Interior History: Rethinking Space and Nation in Brazil

在欧洲在巴西存在的五个世纪里，沿海地区和内陆地区之间形成了对比。里约热内卢和萨尔瓦多周边的沿海地区被描绘成“文明”和“现代”社会的中心，居住着被视为国家文化和政治创造者的欧洲后裔精英。相比之下，广大的内陆地区却被贴上了所谓的“边远地区”的标签。作为更先进海岸的永久陪衬，边远地区一直是想象中的空间，仅对其自然资源和当地居民的劳动有用。数百年来，这种传统的观点已经植根于国家的想象中，在那里，内陆被降级为巴西的概念和政治边缘。为了挑战沿海和内陆之间的主导叙事，这个项目从内部重新审视巴西历史，我们将其称为“内陆历史”。为了颠倒通常用于研究巴西-以及更广泛的拉丁美洲-历史的概念和地理边界，我们展示了内陆的人和空间是如何在国家认同、政治、经济和文化的发展中发挥核心作用的。巴西是一个理想的案例研究，因为它既参与又颠覆了对边境的历史学关注。在巴西，内陆类似于传统的边疆，有着探险和建国的历史，但它充满了落后的文化比喻，与边疆不同，它抵制定居。此外，无论是在地理上还是在国家想象中，都没有单一的“内部”。通过问当我们使用内陆而不是边境时，如果有什么变化的话，我们的项目将重新思考空间和国家的形成。我们聚集了一个由来自巴西、英国和美国的14名历史学家、文化学者和社会科学家组成的研究团队，旨在展示巴西的内部史--进而延伸到拉丁美洲内外的其他国家--如何不仅可以挑战假定的地区之间的等级和边界，而且还可以重新获得长期被认为与国家叙事无关紧要的社区的机构。我们将产生两个产出：编辑后的卷，其中每一章都使用内部视角来重温巴西历史上的一个开创性时刻。以及一本互动的数字地图集，其中整合了书中的每一章。编辑后的卷将以英语和葡萄牙语版本出版，将展示来自多个国家和学科的老牌和后起之秀学者的工作。通过其单独的章节贡献和案例研究的集体凝聚力，这本书将为研究巴西历史开辟新的知识领域。尽管在线可视化最初是作为编辑后的书的更传统学术输出的数字伴侣而设计的，但在2018年8月里约热内卢国家博物馆发生毁灭性火灾后，它变得更加重要。这场大火是有记录历史上最大的历史文献损失之一，它向巴西国内外的学者和档案工作者提出了挑战，要求他们思考如何在21世纪保护历史遗产。因此，除了提供一种创新的工具来探索过去500年巴西内陆历史的大量案例研究外，在线地图集还将展示数字人文项目如何为公众提供一个新的平台，让公众了解历史知识。该项目的首席调查员是雅各布·布兰克博士，他是爱丁堡大学拉丁美洲历史讲师，也是巴西农村问题专家。联合调查员(Co-I)是曼彻斯特大学的巴西文学和土著文化专家L·中央情报局S教授。

In the five centuries of European presence in Brazil, a contrast has developed between the coastal and interior regions. The coastal areas around Rio de Janeiro and Salvador have been depicted as the centre of 'civilised' and 'modern' society, inhabited by European-descendant elites seen as the creators of national culture and politics. In contrast, the vast interior regions have been stigmatized as the so-called 'backlands'. As the perpetual foil to the more advanced coast, the backlands have stood as an imagined spaced useful only for its natural resources and the labour of its local populations. Over hundreds of years, this traditional view has become implanted in national imaginations, where the interior is relegated to the conceptual and political periphery of Brazil.To challenge the dominant narrative between coast and interior, this project re-examines Brazilian history from the inside, a framework that we call 'interior history'. Seeking to invert the conceptual and geographic boundaries often used to study the history of Brazil-and of Latin America more broadly-we show how the people and spaces of the interior have been central to the development of national identities, politics, economy, and culture.Brazil is an ideal case study as it both engages and disrupts the historiographical focus on frontiers. In Brazil, the interior is similar to a traditional frontier with its histories of exploration and state-formation, yet it is imbued with cultural tropes of backwardness that, unlike frontiers, are resistant to settlement. And moreover, there is no single 'interior'-either geographically or in the national imagination. By asking what, if anything, changes when we use interior rather than frontier, our project will rethink the formation of space and nation.Bringing together a research team of fourteen historians, cultural scholars, and social scientists from Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we aim to show how an interior history of Brazil-and by extension, of other countries across and beyond Latin America-can not only challenge the assumed hierarchies and boundaries between regions, but also recapture the agency of communities long-stigmatised as inconsequential to national narratives.We will produce two outputs: an edited volume where each chapter uses an interior perspective to revisit a seminal moment in Brazilian history, and an interactive digital atlas that integrates each chapter from the book. The edited volume-to be published in English and Portuguese versions-will showcase the work of both established and up-and-coming scholars from multiple countries and disciplines. Through its individual chapter contributions and also the collective cohesion of its case studies, the book will open new intellectual terrain for studying Brazilian history. Although the online visualization was initially designed as a digital companion to the more traditional academic output of the edited book, it has acquired even greater importance in the aftermath of the devastating fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro in August 2018. One of the greatest losses of historical documents in recorded history, the fire has challenged scholars and archivists across Brazil and abroad to think about how to preserve historical patrimony in the twenty-first century. So along with providing an innovative tool to explore numerous case studies from the past 500 years of Brazil's interior history, the online atlas will showcase how a digital humanities project can offer a new platform for making historical knowledge accessible to public audiences.The project's Principal Investigator (PI) is Dr Jacob Blanc, a lecturer in Latin American history at the University of Edinburgh and an expert on rural Brazil. The Co-Investigator (Co-I) is Professor Lúcia Sá, an expert in Brazilian literature and indigenous cultures at the University of Manchester.