Davies, A. orcid.org/0000-0001-7421-419X (2021) The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46 (2). pp. 270-283. ISSN 0020-2754
Abstract
In this paper I analyse the making and unmaking of amphibious urban modernity in Recife in the Northeast of Brazil between 1920 and 1950. I argue that the transformation of the city was predicated on an absorptive and eradicative notion of whiteness that necessitated the creation of dry, enclosed land. The process of urban transformation proceeded not only through a racial division of space, but through a racial division of nature. Racialised groups, and the houses, marshlands, and mangroves where they lived were subject to eradication not only as spaces but as ecologies and landscapes. Brazilian racial thought in the period was fundamentally imbricated with ideas about nature. Histories of coloniality, indigeneity, enslavement, and escape meant that forests, wetness, and the spectre of commonly held land were understood as threats to whiteness and its self‐association with order, enclosure, purity, and dryness. To answer why the division between the wet and the dry was so important, and why whiteness needed dryness, I turn back to philosophical investigations of the foundational myth of Brazil. I argue that a peculiarly Brazilian philosophy of nature, which drew racial lines within nature itself, underpinned a familiar, if uncanny, white supremacy that ordered society along the material and symbolic contours of race. Under colonial modernity, this philosophy translated into a division of the pure – rational, cleansed, dry, modern, urban space – from the impure – muddy, fearful, tangled, forested landscape. Under the conditions of dependent capitalism, the process on which this racial division of nature relied was enclosure. Identifying the historical process of the racial division of nature is of particular significance in Brazil, given the still flowing undercurrents of racial oppression and environmental plunder.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Brazil; race; racial division of nature; Recife; urban political ecology; whiteness |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Geography (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Leverhulme Trust ECF-2019-661 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 08 Feb 2021 14:09 |
Last Modified: | 01 Feb 2022 08:56 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/tran.12426 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:168621 |