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 mostly never translated into English, I also extend current literature rediscovering critical and radical geographies beyond their Northern and Anglo-American ‘core’.