Interior History: Rethinking Space and Nation in Brazil

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.