Celebrations and challenges: the international at the 16th International Conference of Historical Geographers, London, July 2015

Abstract

This paper addresses how Élisée Reclus's geographical work was read and circulated by two important activists, intellectuals and exponents of ‘transnational anarchism’ in the twentieth century, the father and daughter Luigi and Luce Fabbri. Using both their published work and unpublished archival sources, the paper analyses the various translations, multilingual studies and interpretations of Reclus that the Fabbris undertook in Italy and later Latin America, and the role they played in the international circulation and reinterpretation of Reclus's ideas. This paper contributes to current studies of the circulation of geographical knowledge and historical geographies of science, as well as to the transnational turn in the social sciences and, in particular, its application to ‘anarchist studies’. It draws on the recent international literature devoted to the historical and epistemological relations between geography and anarchism, stressing the intimate relationship between intellectual and political work among anarchist geographers.