The interior : recentering Brazilian history /
"At the beginning of his seventeenth-century book, História do Brasil, the Franciscan friar Vicente do Salvador criticized the Portuguese for neglecting the interior of their new colony. A century after their arrival in Brazil, Portuguese colonists still avoided penetrating deeper into the land...
| Other Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Austin :
University of Texas Press,
2024.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Series: | Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "At the beginning of his seventeenth-century book, História do Brasil, the Franciscan friar Vicente do Salvador criticized the Portuguese for neglecting the interior of their new colony. A century after their arrival in Brazil, Portuguese colonists still avoided penetrating deeper into the lands they claimed. Instead, Salvador argued, they were content to remain "clinging to the coastline, like crabs." In the centuries since then, commentators have cited this passage to point to the neglect of the country's interior which has tended to be conceptualized as an unknown and vaguely defined frontier within the national imagination. In this edited volume Jacob Blanc, Frederico Freitas, and their fellow contributors explore questions around the historical depiction of the interior of Brazil, a wide and diverse landscape with communities of people that have been juxtaposed with the coast as the less advanced, less modern, less "civilized" part of Brazil. The interior, therefore, was and is viewed as the periphery of Brazil and a place that's only meant to be made use of, through its ever-rapidly degraded natural resources and the labor of its people. Freitas and Blanc propose to re-imagine Brazil from the inside out, creating a framework for historians of Brazil and Latin America more generally to define a new subject of history that re-imagines not only Brazilian history, but also border studies to develop a way of to rethink space and community. Scholars from Brazil, the U.S., and the U.K. have come together to revisit seminal moments in this country's history through the lens of the interior. Topics are wide-ranging and reconsider well-known events such as the Canudos War led by the millenarian leader Euclides da Cunha in the Sertão region, differing views of colonial cities and Indigenous space, ethanol production, and guaraná production and scientific studies of the plants' benefits. It ends with an epilogue by Susanna Hecht outlining the far reaching consequences of this kind of work by placing the perhaps greatest symbol of the interior, the Amazon, as a space that has profound global reach and consequences"-- |
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| Physical Description: | 300 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781477330371 1477330372 |