Critical historical geography

This is an interesting entry to compile in that while most work in historical geography—the subdiscipline of geography concerned with the past and its relations with the present—might now be called “critical historical geography,” the term is scarcely defined. Its story involves changing geographies and landscapes of environmental and social change (encompassing problems of capitalism, modernity, empire, nation, globalization, violence, and planetary peril, to name just the most prominent) and thus serves as a commentary on changing times and current predicaments from a specific (if eclectic) area of inquiry. This story has been integral to the journey of “critical geography” over the last sixty years: to fostering recognition that the questions and things the geographer studies are bound up with the past and have a history. Geographical interest in the past is not the preserve of historical geography (the boundaries of the subdiscipline are porous), and not all work referenced in this bibliography comes from researchers who identify themselves as historical geographers. Our term shall be annotated in three (overlapping) ways: to denote, first, work in historical geography that is informed by theory and philosophy (especially questions of power, knowledge, representation, materiality, identity, memory, difference, and human-animal-nature linkages) and has a normative concern not simply with understanding the world but also with trying to change it for the better; second, wider theoretical debates that have grappled with how questions of geography and space are critical (vital) to understanding time and history, and vice versa; and third, historical geographers’ instinctive sensitivity to both methodological questions and how the times and spaces in which they live and work influence what they do—and with “the archive” a key material and social entity and relation (object, site, practice, and way of seeing and knowing). A general overview of this tripartite definition is followed by more detailed commentaries on the three facets, which are given the section headings “Critical of . . .”; “Critical to . . .”; and “Critical Reflexivity . . .” With over one hundred references, the first section is the mainstay of the entry. It recounts the growing and changing scope of critical historical geography by decade and theme (albeit with some intersecting threads), and chronicles from where new and different interests and bodies of work emanate. In all, the following attempt to “curate” this entry is just that: a selective and subjective story, a construct.