Archie DAVIES, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Milton Santos, Josué de Castro and Beatriz Nascimento were all born and grew up in the Brazilian Northeast, and all moved south to the metropoles of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo before their lives took on differentially global geographies. What did their personal trajectories mean for the development of their ideas? In this paper I will argue that their biographies are key tools in understanding their unique geographical contributions to twentieth century radical thought, whose work offers ways of understanding space that militates against colonial geographical categories. I want to argue that we can trace a relationship between the spatial formulations that emerged in these intellectuals’ writing and practice, and the trajectories, orientations and movements that marked their lives. Specifically, I want to attend to what their movements southwards meant, and enabled, for them as Northeastern intellectuals. There is a connection, I argue, between the movement southwards, and the possibilities of scalar shifts in their conceptual thinking.
Specifically, the paper will analyse the role of the Northeast in their lives. All three carried the Northeast into global scales of practice, into international institutions (Josué de Castro), anticolonial scholarly networks (Milton Santos), and a transatlantic Black political community (Beatriz Nascimento). In these movements, and their relationship with spatial thinking, we can connect biography and geography – lives and life writing. By seeing their movements as shifting orientations, we can the south not as a situation, but as a relation. This means configuring our understanding of southern geographical writing not as located in a fixed geographical space (the south), but as involving differential kinds of southern movements. I want to argue that following the lifepaths of intellectuals can help us see how geographical categories – like the south, or like the northeast – come into being in relation to individual biographies.
Mots clés : Brazil|Milton Santos|Josué de Castro|History of Geography|Beatriz Nascimento
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