Jacobo GARCÍA-ÁLVAREZ, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Paloma PUENTE-LOZANO, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
The concept of ‘imaginatives geographies’, coined by Edward Said (1978) in his best known work, has been widely developed in geographical studies influenced by postcolonial theoretical perspectives. The branches of the discipline that have incorporated and drawn on this notion are multiple, including, among others, the history of geography, historical geography, political geography, and geopolitics (Zusman 2013; Morrisey 2014). In those fields, the idea of imaginative geography has brought to the fore not only the analysis of spatial representations of places and their role in the construction of territorial identities but also their political consequences. Moreover, in contrast to previous approaches to geographical imaginations, Said's notion, inspired by Foucauldian conception of power-knowledge, is inherently political, inasmuch as it links spatial imaginations with practices of domination, or in other words, with the political projects that shape territories. This paper aims to review the genesis and trajectory of the concept of imaginative geography within the discipline, paying attention to its diverse meanings and uses, as well as to the criticisms that have pointed out its limitations and the proposals that have tried to enrich it or overcome these limitations. In order to exemplify these considerations, we will deal with the application of this category to the study of border delimitation processes associated with the modern nation-state and the way in which imaginative geographies contributed to the material and symbolic territorialisation of border regions and populations. Drawing on the extensive geohistorical literature recently published on this type of processes (Puente and García 2021), we will present the case of the modern delimitation of the Spanish-Portuguese border (ca. mid-19th century), on which we have worked in some depth in recent years (García and Puente 2017).
Mots clés : Political Geography|Historical Geography|imaginative geographies|borderlands|boundary-making
A104215JG