Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Description to come.
Synopsis
Defiant Geographies examines the destruction of a poor community in the center of Rio de Janeiro to make way for the country's first international mega-event in the 1920s. As the country celebrated the centenary of its independence, its post-abolition whitening ideology took on material form in the urban development project that staged Latin America's first World Fair. The book explores official efforts to re-organize space that equated modernization with racial progress. It also considers the ways in which black and blackened subjects mobilized their own spatial logics to introduce alternative ways of occupying the city. The study unpacks how the spaces of the urban poor are racialized, and the impact of this process for those who do not fit the ideal models of urbanity that come to define the national project. The book therefore puts the mutual production of race and space at the heart of scholarship on Brazil's urban development, which has primarily focused on class relations and class domination. It understands urban reform as a monumental act of forgetting the country's recent slave past.