Géographie, tournant culturel et imaginaires nationaux: Risorgimento, irrédentisme et invention géographique de l’Italie

This paper addresses the construction of nations as geographical objects during the 19th and the 20th centuries, drawing on the critical frame of concepts provided by cultural geography like imagination, identities and cultural transfers. Focusing on the Italian 'Long Risorgimento', the paper shows the contribution that cultural geography can give to the history of geography. Analysing primary sources, I provide an overview of the Italian geographers' work to invent national identities and a national imagination before their country became a unified state. First, I question the ways in which they naturalised national unity. Then, I analyse how they justified more centralist or more federalist proposals through geographical arguments. Finally, I try to evaluate their debt with international circulation of knowledge and geographical cultures coming mainly from the French-speaking and German-speaking areas. The conclusions stress the pertinence of cultural approaches and of the 'cultural turn' for studying the circulation of geographical knowledge and the construction of geographical objects during geographical discipline's history.