Chris Philo, Adorno and the Antifascist Geographical Imagination – Edinburgh University Press, July 2025

A pioneering excavation of Adorno’s geography which engages fascism and antifascism in the terrain of geographical theorising

• Brings fascism and antifascism into the heart of geographical theorising
• Argues that thinking geographically is indispensable to thinking antifascistically
• Argues that thinking antifascistically should be at the core of thinking geographically
• The first staging of a sustained engagement between Adorno and geography
• A systematic disclosure of how Adorno’s writings – on diverse matters from philosophy to music – entangle a critical-geographical sensibility

To think antifascistically is necessarily to think geographically; to think geographically ought to be to think antifascistically. This aphorism sets the compass for this book’s ambitious attempt to fold questions of fascism and antifascism into the remit of Geotheory (the focus of the host book series). Alert to fascism’s pernicious haunting of our contemporary moment, it reaches for intellectual resources through which to fashion constellations of antifascist thought hinging on attentiveness to space, place, landscape and nature.

Specifically, the book offers the first attempt to systematically explore the ‘geographies’ integral to the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno, premier exponent of the Frankfurt School of critical theory whose writings – on philosophy and sociology, politics and culture, literature and music – were often framed precisely against the threat of fascistic regression. By disclosing Adorno’s geographies, the shape of a geographical antifascism comes into view as a transformational restatement of critical geography’s spirit and purpose.

I’ll be part of a discussion of the book with Chris Philo and Felicitas Kübler, London Group of Historical Geographers, online 27 May 2025, 5pm. More details when I have them.