Radical Autobiography as Place Storytelling: The Troubled Antiracist Geopoetics of “Wild Bill”

This paper explores a neglected aspect of the otherwise widely studied life and thought of radical geographer William Wheeler “Wild Bill” Bunge (1928-2013). That is, his engagement with the kind of narrative storytelling that is studied today under labels such as “geopoetics” and “geo-literature”. It makes so starting by an unexpected archival discovery: a 478-page document, titled Donia’s Garden (hereafter DG), dedicated to Bunge’s second wife Donia Johnson and containing the messy draft of what Bunge tried unsuccessfully to publish as a book. This work was presented by its author as nothing less than the new “Anne Frank’s Diary”, and the only copy that I could locate hitherto survives in the archives of Bunge’s friend and correspondent Anne Buttimer (1938-2017). Comparing this intriguing document, which performs an (auto)biography of Bunge and his family from 1971 to the early 1990s, with other Bunge’s works such as Fitzgerald (1971) of which DG was a sort of continuation, I argue that Bunge’s kind of radical autobiography and storytelling provides insights to both antiracist geopoetics and the biographical turn in Geography, highlighting the complex, unpredictable and often contradictory relations between life, networks and ideas. Without undermining the groundbreaking contributions that Bunge gave to “canonised” Geography, this paper shows that his writing was also a literary genre—a wild one, like the author.