Reading Claude Raffestin: Pathways for a Critical Biography

Abstract

In this paper I suggest fleshing out and making material the authorial voice by exploring pathways for writing a critical biography of Claude Raffestin, a Swiss geographer writing since the late 1970s up to the present day. In exploring his life and contribution as part of the wider Francophone tradition of social and political geography, I aim to engage further with the debate on the circulation of knowledge and the alleged hegemony of the English language within geography. In doing this, I suggest that the term ‘disciplinary Orientalism’ might help to think through some of the contradictions in geography, which both draws heavily from foreign critical thinkers, often removed from the spaces and contexts of debate they are/were writing in, and simultaneously ignores foreign geographical traditions and contributions. Building on Raffestin's work—and drawing from diverse sources, including his writings, reviews of his work, and new interview material—I explore how his geographies might make sense here and now, to the extent that ‘here’ is inevitably an uncertain place, not only in where this paper is written and read but also because reading always takes place in-between contexts. Through this example I explore how scholars are embodied and located in uncertain places and points to the multiple circulations and noncirculations of theory and praxis within geography.