[forthcoming] Decolonial openings of Ron Johnston's legacies: how to avoid new amnesias

All along the seven editions and the numerous discussions around his key work Geography and Geographers: Anglo–American human geography since 1945 [hereafter GaG] Ron Johnston offered remarkable examples of self-reflectivity. Stimulated by critics who stressed the need to foster plural views on the increasingly complex and multifaceted field of geography by including approaches such as feminism, gender studies, race studies, transnationalism, postcolonialism and decoloniality (among others), Johnston fully recognized the urgency of a collective engagement to write ‘different stories’ from the ‘margins’ of the discipline, that fully consider those that are told from other standpoints than the Anglo-American ones. Johnston was well aware that we are never writing ‘the history’ of geography, but only ‘a history’. This is the first reason for which, like other authors in this book, within the majestic Johnston’s opus, I chose to focus on GaG, in order to first explore the decolonial openings that can be inspired by Johnston’s intellectual legacy. Drawing upon decolonial ideas of wider inclusion in the discipline (theory and practice) and starting from GaG and from key debates within and outside the Anglosphere, my aim is to provide theoretical and methodological insights for writing new global, plural, cosmopolitan and multilingual histories of geography by recovering neglected people, ideas, places and moments in this field of study.