A new history of Brazil told through the lens of the often-overlooked interior regions. In colonial Brazil, observers frequently complained that Portuguese settlers appeared content to remain âclinging to the coastline, like crabs.â From their perspective, the vast Brazilian interior seemed like an untapped expanse waiting to be explored and colonized. This divide between a thriving coastal area and a less-developed hinterland has become deeply ingrained in the nationâs collective imagination, perpetuating the notion of the interior as a homogeneous, stagnant periphery awaiting the dynamic influence of coastal Brazil. The Interior challenges these narratives and reexamines the history of Brazil using an âinterior historyâ perspective. This approach aims to reverse the conventional conceptual and geographical boundaries often employed to study Brazilian history, and, by extension, Latin America as a whole. Through the work of twelve leading scholars, the volume highlights how the people and spaces within the interior have played a pivotal role in shaping national identities, politics, the economy, and culture. The Interior goes beyond the traditional boundaries of borderland and frontier history, expands on the current wave of scholarship on regionalism in Brazil, and, by asking new questions about space and nation, provides a fresh perspective on Brazilâs history.
Industry Reviews
"This volume exquisitely succeeds in presenting many fresh new lenses through which to see these concepts of the frontier in both micro and macro frames. I find this among the best volumes I've seen in some time, containing the most effective voices in Brazilian history today, both within Brazil and beyond." - Emily Wakild, Boise State University, author of Revolutionary Parks: Conservation, Social Justice, and Mexico's National Parks, 1910-1940 "Interior history" is a framework that emphasizes how noncoastal spaces have been critical to the development of Brazil in everything from politics to culture to economics. Coeditors Freitas and Blanc have cleverly positioned the volume as the opening salvo in a reexamination of national identities globally by centering the Brazilian interior and understanding its broader impact. The twelve chapters, written by a multinational group of authors, are short and well written. Together they focus on themes including real and imagined geographic scales, Indigenous worlds, human and nonhuman lives and actions, and natural and built environments." - Jeffrey Lesser, Emory University, author of Living and Dying in Sao Paulo: Immigrants, Health, and the Built Environment in Brazil "This multifaceted approach to the interior provides an engaging perspective for a non-specialist audience." (ReVista)
