of the geographical anarchi…
La géographie, émergence d'un champ scientifique. France, Prusse et Grande Bretagne (1780–1860)
Tropicality, the unruly Atlantic and social utopias: The French explorer Henri Coudreau (1859 − 1899)
This paper addresses the works of Henri Coudreau, a little‐known French explorer of Guiana and Amazonia who was later forgotten by the ‘heroic’ histories of exploration because of his unruliness and nonconformist attitudes. Drawing on the literature of postcolonialism and tropicality as well as on recent studies of anti‐colonialist geographies, I address for the first time Coudreau's geography from the perspective of anarchist and critical thinki…
Intelectuais, militares, instituições na configuraçõo das fronteiras brasileiras (1883–1903)
A specialist in the history of the Rio de Janeiro Geographical Society and in the study of the places of early Brazilian geography, Luciene Pereira Carris Cardoso addresses here the problem of the participation of intellectuals in Brazil's territorial formation at the beginning of the First Republic. \n \nThe three cases taken into consideration are the border disputes Brazil undertook with Argentina (Las Palmas issue), with France (Amapá issue),…
Publishing anarchism: Pyotr Kropotkin and British print cultures, 1876–1917
The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation
In 1882, conservative Parisian journalist Abert Delpit commented on the endorsing speech Élisée Reclus pronounced at the “free union” ceremony of his daughters Magali and Jeannie, who publicly celebrated the fact they went to live with two young men without any legal sanction from a mayor or a priest. Given that this event raised a huge scandal in French mainstream press, Delpit tried to explain the contradiction between the generalized praise of…
Political geographies, 'unfaithful' translations and anticolonialism: Ireland in Élisée Reclus's geography and biography
Sociology (62 works) · Political science (61 works) · Law (52 works) · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought (48 works) · Politics (48 works) · Law (38 works) · Geography (36 works) · Social science (34 works) · Philosophy (33 works) · Philosophy (28 works)