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Journeying Through Utopia: Anarchism, Geographical Imagination and Performative Futures in Marie-Louise Berneri’S Works

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Investigaciones Geográficas • Instituto de Geografía •UNAM eISSN: 2448-7279 • DOI: dx.doi.org/10.14350/rig.60026 • ARTÍCULOS Núm. 100 • Diciembre • 2019 • e60026 www.investigacionesgeograficas.unam.mx Journeying through Utopia: anarchism, geographical imagination and performative futures in Marie-Louise Berneri’s works Un viaje a través de la utopía: anarquismo, imaginación geográfica y futuros performativos en la obra de Marie-Louise Berneri Federico Ferretti* Recibido: 25/07/2019. Aceptado: 12/09/2019. Publicado: 1/12/2019. Abstract. This paper addresses works and archives of Resumen. Este articulo aborda los trabajos y archivos de transnational anarchist intellectual Marie-Louise Berneri la militante anarquista transnacional Maria Luisa Berneri (1918-1949), author of a neglected but very insightful (1918-1949), autora de un estudio poco conocido pero muy history of utopias and of their spaces. Extending current significativo sobre las historias de las utopías y sus espacios. literature on anarchist geographies, utopianism and on the Al ampliar la literatura actual sobre geografías anarquistas, relation between geography and the humanities, I argue utopismo y sobre la relación entre la geografía y las ‘humani- that a distinction between authoritarian and libertarian dades’, defiendo que una distinción entre utopías libertarias utopias is key to understanding the political relevance of y utopías autoritarias es esencial para comprender la impor- the notion of utopia, which is also a matter of space and tancia política del concepto de utopía, que es también un geographical imagination. Berneri’s criticisms to utopia were asunto de espacio y de imaginación geográfica. Las críticas eventually informed by notions of anti-colonialism and anti- de Berneri a la utopía se inspiraron en su anticolonialismo y authoritarianism, especially referred to her original critique su antiautoritarismo, centrado especialmente en su original of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Then, I argue for critica de los totalitarismos del siglo XX. Además, propon- a connection between anarchist, humanistic, cultural and go una conexión entre abordajes anarquistas, humanistas, historical approaches to geography, to extend the empirical culturales e históricos de la geografía para ampliar el campo and theoretical reach of the discipline and its relations empírico y teórico de la disciplina y de sus relaciones con with the ‘humanities’. This paper likewise contributes to las humanidades. Este articulo contribuye también a las in- recent scholarship on transnational anarchism, arguing that vestigaciones recientes sobre el anarquismo transnacional, y the anarchist tradition cannot be understood outside its afirma que la tradición anarquista no puede ser comprendida transnational, cosmopolite and multilingual networks and fuera de sus redes transnacionales, multilingües y cosmo- concrete practices: therefore, only relational, contextual and politas y de sus practicas concretas. Entonces, solo lecturas space-sensitive approaches can make sense of its specificity. contextuales, relacionales y sensibles al espacio pueden dar sentido a esta especificidad anarquista. Keywords: Berneri, geographical imagination, anarchism, utopianism, anti-colonialism Palabras clave: Berneri, imaginación geográfica, anarquis- mo, utopismo, anticolonialismo * Associate Professor, University College Dublin, School of Geography, Belfield, Newman Building, Room H015. Email: [email protected]. https://people.ucd.ie/federico.ferretti. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5446-6522; Scopus Author ID: 55540917000. F. Ferretti Journeying through Utopia: anarchism, geographical imagination and performative futures… ‘The utopian lights stars in the sky of human dig- opening quotation from Camillo Berneri (1897- nity, but he sails in a harbourless sea. His psycho- 1937), important transnational activist of the first logical nature is that of a mystic, his ingenuity is half of the twentieth century and father of Maria that of a true poet; he lives outside his time, turned Luisa, exposing a certain ambivalence of the notion towards the most remote and dead past, or staring of utopia in the anarchist intellectual tradition. at the most unrealistic future. The utopian can fly On the one hand, anarchists have often expressed on the actual town, but he can never conquer it. In appraisals of utopias as positive ‘dreams’ of a new all times, Florence kills Savonarola’. society. On the other, they generally claim not to be utopians but proponents of real alternatives to the Camillo Berneri, 1932: 1. present society, arguing that ‘utopia’ is a generally bourgeois notion: Camillo Berneri’s classification of the ‘utopian’ among the ‘politicians’ is a good INTRODUCTION1 example of this critique. Anarchism is an idea which appears especially relevant for geography, This paper discusses the problem of how to build given the historical links between the construction geographies of Utopia, drawing upon an excep- of an anarchist thinking and a geographical one tional and little-known case, that is the works of embodied by figures such as Elisée Reclus (1830- anarchist transnational intellectual and activist 1905) and Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921) (Ferretti Maria Luisa (or Marie-Louise) Berneri, author of 2014 and 2018; Kinna 2016; Springer 2016), neglected but exceptional works on histories and and the widely acknowledged role of present-day spaces of utopias. While her masterpiece Journey rediscovery of anarchist geographies in fields such Through Utopia (Berneri 1952), written in the as historical geography (Keighren 2018). What 1940s, addressed philosophical matters from the deserves further reflection is that, as anticipated, Antiquity to the beginning of the twentieth cen- most of the anarchist tradition, including Reclus tury, it was inserted in the context of the author’s and Kropotkin, explicitly refused the label of political activities, tackling the challenge of pro- utopianism, considering that anarchist activists viding a suitable alternative to the dominant re- should strive for concrete societal modifications presentations of the opposition between demo- rather than build ‘Icarias’ outside the real world, cracies and totalitarianisms, a very urgent task including utopian communities overseas (Ferretti for the international anarchist movement at that 2013). Nevertheless, according to Ruth Kinna, time. Berneri’s reflections provide useful concep- some tendencies in anarchism, normally conside- tual tools to understand anarchist approaches to red as ‘romantic’ ones, adopted the idea of utopia the notion of utopia, and at the same time it con- as synonymous with the freed society they drea- tributes to current reflections on the relation bet- mt. Kinna’s argument is that, between anarchist ween geography and utopia, extending scholar- utopianism and anti-utopianism, ‘the differences ship on cultural, (neo)humanistic and anarchist have been exaggerated’ (Kinna 2009, 222). This geographies. matches Maria Luisa Berneri’s distinctions bet- One of the political movements which have ween ‘authoritarian’ and ‘libertarian’ utopias as been especially identified with the idea of utopia I explain below. is anarchism. This association is exemplified by the My main argument is twofold. First, as Berneri did, geographies of utopia should distinguish bet- 1 An early version of this paper was presented at the session ween, on the one hand, an imperial model which ‘Where Next? Historical Geographies of the Future’ at the characterised the ultramarine expansion in the early RGS-IBG International Conference in 2016. Thanks to all Modern Epoch, reflected by the first self-declared those who asked questions and gave suggestions, especially Utopia (1516) of this kind by Thomas More the panel’s convenors Mike Heffernan and Jake Hodder. Many thanks also to Carolina Martínez (CONICET) for (Martínez 2017) and, on the other, a pluralist and our conversations on utopia and modernity. complex inspiration for more recent prefigurative 2 • Investigaciones Geográficas • eISSN: 2448-7279 • DOI: 10.14350/rig.60026 • ARTÍCULOS • Núm. 100 • Diciembre • 2019 • e60026 F. Ferretti Journeying through Utopia: anarchism, geographical imagination and performative futures… thinking linked to the idea of social progress. Se- early humanist thinkers like Erasmus, a philoso- cond, utopia is a pertinent object of study at the pher who was likewise evoked by Berneri. Recent same time for anarchist geographies, cultural and scholarship has demonstrated the political, ethical humanistic (or neo-humanistic) approaches as a and scholarly interest of early anarchist geographers literary genre, a conceptual device for investigating for ‘humanism’, ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘humane cultures of empire but also as a potential tool for science’ against the various utilitarian and amoral prefiguration and social action. Considering uto- approaches to the production of knowledge (Fe- pias in their places and in their historical contexts rretti 2018). This parallels the rediscovery of the is essential: as a corollary to my first argument, I connection between ‘humanistic’ approaches to contend that there is generally (but not necessarily) geography fostered by Anne Buttimer (1938-2017) a conceptual difference between utopias located and what was considered as ‘radical geography’ in in imaginary places overseas, linked to imperial the 1970s and 1980s (Ferretti 2019a). This paper imagination, and utopias which try to locate pos- extends this scholarship by
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