Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro

by Lorraine Leu

Overview

Defiant Geographies examines the destruction of a poor community in the center of Rio de Janeiro to make way for Brazil’s first international mega-event. As the country celebrated the centenary of its independence, its postabolition whitening ideology took on material form in the urban development project that staged Latin America’s first World’s Fair. The book explores official efforts to reorganize 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. Leu 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. Defiant Geographies puts the mutual production of race and space at the heart of scholarship on Brazil’s urban development and understands urban reform as a monumental act of forgetting the country’s racial past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822987369
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Series:	Pitt Illuminations
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	238
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Lorraine Leu is associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin, where she holds a joint appointment in the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS) and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She is the author of Brazilian Popular Music, and co-edited the anthology Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Race, Ethnicity, and Urbanization 2. Race, Ethnicity, and Visuality 3. Alternative Geographies and Spatial Practices 4. Eradicating Blackness from the Ideal City Epilogue: Mega-events, Ruination, and the Politics of Staying Put Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

In this carefully  researched and beautifully written analysis of a decisive moment in the history of urbanization and modernization in Brazil, Lorraine Leu demonstrates how and why the racial projects of modernity all around the world routinely entail a distinct spatial imaginary rooted in anti-blackness. Her case study shows, however, that the dominant conflation of race with space did not go unchallenged, that the aggrieved and racialized denizens of the city created defiant geographies in which they could talk back to power and take back a measure of what had been stolen from them.” —George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place  
 


“Brilliantly combining insights from history, geography, and cultural studies, Leu shows us not only how race makes space, but also how space constitutes racial difference in imaginations and in practices, creating a complex dynamic of domination and defiance that she traces as a continuous thread through more than a hundred years of Rio de Janeiro's history. That she manages this convincingly and in rich detail - amassing textual, visual, and sonic images - for the dense, striated, and fractal spaces of the city is quite an achievement.” —Peter Wade, University of Manchester
 

“Leu’s attention to the particularities of anti-Blackness within the multiethnic urban context of early twentieth-century Rio make this text especially welcome to scholars of urban studies in the Americas.” —H-Net Reviews
 

“Wonderfully written, compellingly argued, and richly documented, Lorraine Leu’s Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro is a decisive contribution to understanding how race and spatiality were strongly intertwined in the making of Rio de Janeiro’s urban reforms in the early decades of the twentieth century.” —Hispanic Review

“Lorraine Leu explores how the urban reform initiatives of 1920s Rio de Janeiro were underpinned by racial displacement and how black and poor white immigrant communities sought to defiantly resist these processes. This is a welcome and accessible contribution to Brazil’s anti-racist urban theory and will be a fundamental read for anyone interested in race, urban space, urban renewal, and displacement.” —LSE Review of Books

From the Publisher