Indignation, Civic Virtue, and the Right of Resistance: Critical Geography and Antifascism in Italy

This article addresses the ethical and scholarly relevance of notions such as antifascism and resistance for the field of critical and radical geographies, starting from a little-known case, the formation of early critical geographies in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on ideas of civic virtue and nondomination as read by radical and anarchist traditions, I analyze the recently opened archives of Lucio Gambi (1920–2006), which contain unpublished correspondence revealing the fearless role that this critical historical geographer played in denouncing at the same time the outdated positivistic, conservative, and descriptive legacies of Italian geography and the frightful prominence of former Fascist officials in that field. Addressing works of Gambi, of his friend and fellow of the 1943–1945 antifascist Resistance, geographer Giuseppe Barbieri (1923–2004), and of the collective Geografia Democratica (1974–1981), I argue for recognizing the importance, for critical geographers, of fighting against authoritarianism by adopting values of civic virtue, standing proudly against academic opportunism and political conservatism within and outside campuses, past and present.