# Translations, translocations, and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge

Federico Ferretti

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Federico Ferretti. Translations, translocations, and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2025, 10.1111/tran.12743. hal-04895417

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# Translations, translocations and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge

**Abstract:** 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) and Geografia Democratica (GD, Italy [involving France], 1976-1981), it extends scholarship on translation, translocation and pluralistic bids to decolonise geography. It argues for considering transnational and multilingual analyses of the circulation of geographical knowledge as key to understand translation as translocation, based on transcultural empathy. Far from being a mere linguistic matter, translation/translocation allows understanding elements of translatability and distinctiveness of concepts travelling from one place to another through complex and rarely linear trajectories. While these three cases show how problematic is to translate adjectives such as 'radical' and 'critical' across national, linguistic and cultural barriers, they also expose how there is no standard or unique application of these definitions to geography, which does not impede putting distinct experiences in mutual and productive dialogues, including for today scholarly and activist agendas.

**Keywords:** Multilingualism; Critical and Radical Geography; Transnationalism; Translation; Translocation.

This paper aims at overtaking nationalistic and comparatist schemes in the history and philosophy of Geography by applying transnational, translocal and decolonial methodologies to the study of early radical and critical geographies. Extending recent literature that questions Anglo-American hegemonies acknowledging other ‘worlds’ (Barnes and Sheppard 2019; Berg et al. 2021; Clayton 2022; Craggs and Neate 2020; Ferretti 2022a; Jöns and Freytag 2016; Schelhaas et al. 2020) as part of the wider task of decolonising geography (Esson et al. 2017), I argue that these questionings are not always translated into practice by so-called ‘international’ scholarship, despite recent

F. Ferretti, 2025, Translations, translocations and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge, *Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers*, https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12743
claims for ‘worlding’ geography (Müller 2021; Korf 2021). First understood by early postcolonial scholarship as the expression of a dominating worldview (Spivak 1985), the term ‘worlding’ is now used to claim for pluralism, being also declined as ‘worldings’ or ‘re-worlding’ in relation to ideas of the pluriverse (Tornel and Lunden 2022).

Similar questionings are prominently featuring in histories of geographies that seek to decentre the traditional European gaze as exposed in a recent *Transactions* forum for the 25 years of David N. Livingstone's *The Geographical Tradition* (Livingstone 1993). This Forum was the occasion for thinking historical and theoretical approaches to the discipline taking onboard decolonial concerns for 'historicising, relativising, and provincialising geographical philosophies and practices' (Boyle et al. 2019, 440). Recognising that 'more inclusive, more-than-contextual, situated, and theoretically informed historiographies present rich opportunities for epistemological and methodological dialogue' (Maddrell 2019, 452), the forum's contributors argue for decolonising geographical traditions by decentring the standpoints from which they are seen. They stress how 'national' or 'local' histories that are well known in the respective places do not always circulate in 'international' scholarship, making the case for including 'scholars and others from the post-colonial world as authors, interlocutors, and subjects' (Craggs 2019, 445). They also introduce matters on translation, stressing the complexity of knowledges' circulations across space, time, languages and cultures as 'the movement of ideas is not simply about translocation; it's about transformation' (Livingstone 2019, 461). That is, translations should never be taken for granted.

As for languages, well-known geographical literatures question Anglophone hegemonies in the academy (Aalbers 2004; Germes and Husseini de Araújo 2016; Berg 2013; Garcia Ramon 2003; Kitchin 2005; Minca 2000; Desbiens and Ruddick, 2006; Timár 2004). In this paper, I engage with new contributions that consider practices of translation as more than a way to circulate concepts: namely, a creative and intrinsically ‘geographical work’ (Davies 2024, 105) that has both methodological and political implications. For Archie Davies, the ‘processes of translation which weave through the multi-lingual and multi-national histories of geography’ (Davies 2021) are not only linguistic, but also conceptual. This scholarship contends that criticising the global hegemony of English in academic literatures does not mean endorsing localisms, parochialisms or peripheric

F. Ferretti, 2025, Translations, translocations and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge, *Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers*, https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12743
linguistic imperialisms (Ferretti 2022a), confirming previous contentions that Anglo-centrism
should not be replaced by ‘bounded national universes’ (Samers and Sidaway 2000, 664). Indeed,
methodological nationalisms cannot provide understandings of complex transfers of knowledge
‘between cultural universes’ (Simonsen 2002, 392) that go well beyond mere linguistic matters.

While observing that monolingualism, a limiting condition for any scholar, ‘applies just as much
to the conservative as to the radical ends of the [geographical] discipline’ (Davies 2021), Davies
warns about the dangers of fetishizing translation as something that automatically favours
pluralism. Recalling classical scholarship on postcolonial translation that highlights the imperial
nature of translations just bringing texts from the periphery to the core (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999),
Davies argues that: ‘If our intention is to produce emancipatory and diverse geographical
knowledges there is nothing *inherently* useful about translation. What matters is how the tools of
translation, interpretation and multilingualism are used’ (Davies 2021). Other contributions stress
the need to ‘be wary’ of translators to overtake the canons of ‘modern Eurocentric science
[including] monolingual nationalism’ (Ribeiro 2021). Thus, working critically on (linguistic or
cultural) translation should not prevent from ‘valuing scholarly multilingualism’ (Péaud 2021).

Recent decolonial scholarship expresses concerns on the translation of scholarly concepts elaborated in the ‘Norths’, such as ‘territory’, whose meaning in Latin America is very different from its Anglo-centred understandings (Haesbaert 2021), or ‘settler colonialism’, which ‘is rarely used within Latin American activist research circles, in part because it is seen as a Northern colonial framework that can strengthen a North American gaze… for Northern-based audiences’ (Zaragocin 2024, 24). These scholars engage with translocation understood as a feminist theory that allows circulating diverse notions of Black and Indigenous resistance ‘across the Americas’ (Zaragocin 2024, 27). Translocation/translocality theory allows for transcultural dialogue across different locations, considering translators as *translocas* (Alvarez 2014, 3) [a joke with Spanish *loc**, that is ‘crazy’]. Eventually: ‘More than world-travelling translators, [they] are cultural, political, theoretical mediators … agents of transculturation’ (Alvarez 2014, 8), considering the geographical implications of translating concepts.

F. Ferretti, 2025, Translations, translocations and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual
analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge, *Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers*, https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12743
Within geography, tensions between national, international and transnational/translocal spheres correspond to what Claudio Minca calls the dilemmas of the ‘cosmopolitan geographer’, a figure that is ‘caught in-between different worlds’ (Minca 2018, 5) and imperatives of different national, cultural and linguistic setups. Minca’s notion opens possibilities for linguistic and cultural translocations of geography that circulate voluntaristically through ‘boundary spanners’ (Jöns and Freytag 2016), whose interest has been recently acknowledged by the *Transactions* initiative ‘Geography in the World’ aiming at discovering plural contributions ‘from different places and contexts’ (McFarlane 2022, 6). This paper addresses three experiences in early critical/radical geographies that took place between the 1970s and the 1980s in different countries, speaking different languages: the *Union of Socialist Geographers* (USG, 1974-1982), which operated between United States, Canada and other countries having English as main language but including French-speaking contributions from Québec;<fnref n="1" /> the *Unión de Geógrafos Progresistas de México* (UGPM, 1978-1990), which was active in Mexico but took inspiration from internationalist ideas and welcomed political refugees from other (Spanish-speaking) Latin American countries (Ferretti 2023; Ibarra García 2023; Mendoza Vargas 2018); the collective *Geografia Democratica* (GD, 1976-1981), acting in Italy but strongly relying on French-speaking connections. All these groups had visible local characterisations, but they all displayed transnational concerns and connections across national and linguistic boundaries.

My main argument is that analysing the complex transnational circulations of early critical and
radical geographies is key to understand translations as translocations. Beyond linguistic matters,
translation/translocation allows evaluating the conditions for translatability or distinctiveness of
concepts that travel from one place to another, being necessarily transformed and variously
reappropriated during their complex and non-linear journeys. It implies putting into practice
intercultural and contextual sensitivity, multilingualism and empathy toward each studied
situation. It also implies giving up one's own ethnocentrism by questioning the translatability of
concepts and dismissing national (or worse nationalistic) frameworks. In the history of early

<footnote n="1">¹ USG Newsletter [hereafter Newsletter] 3(2), 1977-78, L'Union des Géographes socialistes, 2 ; Newsletter 6, 2, 1981, J. Aubin et L. Seguin, Revue des analyses de la gauche québécoise face au référendum, 31-34.</footnote>
radical/critical geographies, recent scholarship shows that their circuits worked transnationally and multilingually (Ferretti 2022a and 2023), showing the limits of interpretive frameworks addressing ‘national schools’ or classifying ‘critical geography’ per country. Eventually, the three cases addressed here show that there is no standard or orthodox definition of what can be defined as ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ geography at each time.

As for matters with ‘translatability’, I consider postcolonial scholarship on ‘singularity’ and ‘incomparable geographies’ as a ‘methodological response to the challenge of decolonising geographical knowledge’ (Jazeel 2019, 5). By singularity, Tariq Jazeel understands the need for questioning traditional comparatism and area studies (Sidaway et al. 2016) marked by ‘a theoretical modernity that remains firmly located in the EuroAmerican academy’ (Jazeel 2019, 5) and based on a transparent translatability of concepts. For Jazeel, the main issue with comparison is not the very act of comparing, but the cases in which we stand ‘face to face with the incomparable’ (Jazeel 2019, 7). In this vein, singularity does not mean impossibility of translating between different traditions: it rather exposes the need to question our own positions and disciplinary orthodoxies while translating notions, being cognizant of ‘linguistic and ethnographic spaces of translation, but importantly spaces of untranslatability as well’ (Jazeel 2019, 14). Kiran Asher likewise highlights how ‘we cannot not compare’ (Asher 2019, 27), although we should always acknowledge epistemic and linguistic pluralism. Here, I understand these postcolonial notions as an invitation to consider the distinctiveness of different geographical traditions, which should never impede dialogue and reciprocity.

While current scholarship stresses how different locations and receptions of critical/radical geographies contribute to shape their identities (Sidaway et al. 2020), USG, UGPM and GD displayed plural ideological discussions on which form of socialism they should adopt (being classical Marxism the main option, followed by anarchism and feminism). They all existed for a limited number of years as independent and self-funded groups with contrasted ties to the respective academic ‘mainstream’, being all confronted with the dilemma of how to conciliate radical activism and academic work. In the respective linguistic areas, these groups adopted labels that appear different and even contrasting, such as ‘progressive’, ‘socialist’ and ‘democratic’

F. Ferretti, 2025, Translations, translocations and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge, *Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers*, https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12743
(Celata and Governa 2023; Crossa 2019; Peake 2019). This exposes the need to address the ‘losts in translation’ that the transnational moves of geographical radicalism necessarily imply. For instance, the term ‘radical’ has completely different meanings in European and North American political cultures, so that one would seek in vain the perfect equivalent of North American ‘Radical Geography’ in the geographical histories of most non-Anglophone countries (Ferretti 2021). Even the distinction between ‘radical’ and ‘critical’ approaches is considered outdated, as after its initial emphasis on Marxism and anarchism, geographical radicalism has been progressively enriched by contributions from feminism, queer theory, LGBTQ+, subaltern, postcolonial and decolonial studies to only mention some (Peake and Sheppard 2015).

To analyse my cases, I made a systematic survey of their available archives, focusing on sources accounting for internal political debates and international networking. As for USG, I mainly worked on their *Newsletter* (of which current literature, mostly based on USG members’ recollections, has only made partial use) and related documents. As for UGPM, the bulletin *Posición* and related publications were precious in reconstructing this little-known experience. As for GD, I availed of the archive of their meetings and correspondences that was recently donated by Giuseppe Dematteis to the Italian Geographical Society, plus *Hérodote-Italia*, although this journal only represented a faction within GD, as I detail below. Directly produced by the relevant actors, all these materials contribute to the construction of the transnational and radical archive as it has been addressed by critical geographical scholarship (Hodder, Heffernan and Legg 2021).

In the first part, I address USG transnational and pluralistic trajectories as an attempt to learn socialism from heterogeneous sources. In the second part, I discuss the UGPM experience as an attempt to adopt well-defined socialistic models from decolonisation and Third-Worldism. In the third part, I address GD’s attempts to conciliate geography and socialism considering the peculiarity of Italian radical traditions, putting these three experiences into dialogue while being cognisant of the respective distinctiveness.

## USG: Learning (some kind of) socialism

F. Ferretti, 2025, Translations, translocations and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge, *Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers*, https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12743
Compared to the other cases addressed in this paper, USG is relatively better known. Yet, its trajectory was never discussed through its direct or indirect relations with parallel associations in other areas. So far, the most complete scholarly account of USG is a chapter by Linda Peake, who highlights USG's ideological pluralism, as its members developed 'networks of solidarity and praxis within which the seeds of Marxist but also feminist, anti-racist, and queer geographies emerged' (Peake 2019, 149). Like UGPM and GD, USG membership (which according to Peake involved up to 200 individuals, doubtlessly more than UGPM or GD) included both students and early-career scholars. Among them, there were maverick geographers such as William Bunge (Barnes 2018; Heynen 2013), wannabe university professors and already established academics such as Richard Peet, David Harvey and James Blaut.

According to Peake, the difficult balance between career development and political activism was one of the causes for the tensions that led to USG's disbandment since 1980. Then, a 'socialist diaspora' (Peake 2019, 173) had occurred following the failure of several USG members to secure academic posts. In 1982, the last issue of the *Newsletter* explicitly complained about 'scrambling for the material means of subsistence'.<fnref n="2" /> Something similar happened in Italy, where GD members were massively failed by university recruitment boards as I discuss below. Additionally, some USG members felt frustrated for remaining relatively apart from working-class movements and places of real class-struggle except 'specific and limited cases' (Peake 2019, 175). Indeed, the problem of articulating theory and praxis proved to be particularly thorny since the early USG debates (USG 1975).

Yet, the initial USG official programme was definitively radical, advocating for social transformation following 'the principles of social justice' through 'organising ... for radical change in our communities [and] developing geographic theory to contribute to revolutionary struggle' (Thatcher et al. 2017). Importantly, USG adopted the classical communist principle that was first declared around nineteenth-century Internationalist milieus: 'From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. ... The development of a humane, non-alienating

<footnote n="2">² *Newsletter* 8(1), 1982, 2.</footnote>
society requires, as its most fundamental step, socialisation of the ownership of the means of
production' (Sheppard and Peake 2019, 264), countering 'bourgeois geography'. Like in the other
cases discussed here, this raises the matter of pluralism among different views of what 'socialism'
should be. USG is considered as one of the earliest circuits in which geographers started to pay
(some) attention to themes such as: 'Feminism, anarchism, indigeneity, homosexuality, Third
World movements, "nature", and race' (Sheppard and Peake 2019, 265). Significantly, among
early USG animators there were geographers akin to anarchism rather than orthodox Marxism
such as Kent Mathewson and Clark Akatiff (Thatcher et al. 2017; Lauria et al. 2019). For Peake:
'The wide-ranging coverage of the *USG Newsletter* disrupts the orthodoxy of the material origins
of radical geography being funnelled solely through a theoretical Marxist base' (Peake 2019, 172).
However, a systematic consultation of the *USG Newsletter* shows that, after the early years in
which apparently 'pluralism flourished as Marxists, Maoists, anarchists, feminists, and
environmentalists co-mingled' (Peake 2019, 159), tensions and disagreements gradually grew.

The USG Newsletter had a contrasted editorial story as its redactional committee travelled almost yearly among different USG locals, being mostly held by Canadian groups (Blomley and McCann 2019) but also remaining for a while with the British local. Since the earliest issues, themes such as anarchism and non-orthodox Marxism were represented thanks to Akatiff and to other scholars who were especially sensitive to anarchism such as Myrna Breitbart, or to some extent Peet and Ian Cook. Since the first issue, the Vancouver USG local announced a commented bibliography on ‘Anarchy and Geography’ presenting: ‘The massive contribution to Geography of the anarchist geographers P. Kropotkin and E. Reclus [which] has been omitted from the histories of geography [revealing] an urgent need to rewrite the history of geography’.<fnref n="3" /> Like in the GD and UGPM cases, finding ‘noble ancestors’ was perceived as key to build renewed geographies.

In organising dedicated USG courses on the theoretical foundations of socialism/Marxism, a
peaceful cohabitation of ‘Marx, Reclus, Kropotkin’ as inspirers of ‘alternative approaches to

<footnote n="3">³ Newsletter 1(1), 1975, The immediate task of socialist geographers, 7.</footnote>
people/nature relationships<fnref n="4" /> was suggested in the second issue of the USG Newsletter. In the following issue, an annotated bibliography of Kropotkin was published, although declaredly ‘far from comprehensive’,<fnref n="5" /> paralleling the numerous Marx/Capital reading groups that were showing up in the same years. The Newsletter accounts for a movement that was mostly composed by young people who grew up in North American countries, where arguably reading the classics of socialism in its various forms was relatively less common than in other countries, hence the need for basic formation.<fnref n="6" /> In 1978, the Minnesota local relaunched a discussion on anarchism that seemed to be informed by the same spirit of open quest for a plurality of theoretical elements to inform radical approaches to geography.<fnref n="7" /> One of this discussion’s animators was Mickey Lauria, who was equally committed to promote readings of Marx’s Capital.<fnref n="8" /> In 1978, the McGill USG local published a text on the anarcho-punk scene in Montreal.<fnref n="9" />

Conversely, in a 1980 issue produced by the Kingston-Ontario local, it was said that most local USG members had joined one 'Kingston Socialists' collective from which a 'Trotskyist was expelled' in the bid of 'asserting [their] Marxist purity over charges of New Left anarchism'.<fnref n="10" /> From the aforementioned pluralism to the soundly Stalinist charges of 'anarchism' levelled to the New Left there is much more than some nuances. However, in the same issue, other authors addressed these matters in less orthodox ways. It was the case with an article by Laurence G. Wolf, who criticised Marxist-Leninist notions such as the 'transition period' and the recreation of privileged classes under communist regimes noting how, after the Russian revolution, 'the original Soviets ... were carefully and thoroughly destroyed by Lenin'.<fnref n="11" /> Although arguing that, 'to criticise Soviet regimes shortcomings is not to deny their accomplishments',<fnref n="12" /> Wolf concluded that the way to follow was not 'the Leninist model, but one which draws heavily on the anarchist

<footnote n="4">⁴ Newsletter 1(2), 1975, USG Course Proposal, 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Newsletter 1(3), 1976, Bibliography on Peter Kropotkin, 36.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Newsletter 1(2), 1975, Recent activities of the Vancouver local, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Newsletter 3(3), 1978, B. Pisarra, Why study anarchism? 6-10.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Newsletter 3(3), 1978, M. Lauria, An anarchist Seminar.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Newsletter 3(4), 1978, J. King, Anarchy is not only punk-rock, 17-18.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Newsletter 5(4), 1980. R. Schmidt, Intellectuals and class struggle: political activities in Kingston in the 1970s, 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Newsletter 5(4), 1980, L.G. Wolf, Socialism, communism, anarchism, further interpretations, 87-90.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Socialism, communism, anarchism, 88.</footnote>
tradition'.<fnref n="13" /> Obviously, this raises the matter of deciding at what point pluralism clashes with the impossible convivence of positions that are simply irreconcilable, a matter that will soon arise.

Indeed, the relations between geographical Marxism and the kind of ‘socialism’ that was then practiced in the countries of the Eastern Bloc led by the USSR were not straightforward. Unlike UGPM, which overtly supported the ‘Marxist Geography’ that was then carried out beyond the Iron Curtain, USG members showed some ambivalences on this matter. On the one hand, some implicit defence of ‘real’ socialism emerged on occasions such as an early debate on women rights in which, when someone mentioned an author criticising the anti-feminist policies of ‘socialist’ countries, one attendee asked if that author ‘was a Marxist or someone who is just trying to attack socialism’ (USG 1975, 77). On the other, the authoritarian aspects of these regimes were well known and emerged in denunciations of gay oppression in countries such as Russia and China.<fnref n="14" /> Clearly, in North America, it was more difficult to defend geopolitical adversaries such as the USSR than in countries such as Italy or Mexico in those years.

An attempt to establish contacts between Soviet and radical geographers took place after that *Soviet Geography* dedicated a long review to the book *Radical Geography* (Peet 1977). Soviet critics appreciated the presence of radicals in Western geography as a phenomenon to be seen ‘with interest’ (Lavrov et al. 1980, 308), but also accused them of ‘poor knowledge of Marxism’ (Lavrov et al. 1980, 312), little interest in what was going on in Eastern countries and excessive sensitivity to ‘anarchist and ultraleft views’ (Lavrov et al. 1980, 319), being ‘Marxist-Leninist theory’ (Lavrov et al. 1980, 320) the only valid way to develop geography. Likewise published by *Soviet Geography*, the response of Peet and David Slater further exposed the ambivalences noted above. On the one hand, they claimed the plural nature of their radicalism aiming to ‘avoid correct lineism’ (Peet and Slater 1980, 542), denied that there was true ‘communism’ in the Soviet Union and criticised the excessive ‘economism’ (Peet and Slater 1980, 543) of their Eastern counterparts. Yet, they appealed to the understanding of Soviet ‘comrades’ (Peet and Slater 1980, 542) and

<footnote n="13">¹³ Socialism, communism, anarchism, 90.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ *Newsletter* 1(4-5), 1976. A. Rosenguist, Notes on gay oppression, 13-15.</footnote>
proposed to establish permanent exchanges with them through *Antipode*, a request that apparently
did not receive any response. As I discuss below, very different positions on Cold War matters
were taken by Mexican UGPM.

Finally, in a sort of USG’s obituary, the editor of the last *Newsletter* issue Chrys Rodrigue wrote that USG’s decline was also due to political divisions, as too many members had embraced divisive agendas, committing to ‘particular approaches’ that spanned from ‘orthodox Marxist-Leninists [to] Trotskyites, Maoists, the Young Marx-ists, anarchists and so forth’.<fnref n="15" /> In this context, debates on which was the best attitude towards traditional professional bodies such as the AAG resulted in an ‘internal struggle’ (Thatcher et al. 2017). Yet, among the most original points of USG debates, it is worth mentioning their elaborations on imperialism, a theme that was discussed all along the short life of that association.

The inaugural 1974 Vancouver meeting already included speeches such as ‘A theoretical introduction to imperialism’ by Colm Regan and ‘Seven theses on colonialism’ by Jim Blaut,<fnref n="16" /> one of the North American authors who fostered an anti-colonial and anti-Eurocentric turn in radical geography (Bunnel, Ong and Sidaway 2013). In the *Newsletter*, the ‘victorious people of Vietnam’<fnref n="17" /> was congratulated. Since the earliest discussions, geographers such as Blaut called for paying more attention to non-Eurocentric views of socialism, noting that: ‘There is an urban bias among socialists in respect to peasants’ potential for rapid social change’ (USG 1975, 2) to be corrected by reading authors from the rural ‘Souths’ such as Amílcar Cabral (1971). Parallelly, so-called ‘tropical geography’ experienced plural and contested circulations leading to anticolonial understandings (Power and Sidaway 2004; Bowd and Clayton 2019).

The *Newsletter* included a bibliography of anticolonial British geographer Keith Buchanan<fnref n="18" /> and bibliographies on imperialism containing works on dependency theory by authors such as

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ *Newsletter* 8(1), 1982, Editorial, 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ *Newsletter* 1(1), 1975, Imperialism, 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ *Newsletter* 1(1), 1975, 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ *Newsletter* 1(2), 1975. *Bibliography of socialist geographer Keith Buchanan*, 17-18.</footnote>
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Andre Gunder Frank who were then quite popular among Latin American radicals.<fnref n="19" /> There were correspondences by geographers committed to solidarity with African decolonisation such as Slater<fnref n="20" /> and more frequently Ben Wisner, who worked in several African countries and released calls to find secondary teachers for the schools of recently decolonised Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.<fnref n="21" /> One of the ‘Northern’ scholars committed to help the educational systems of newly decolonised countries (Craggs and Neate 2024; Sharp 2019), Wisner sent several reports from Mozambique accounting for the dramatic difficulties that leading anticolonial organisation FRELIMO was facing in this task.<fnref n="22" /> USG discussions also addressed notions such as ‘internal colonialism’, first applied to the racialised and socio-spatially marginalised neighbourhoods of the North American cities reached by the Geographical Expeditions<fnref n="23" /> and then to cases such as the Celtic Fringe.<fnref n="24" />

In 1977, there were debates on dependency theory, on which Colm Regan noted that, despite the great interest surrounding ideas of dependency and uneven development: ‘Without a proper critical perspective, the theory of dependency will provide geographers with yet another mechanical spatial model that adds little to our understanding of the dynamics of imperialism’.<fnref n="25" /> Some materials also accounted for the difficulties that Northern scholars encountered in Southern terrains, like a sarcastic Ben Pisarra’s note on an ‘aborted fieldtrip’ in an unnamed African country: ‘In a place where I thought radical thought flourished, I found that radicals had been systematically removed’.<fnref n="26" /> Thus, committed to broad anti-colonial agendas, USG members matched the well-known disappointment for the expectations that the independences did not satisfy (Craggs and Neate 2024). However, USG’s junior members’ willingness to learn socialism included listening to its ‘Southern’ versions. Brazilian geographer Milton Santos attended USG meetings in which

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Newsletter 1(2), 1975. Topical bibliography – Imperialism, 29-33.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Newsletter 2(1), 1976, Debate on Socialism, 31-35</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Newsletter 1(4-5), 1976, Minutes of the USG Meetings, 3; B. Wisner, The political economy of drought in Eastern Kenya, 31-35.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Newsletter 2(1), 1977, B. Wisner, Geographical aspects of national reconstruction in Mozambique, 24-32.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Newsletter 1(1), 1975, Revolutionary praxis, 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Newsletter 5(1), 1979, M. Bouman, Nationalism and uneven development: Scotland and the model of internal colonialism, 36-39.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Newsletter 2(1), 1977, USG East Coast Meeting, 19.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Newsletter 3(3), 1978, B. Pisarra, On an aborted fieldtrip, 29.</footnote>
he presented his works on ‘Third World’ uneven urbanization.<fnref n="27" /> Still in the last *Newsletter* issues, there was room for reports on socially committed research from places such as Guyana<fnref n="28" /> and Guatemala.<fnref n="29" /> The Canadian and Australian locals also expressed an incipient sensitivity to matters of indigeneity and native rights.<fnref n="30" />

Finally, USG was active in seeking contacts beyond the Anglosphere by announcing the inaugural issue of French *Hérodote*,<fnref n="31" /> a common reference for all the three cases addressed in this paper, and reviewing international publications such as German *Geographische Hochschulmanuskripte* and Dutch *Zone*.<fnref n="32" /> ‘By 1979, interest in the USG had spread as far as Africa, Latin America, and Asia, especially India’ (Sheppard and Peake 2019, 265). In 1980, the *Newsletter* reported that: ‘USG has currently members in Africa, Europe, Asia and Latin America as well as North America’.<fnref n="33" /> Intriguingly, in 1984, UGPM’s bulletin *Posición* mentioned among their international partners one ‘USG India’<fnref n="34" /> whose activities remain poorly documented and would deserve more research. Therefore, USG was characterised by a transnational setup that has not been always highlighted by commentators so far. This matched the fully displayed Third-Worldist and Latin-American inspiration of a little-known but exceptional experience, the UGPM, as I discuss in the next section.

## UGPM: Invisible radical geographies?

It is commonly understood that, in Mexico, there was no early Radical Geography like in the USA. Veronica Crossa even asserts that, still in the early 1990s, a ‘critical vocabulary … was certainly absent from the field of geography’ (Crossa 2019, 330) there. Yet, this raises the methodological problem of what to search in order to find something, as Crossa does not quote direct sources or

<footnote n="27">²⁷ *Newsletter* 2(1), 1977, USG East Coast Meeting, 19-20; *Newsletter* 2(2), 1977, M. Santos, ‘Devil’s totality, or how Imperialism diffuses Capital through forms’, 28-32.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ *Newsletter* 6(2), 1981, S.R. Thompson, ‘Human rights and repression in Guyana’, 14-25.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ *Newsletter* 6(2), 1981, R. Eastlake, ‘Class struggle in El Salvador and Guatemala and the role of the Church’, 53-57; *Newsletter* 5(4), 1980, G. Lovell, ‘The colonial experience in the Chucumatan Highlands of Guatemala’, 43-47.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ *Newsletter* 3(4), 1978, G. Wenzel, ‘A note on harp seals’, 10-11; *Newsletter* 4(4), 1978, R. Howitt, *Aurukun*, the Aboriginal Land Rights Movement, 39-43.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ *Newsletter* 1(3), 1976, Bulletin *Hérodote*, 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² *Newsletter* 3(1), 1977, Foreign publications, 32-34.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ *Newsletter* 5(4), 1980, cover page.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ *Posición*, 3, 1984, A. Bassols Batalla, ‘ Mensaje para finalizar el periodo de presidente’, 95.</footnote>
original texts produced by UGPM or by its animator and inspirer Angel Bassols Batalla (1925-2012), basing these assertions on secondary literature by Ramírez, Delgadillo and others (Crossa 2019). While it should be clear that, for making histories of geography, working on direct sources is not an optional ‘plus’ but a paramount task, and that the diversity of the ‘critical turn’ in Latin American geographies should be considered (Ramírez, Montanez and Zusman 2021), works by Héctor Mendoza (2017) and Javier Delgadillo (2015) stress instead the political radicality of the innovations that were brought to Mexican geography by Batalla. Coming from a scholarly and activist family whose internationalist trajectories are addressed by recent work (Ferretti 2024), Batalla was a declared Marxist and an admirer of ‘socialism’ in Eastern countries who took his geography degree at Moscow Lomonosov University in 1949 (Bassols Batalla 1950) and constantly supported Third-World anticolonial movements (Bassols Batalla 1983).

A friend and admirer of Brazilian radical geographers Milton Santos, Manuel Correia de Andrade and Josué de Castro, and a sort of voluntary ‘cosmopolitan geographer’, Batalla entered *Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México* (UNAM) in 1957, at the Department of Economy. According to Mendoza, Batalla could not join the Geography Department due to his reputation as a Communist,<fnref n="35" /> and was among those who fostered ‘the creation of critical geography’ (Mendoza Vargas 2009, li) there.<fnref n="36" /> While, at UNAM, the earliest sights of student unrest explicitly involving geographers can be dated back to 1974,<fnref n="37" /> this critical shift occurred between the 1970s and 1980s, when Batalla became a leading figure for younger geographers who joined the UGPM. This group was founded ‘in July 1978 by an assembly attended by 30 people’<fnref n="38" /> that was chaired by Carlos Sáenz de la Calzada (1917-1995), one of the exiled geographers who fled from Spain in 1939 (Moncada Maya 2021). Sáenz was eventually an anti-fascist ‘fighter’ (Bassols Batalla 1998, 53) in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. A systematic survey of the ten issues (overall seven volumes) of *Posición* published between 1982 and 1990, plus some publications of UGPM members such

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Héctor Mendoza Vargas, Personal communication to the author, Mexico City, 1st November 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ All quotes from texts in languages other than English have been translated by the author.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Blanca Rebeca Ramírez Velázquez, Personal communication to the author, Mexico City, 31 October 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ *Posición*, 1, 1983, Surge la Unión de Geógrafos Progresistas de México, 6.</footnote>
as the volume *Realidades y problemas de la geografia en México*, allows seizing both distinctiveness and amazing similarities between UGPM and USG.

While these works 'seldom appear in broader disciplinary histories, nor in what are seen as the top "international" journals' (Craggs 2019, 444) it can be argued that *Posición* is hardly studied even in Mexican scholarship. Yet, these sources reveal that, although adopting the apparently moderate label of 'progressive', UGPM members were not less radical than 'socialist' USG on several political aspects, as suggested by titles such as 'Por una geografia revolucionaria' (Macías and Calderón 1982). The editorial of the first *Posición* issue, authored by Batalla, argued explicitly for a militant geography going beyond the academic domain to deal with global problematics by joining 'the struggle that is fought at the universal level between the forces of progress and the forces of regression'.<sup>39</sup> This militant geography had to denounce the 'increasingly sharper contradictions intrinsic to the capitalist system [including] dependent underdevelopment', to support 'the advancement of Third World's struggles for its economic and political liberation'.<sup>40</sup> Well beyond mere 'progressivism', Batalla defined UGPM as a 'sword' for 'a fresh and combative geography, which overtly declares its commitment to the causes of peace, of equality among nations and among individuals, for a free world in which the dawn of socialism will become the full sunshine of justice. We have no reasons to hide our ideas'.<sup>41</sup> The 'Declaration of Principles' formally approved by the UGPM assembly confirmed this setup.

That document endorsed internationalist commitment to ‘exchange with similar groups in the Republic and abroad’.<fnref n="42" /> Among these groups, UGPM explicitly mentioned the *Asociación de Geógrafos de América Latina* based in Venezuela, the *Hérodote* group in France and the *Antipode* group in the USA, with which ‘publications were exchanged and … some of our members still keep contacts’,<fnref n="43" /> arguably alluding to relations that had been established in former years. Additionally, contacts were ongoing with ‘different personalities of geography in Argentina,

<footnote n="39">³⁹ *Posición* 1, 1983, A. Bassols Batalla, Editorial, 4</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ *Posición* 1, 1983, A. Bassols Batalla, Editorial, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ *Posición* 1, 1983, A. Bassols Batalla, Editorial, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² *Posición* 1, 1983, Surge la Unión ..., 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ *Posición* 1, 1983, Surge la Unión ..., 7.</footnote>
Uruguay, Cuba, Spain, Poland, Canada, France, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Great Britain, Soviet Union, United States, German Democratic Republic and Norway.’<fnref n="44" /> UGPM members concurrently participated to grassroots mobilisations in solidarity with leftist movements in then-called Third World, especially Africa and Latin America, overtly displaying their sympathy for the geopolitics of ‘development’ (Power 2019) that were deployed there by socialist countries during the Cold War.

It was the case with public mobilisations in favour of Sandinista Nicaragua, then threatened by US-funded counter-guerrillas, to which the second issue of *Posición* dedicated a detailed report, including maps, that was overtly inspired by the critical geopolitical approach of *Hérodote*,<fnref n="45" /> which had acquired notoriety denouncing war crimes such as the bombing of dikes in Vietnam (Bassols Batalla 1998). UGPM members were also active in concrete solidarity with political refugees from Latin America, such as Uruguayan critical geographers Elbio Garrone and Germán Wettstein, the former residing several years in Mexico, the latter often invited there when he was exiled in Venezuela.<fnref n="46" /> Batalla and friends considered priority a commitment to wider Latin American critical geographical networks and were among the founders of EGAL (*Encuentro de Geografías de América Latina*) whose earliest meeting took place in Brazil in 1987. On that occasion, Batalla fraternized with Santos and Andrade and paid tribute to José de Castro.<fnref n="47" />

The UGPM Declaration of Principles included the idea that geography should be ‘committed to this country’s working class’,<fnref n="48" /> proclaiming that scholars cannot enjoy ‘the possibility to be neutral’ and should actively work with ‘democratic organizations of workers, peasants, intellectuals and students’.<fnref n="49" /> In this vein, the successive issues of *Posición* released materials from militant peasants’ groups such as the *Unión de Comuneros Emiliano Zapata* from the regions of lake Pátzcuaro and Meseta Tarasca, areas of indigenous settlement where the defence of

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ *Posición* 1, 1983, *Surge la Unión* ..., 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ *Posición* 2, 1984, J.L. Moreno, Nicaragua: geopolítica y agresión contrarrevolucionaria, 4-12.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ *Posición* 6-7, 1988, M. Ortiz Diaz, R. Guzmán Hernández, *Réquiem para un espacio geográfico*, 53-55.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ *Posición* 4-5, 1987, A. Bassols Batalla, *Editorial*, 3-5.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ *Posición* 1, 1983, *Declaración de principios*, 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ *Posición* 1, 1983, *Declaración de principios*, 9.</footnote>
environmental resources was already associated with the defence of rights and cultures of local dwellers.<fnref n="50" /> There, UGPM geographers promoted scholarly studies that were explicitly informed by communistic principles such as: ‘Land belongs to those who work it’.<fnref n="51" /> UGPM’s anticolonial commitment was likewise displayed in the editorials of Batalla discussing colonialism as the ‘brutal conquest of three continents’.<fnref n="52" />

It is worth noting that UGPM documents included all slogans and labels that were concurrently released by critical/radical geographers in other countries. Eventually, they endorsed ‘critical geographical research’ matching ‘student’s progressive demands’<fnref n="53" /> and building ‘scientific and technical works of critical content’,<fnref n="54" /> explicitly discussing socialism. UGPM members such as student Manuel Macías drew upon declaredly Marxist analyses discussing how geography should contribute to ‘revolutionary’<fnref n="55" /> understandings of the economic crises that are intrinsic to capitalism. UGPM even organised public commemorations of Marx’s centenary in 1983.<fnref n="56" /> Thus, this ill-known Mexican experience displayed key elements of early international socialist/critical/radical geographies. Later, in the 1990s, other Mexican or Mexican-based critical scholars such as Blanca Rebeca Ramírez Velázquez and Chilean exile Graciela Uribe (1928-2000) were among the animators of the International Conference of Critical Geographies (Mendoza Vargas 2018; Ramírez Velázquez 2012). Yet, this is already another story, related to another historical period.

As for UGPM, it can be noted that some of the claims mentioned above even anticipated later definitions of ‘fighting’ or ‘defiant’ scholarship (Daley and Murrey 2022). On the one hand, it is surprising that some authors deny the circulation of radical/critical ideas in Mexican geography until very recent times, a stance that these new sources contradict. On the other, UGPM displayed

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ *Posición* 4-5, 1987, R.S. Calderón, *Organización campesina para la defensa de los recursos naturales*, 151-155; *Posición* 6-7, 1988, R.S. Calderón, *Política agropecuaria y respuesta campesina* 1979-1982, 112-124.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ *Posición* 6-7, 1988, R.S. Calderón, *Política agropecuaria ...*, 116.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² *Posición* 9-10, 1992, A. Bassols Batalla, *Editorial*, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ *Posición* 1, 1983, *Declaración de principios*, 9.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ *Posición* 1, 1983, *Declaración de principios*, 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ *Posición* 1, 1983, J.M. Macías, *Reflexiones en torno al análisis de coyuntura y crisis*, 25.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ *Posición* 1, 1983, *Plan mínimo de trabajo 1982-1984, 16-18*; *Posición* 2, 1984, R. Castrenaza, *La unión de Geógrafos Progresistas de México presente en la conmemoración del centenario de la muerte de Carlos Marx*, 62-64.</footnote>
elements of distinctiveness that can explain the difficulties that both Anglo-centred and nation-
centred interpretations encounter in making sense of the transnational circulation of geographical
knowledge. For instance, there were differences in the social composition of USG and UGPM.
While USG looked like a turbulent nebula centred around youth unrest, UGPM was strongly
influenced by the charismatic leadership of Batalla, who was already an established and
internationally well-known scholar. Batalla authored all *Posición* editorials establishing a clearly
socialist political line for all agendas, while most of the other UGPM members were students and
early career scholars who substantially acknowledged Batalla’s leadership. This can explain why,
while USG members expressed the need of acquiring theoretical grounds on Marxism and
anarchism through seminars and reading groups, UGPM seemed to mostly take theory for granted.
Indeed, UGPM theory was mainly expressed by Batalla’s claims that Marx and Engles should be
considered as ‘geographers’, although in a quite unilateral way, as it was geography that had to be
informed by Marxism rather than vice-versa.<fnref n="57" />

In the 1990s, this setup did not resist the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the departure of some
UGPM members from university (Ramírez, Montanez and Zusman 2021). Yet, it is worth noting
that, since the beginning, Batalla displayed pluralistic intentions by writing that there were
‘multiple ways’ to perform ‘critical geographies’.<fnref n="58" /> In UGPM, anarchism was apparently less
represented than in USG, even though *Posición* included contributions by Narciso Barrera Bassols,
who published texts on indigeneity and translations from French geographer Georges Bertrand<fnref n="59" />
and will contribute to the later revival of anarchist geographies (Barrera Bassols and Barrera de la
Torre 2017). *Posición* authors such as Miguel Aguilar Robledo identified in both ‘Marxism and
Anarchism’ the inspiring ideas for ‘Radicals or Progressives leading a worldwide movement which
finds its expressions in ... geographical organisations of revolutionary inspiration such as UGPM,
USG, etc., alongside journals such as *Antipode, Hérodote, Hérodote/Italia, Roter Globus,
Geographiker, Zone, Geographische-Hochschulmanuskripte, Posición, etc*.<fnref n="60" /> This amazingly

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ La [UGPM] presente en la conmemoración, 62-64.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ *Posición* 3, 1984, A. Bassols Batalla, Mensaje para finalizar el periodo de presidente, 92.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ *Posición* 2, 1984, N. Barrera Bassols, Saludo a la Revista *Posición*, 75-76; *Posición* 3, 1984, N. Barrera Bassols, Construir la Geografía Física, 76-77.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ *Posición* 6-7, 1987, M. Aguilar Robledo, Tendencias y escuelas en la geografia contemporánea, 6.</footnote>
confirms the transnational setup of UGPM, seeking collaborations with concurrent worldwide experiences, whose heterogeneous purposes were conceived as ways for worlding critical dialogues. Robledo's list included GD, discussed in the next section.

## GD: Between contrasting socialistic traditions

Like USG, and unlike UGPM, GD shifted from an initial consensus based on youth enthusiasm to divisive debates on which kind of socialism should underpin geographical work. Discussing 'socialism', we need to consider some degree of untranslatability across different contexts. Key is knowing the Italian political contexts of those years, in which claims for 'democracy' came from antifascist parties and movements for civil rights (Dematteis 2005), so that striving for a 'Democratic Geography' meant occupying a definitively leftist political space. Conversely, a 'Socialist Geography' label would have appeared as a reference to the Italian Socialist Party, a mainstream governmental force that was harshly criticised by the radical Left, especially vibrant in Italy in the 1970s (Balestrini and Moroni 2003).

On the still neglected GD experience, which had groups in most university cities such as Milan, Turin, Genoa, Bologna and Naples, with some lesser presence in places such as Florence, Venice and Lecce, a recent contribution by Filippo Celata and Francesca Governa suggests that GD can be considered as the Italian attempt to join the international 'critical and radical turn' (Celata and Governa 2023, 1). Although making only a marginal use of the newly opened GD archives, these authors stress how this attempt took place in connection with 'other critical turns occurring elsewhere' (Celata and Governa, 2023, 2) especially in France. Celata highlights 'surprising analogies' between GD and 'English-speaking radical geography' (Celata 2021a, 37), similarities that were hardly displayed explicitly but appeared in discussions on the social value of fieldtrips (Celata 2021b) that took inspiration from the Geographical Expeditions. GD's 'radical' features are also revealed by the frequent use of the expression 'Dear comrades' in internal correspondences.<fnref n="61" /> Yet, much of the history that is discussed here can be understood through

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Rome, Società Geografica Italiana, Archivio di Geografia Democratica (hereafter GDA).</footnote>
Italian political traditions and contingent situations, and only grasping this distinctiveness allows understanding how these international transfers of ideas worked.

Unlike UGPM, and like USG, GD did not have a unique recognized leadership, although a couple of its members were already Full Professors. It was the case with Giuseppe Dematteis, whose innovating contributions are widely acknowledged in international scholarship (Fall and Minca 2013) and with Lucio Gambi (1920-2006), recognized as a sort of ‘noble father’ by all kinds of nonconformist geographers in Italy (Ferretti 2022b). Despite that, early GD meetings were characterised by some secrecy for the first three years. These hesitations towards an overt ‘coming out’ to seek ‘alliances’ with the most sympathetic mainstream geographers<fnref n="62" /> was due to concerns about a ‘map of the academic power’ redacted by Gambi, which contained chilling data on the political belonging of Geography Chairs in Italy: ‘38% Right, 48% Centre and 14% Left’.<fnref n="63" /> Thus, junior leftist geographers immediately perceived the dangers of retaliation that this conservative and gate-keeping establishment represented for their career perspectives.

GD’s lengthy discussions on when and how ‘to come out from the closet’<fnref n="64" /> resulted in the organisation of the public conference ‘Fieldwork Enquiry in Geography’ that took place in Florence in 1979 thanks to local allies such as Giuseppe Barbieri (Canigiani et al. 1981). Afterwards, this conference was perceived as a half-fiasco by several GD members, who had the impression that too many ‘conventional’<fnref n="65" /> people attended it. However, key was the document accompanying the event, which remain the sole agreed GD ‘manifesto’ and reveals the plurality of the political traditions to which GD members belonged, namely: ‘The theoretical and methodological contributions of Marxism; the lessons of scholars such as [Carlo] Cattaneo, committed to the solution of the problems posed by the geographical environment to human organizations; the investigations of the most aware scholars of regional geography ... who consider the forms of terrestrial space as a matter of social relations’.<fnref n="66" /> That is, an attempt to bridge through

<footnote n="62">⁶² GDA, A73, Decima riunione, Turin, 23-24 June 1978.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ GDA, A3a Prima riunione, Genoa, 28 September 1976.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ GDA, A73, Decima riunione, Turin 23-24 June 1978, Torino.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ GDA A91, Isenburg to ‘Cari amici’, 11 June 1979.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ GDA A79, Prima circolare de ‘L’inchiesta sul terreno in geografia”.</footnote>
Geography the contrasting claims of orthodox Marxism and federalism in the traditions of the Italian Left.

Significantly, geographical knowledge had to serve agendas very similar to those of USG and UGPM: ‘Knowledge and action should not be produced for the strategies of the dominant groups, ... which make territory a class instrument for the expropriation, exploitation and marginalization of the majority .... They must take shape and grow within the movement of the working masses who ... acquire awareness and knowledge of the role that geographical space has in the struggle for a more just society’.<fnref n="67" /> As for their relations with mainstream geography, GD members declared that: ‘We do not believe that ours is the only way of doing geography ... we are open to broader exchanges and discussions with those who do not subscribe to our positions but carry out a socially committed research work like us’.<fnref n="68" /> Thus, the matter of the relations between activism and academy was dealt with the aim of keeping universities’ doors open for young geography’s contesters, a strategy that was endorsed since the beginning by Gambi.<fnref n="69" />

Yet, like in the other cases discussed here, some GD scholars failed to secure an academic position or had their promotion delayed for several years. A big traumatism were the national concourses of 1979, following the ‘coming out’ mentioned above, which resulted in a disaster as all the GD members who applied for a senior academic position were failed by the boards. They eventually ran into severe written judgements through which the senior geographical establishment contended that these young scholars were doing ‘ideology’ rather than ‘geography’. Massimo Quaini recollected these concourses as ‘an inquisitorial process to the heretics of geography’ (Rossi 2021, 362). In a 1979 letter to Dematteis, Pasquale Coppola attached his evaluation reports, lamenting that the board had criticised ‘the ideological orientation’ of his analyses by arguing that the applicant was dispersing his talent by ‘slipping into polemics that are not supported by original data, being sometimes characterised by preconceived positions’.<fnref n="70" /> This meant the

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ GDA A79, Prima circolare.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ GDA A79, Prima circolare.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ GDA A3b, Seconda riunione, 26 November 1976, Bologna.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ GDA A110b. Coppola to Dematteis, 10 February 1981.</footnote>
excommunication of socially and politically committed geography in the name of some alleged neutrality or objectivity of academic knowledge.

On the one hand, this was perfectly consistent with the toxic practices of ‘a recruitment that is grounded on essentially clientelist and nepotist bases [which] has disqualified so much our discipline’,<fnref n="71" /> that Coppola had already denounced few years earlier on behalf of the GD Napolitan local. On the other, a certain number of GD members progressively accessed full professorships after the disbanding of the group, becoming in some cases the new gatekeepers (Dell’Agnese, Minca and Schmidt di Friedberg 2021). Puzzlingly, this occurred in the Italian academic context, in which nepotism and inverse meritocracy are still at the origins of the high level of legal disputes on the outcomes of public concourses that is documented by independent associations such as *Trasparenza e Merito* (Sciré 2021). It can be broadly said that the conquest of senior positions by former contesters did not alter substantially the system, highlighting the same issue that contributed to the disbandment of most radical scholarly groups. That is, the impact of co-optation from academic power in emptying these associations of their voluntaristic strengths.

Beyond these contradictions, already addressed by the existing literature on GD (Cavallo 2007; Celata and Governa 2023), also the substantial divergences that still emerged in public polemics between GD members several years later (Farinelli 2006; Quaini 2006) contributed to end that experience. They can be exemplified by the story of *Hérodote-Italia* (HI), one of the endeavours that GD scholars tried for giving future visibility to the group alongside the project of an alternative geography textbook, non-realised, that amazingly paralleled concurrent USG attempts of the same kind.<fnref n="72" /> In the bid to serve both activist and scholarly agendas, HI was expected to follow the model of *Hérodote*, which had been recently founded by Yves Lacoste in Paris, and which exerted a strong fascination on Italian early radical and critical geographers.

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ GDA A23, Gruppo di Napoli (nota di P. Coppola), 1976.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² *Newsletter* 5(4), 1980, Concerning the USG textbook project; *Newsletter* 4(1), 1978, P. O’Keefe, Socialist Geography textbook.</footnote>
Through Quaini’s connections with Lacoste, an agreement was reached that *Hérodote* would have granted to HI the use of the title and the republication of some of its materials in Italian, through activist publishing house Bertani. The themes that were initially proposed for HI heavily relied on the topics that were addressed in Lacoste’s journal, such as: ‘Geography and crisis; use of maps; perception and mental maps; Reclus; Southern Europe; military matters; nuclear plants; teaching; Cuba; geographical knowledge of the subaltern classes’.<fnref n="73" /> Since the beginning, perplexities were expressed on the opportunity of following so closely the ‘French’ model and on the explicit Marxist setup established by Quaini. Acquainted with his Savona fellow citizen Arrigo Cervetto, a former anarchist who founded Leninist party ‘Lotta Comunista’ (Rossi 2021, 366), Quaini carried out a quite traditional form of academic Marxism that soon created a polarisation between diverging positions within GD.

Since the beginning, other GD members such as Coppola felt the need to state that: ‘Our collective cannot be identified with HI’.<fnref n="74" /> Among those who criticised HI, Gambi first proposed to name the journal *Pisacane* in honour of proto-anarchist Risorgimento activist Carlo Pisacane (1818-1857), a label that ‘would fit better Italian publics and cultures’.<fnref n="75" /> Gambi stressed how it would have been wrong to ‘invest everything in the journal’<fnref n="76" /> without considering other potential editorial endeavours such as book collections. While these distinctions were initially considered as a marker of healthy pluralism, the following discussions revealed divergences that are well exemplified by a letter to the GD collective by Teresa Isenburg, Gambi’s collaborator in Milan and one of the most committed GD members. Clarifying first that, if GD ‘coincided with HI’, she would have resigned from the group, Isenburg argued that GD’s internal disagreements did not exist by chance, but corresponded to ‘different ways of understanding research’ and also to ‘cultural and scholarly differences that are so deep that they cannot be reduced to a unique action’.<fnref n="77" /> Isenburg and friends also took distances from those HI supporters who considered the academy as the exclusive place

<footnote n="73">⁷³ GDA A42, Quinta riunione. Naples, 23-24 April. 1977.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ GDA A42, Quinta riunione. Naples 23-24 April 1977.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ GDA A45, Gambi to ‘Cari compagni’, 27 April 1977.</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ GDA A56, Gambi to Dematteis, 27 December 1977.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ GDA A91, Isenburg to ‘Cari amici’, 11 June 1979.</footnote>
for struggle and from Quaini’s Marxism, clashing with the left-libertarian and federalist mindset
of Gambi and his likes (Ferretti 2022b).

As for HI, it published only four issues from 1978 to 1981, whose contents exposed most of the problematics that were previously raised. Approximately a half of issues 0, 2 and 3 (that is 3 on 4) was occupied by materials translated directly from *Hérodote* and Lacoste’s work, revealing the group’s limits as for producing original output. Even their conversations with GD’s French partners were not straightforward. On the one hand Quaini, who mentioned USG among the international inspirations of the journal, explicitly aimed at the ‘construction of a Marxist geography’<fnref n="78" /> reproducing excerpts from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao to show that what these theorists wrote was straightforwardly ‘geography’. This paralleled Batalla’s arguments mentioned above, although the Mexican geographer acknowledged more explicitly the need for pluralism.

On the other, Lacoste, in his responses to Quaini, took some distances from the Italian geographer, arguing that the French and the Italian *Hérodotes* had ‘different positions’,<fnref n="79" /> as Lacoste valued more the development of empirically committed research rather than Quaini’s ideological concerns of adapting geography to Marxism without questioning this latter’s very foundations, at least in those early years (Celata 2021b). That is, a debate that was instead taken very seriously at USG as noted above. After 1981, GD and HI no longer existed: yet, also GD can be considered as a representative experience in the broader transnational movement pioneering critical and radical geographies in the Seventies and Eighties.

**Conclusion: Dialogues are ongoing**

This paper has shown how some examples of early critical/radical geographies that took place
across different national, cultural and linguistic contexts presented elements of both translatability
and distinctiveness. Although primary sources show how USG, UGPM and GD often paid
reference to each other, being connected to common transnational and multilingual circuits in

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ HI 1, 1979, M. Quaini, *Quale marxismo per quale geografia*, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ HI 1, 1979, Y. Lacoste, *La posizione di Hérodote-Francia*, 27.</footnote>
which practices of translation and transfer of knowledge were frequent, these documents also
suggest methodological carefulness to scholars working on alternative geographical traditions.
This means paying attention to the elements of untranslatability that possibly exist among different
languages and political/cultural contexts, considering their cultural and linguistic pluralities.
Multilingualism, empathy and scholars' capacity of giving up their own ethnocentrism is necessary
to grasp transnational dialogues, intersections, trajectories and circulations of knowledge.

Problematising methodological nationalism proves key also beyond the specific field of critical/radical geography as it touches broader debates on transnational histories of human and social sciences. In Geography, other movements interacting with critical/radical fields but often seen as opposed to them, such as so-called Quantitative Geography, shared similar international circulations, losts in translation and plural applications in different places as discussed by recent scholarship questioning clear-cut narratives on the likewise complex and multilingual histories of ‘quantification’ (Gyuris et al. 2022). Questioning both national schools and Anglo-centred definitions proves paramount for decolonising geography by (also) recovering silenced voices through archival research.

Despite some broad national label, USG, UGPM and GD were transnational and worked with more
languages, which makes them impossible to understand through mere national frameworks or
monolingual approaches. As for their similarities, they were all self-organized experiences (with
related financial problems) mainly expressed by one or more journals. They were all expressions
of academic youth who suffered some marginalisation and often struggled to obtain stable
academic positions, although availing of the (sometimes patronising) support of some established
senior academics. They referred explicitly to some kind of Marxism (and to a lesser extent
anarchism, feminism or anti-racism). They disbanded quickly but left seeds that are still very
visible in the respective areas and beyond.

As for their distinctiveness, their use of different labels for saying relatively similar things
demonstrates that there is no unique model for making ‘radical’ or ‘critical’ geography. Thus, one
would search in vain for the perfect equivalent of a specific localised tradition: said in other words,

F. Ferretti, 2025, Translations, translocations and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual
analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge, *Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers*, https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12743
‘radical’ geography and its contents are not a monopoly of Anglo-American geographies. Translation understood as translocation allows finding a great richness of relevant contributions in different places, that can be put into dialogue at the condition to avoid nationalistic, monolingual or monocultural approaches. USG, UGPM and GD can belong to common plural histories of radical and critical geography, at the condition that we do not give dogmatic or ethnocentric meanings to these definitions: a key lesson to current critical and radical scholarship.

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