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Geography Compass

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 discipline were more pervasive and influential than what has been believed. In this paper, I define this movement as the rediscovery of “Other Geographical Traditions” (OGTs) arguing that this notion can enlarge our understanding of geography as a plural and contested field. While a great deal of this literature is constituted by studies on early anarchist and critical geographies, I argue that this concept should be extended to scholarly production from the Global South in languages other than English, which is likewise providing important contributions to the discovery of different geographical traditions, politically and culturally. For that, I address the case of recent Latin American scholarship, in Spanish and Portuguese, on the history and philosophy of critical geographies. Moreover, the fact that these “Southern” scholars are rereading and translating classical figures of “Northern” geographers constitutes a reversal of the former colonial gaze from the North–South to the South–North direction. This suggests that the study of OGTs should also consider different cultural and linguistic traditions, challenging monolingualism in both literature reviews and sources' selection.

Rediscovering other geographical traditions