Geographies of revolution: Prefiguration and spaces of alterity in Latin American radicalism

Abstract

This paper discusses geographies of revolution and their potentialities for providing new notions of space to critical, subaltern and decolonial geopolitics. It does so by addressing a virtually unknown case, that is works of Cuban revolutionary and geographer Antonio Nuñez–Jiménez (1923–1998), especially his 1959 Geografía de Cuba. This book was published during the revolutionary period, after the fall of dictator Fulgencio Batista and before the 1961 official ‘socialist’ turn of the new (authoritarian) Castroist regime. According to respected scholarship, the original inspiration of the Cuban revolution was democratic and anticolonialist, and its initial components quite heterogeneous. My argument is twofold. Firstly, I contend that revolutions occur independently from narrow ideological labels that were imposed later, and geographies of revolution express their performative potentialities for prefiguring new worlds independently from the (re)establishment of post-revolutionary states. Secondly, I suggest that Jiménez’s elaborations on the Cuban Monte as a (revolutionary) space of alterity can nourish decolonial geopolitics which are alternative to European ideas of bounded territoriality. Corresponding to the rough and ‘uncivilised’ hinterland where historical experiences of Indio and Afro-Cuban insurgences took place, the Monte became a concept defining subversion and alterity through Jiménez’s claims that these early insurgences found their continuators in the nineteenth-century anticolonial fighters and in the 1950s guerrillas. By addressing Jiménez’s original writings, which were never translated into English, I also extend current literature rediscovering critical and radical geographies beyond their Northern and Anglo-American ‘core’.

For critical geo‐histories of population. Engaging geographically with Massimo Livi Bacci's works

“…There, the availability of space allowed several indigenous groups to reproduce their ways of life in more remote places. While this paralleled the saga of rebel African slaves fleeing to form rebel communities such as quilombos and palenques (Ferretti, 2022; Guillén, 2021; Roberts, 2015; Wright, 2020), Livi Bacci notes that, in the case of Black communities, their demographic dynamics remained strongly constrained at least until the formal abolition of slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was due to hard labour, social conditionings and ‘the frequent intrusion of the White males in the Black reproductive pool’, which altogether continued to imply ‘higher mortality, and lower fertility of the Black population’ (Livi Bacci, 2023, p. 1) in cases such as Cuba, for which the aforementioned remarks as for the violence of colonial miscegenation likewise apply.…”