Landscape semaphore: Seeing mud and mangroves in the Brazilian Northeast

Abstract

This paper explores how the amphibious landscapes of mangroves and mudflats of Northeast Brazil have been seen and re-seen. The spatial and political ecologies of mangroves and mud interact with political aesthetics in specific ways. Reading landscapes as aesthetic encounters] with nature means recognising that ways of seeing are as historically and geographically specific as what they represent and produce. Thinking through the history of landscape from the Northeast exposes the coloniality of landscape thought but can also show how landscape has been reinvented and reconceptualised. Using Marilena Chauí's concept of semaphore, we can place landscape's symbolic force within the colonial encounter. This opens up not only the intellectual history of how geographers use landscape, but the relationship between aesthetics and nature, and between perception and territory, in a specific place. Putting these creative and intellectual practices together can draw out the rich specificity of responses to a singular, changing landscape, and multiply geographical ways of interpreting, representing, and conceptualising landscape. Seeing amphibiously allows us to revel in landscape's flexibility and stickiness. In this paper I pursue this argument through an analysis of cultural representations of the coastal landscape of the Brazilian Northeast. The Northeast's place within the emergence of European landscape histories reminds us of the under-emphasised coloniality of landscape. More importantly, in 20th-century representations of the territory of the estuarine Atlantic coast we find a re-calibration of perspective that is foreshortened, embodied, and muddied. They unsettle the fixities of colonial ways of seeing space, nature, and territory and amount to a regionally specific, counter-hegemonic political aesthetics of nature.

History and philosophy of geography III: Global histories of geography, statues that must fall and a radical and multilingual turn

“…It is again the case with Josué de Castro, who committed to the global endeavour of the CID (the Paris-based Centre International pour le Développement), a worldwide network involving exiled and persecuted scholars in the decades of Cold War and decolonisation (Ferretti, 2021b). Castro's works, and critical authors from North-eastern Brazil, remain key inspirations for geographical scholarship dealing with contributions from non-Anglophone regions of the Global South (Davies, 2021a(Davies, , 2021bDavies and Ferretti, 2021;Ferretti, 2021c) as I further detail below.…”

Decolonizing regional planning from the Global South: Active geographies and social struggles in Northeastern Brazil

“…As Archie Davies notes, what Castro challenged in Recife were public policies of aterramento (that is, ‘making land’). These policies reflected ‘an absorptive and eradicative notion of whiteness that necessitated the creation of dry, enclosed land’ (Davies, 2020: 1) to foster ‘modernity’ by ‘sanitising’ the amphibious environment of the mocambos , which were situated in the estuarine mangroves of the Capibaribe and Beberibe rivers and whose dwellers were socially and racially stigmatized (Davies, 2021; Ferretti, 2020).…”

Decentring the Lettered City: Exile, Transnational Networks, and Josué de Castro’s Centre International pour le Développement (1964–1973)

“…This urban milieu remained Castro’s environment: Chauí identifies an opposition between “a littoral Brazil, that is a lettered and bourgeois caricature of liberal Europe, and the hinterland of Brazil, real, poor, and unlettered” (2000:69), which helps understanding books such as Of Men and Crabs (Castro 1970) and Death in the Northeast (Castro 1969) that Castro published during his CID years. These works deal with the social and political problems of north‐eastern Brazil, namely hunger and migrations from the rural hinterland to coastal cities such as Recife (Ferretti 2020b), phenomena that marked “the social and political landscape of the north‐east” (Davies 2021:15). Castro tried to bridge this urban/rural divide from the position of a “privileged” observer within the international Lettered City, populated with radical scholarly networks, from which he reflected on how to build “an alliance between peasants and the urban working class” (Davies 2021:15) in his country.…”

“…These works deal with the social and political problems of north‐eastern Brazil, namely hunger and migrations from the rural hinterland to coastal cities such as Recife (Ferretti 2020b), phenomena that marked “the social and political landscape of the north‐east” (Davies 2021:15). Castro tried to bridge this urban/rural divide from the position of a “privileged” observer within the international Lettered City, populated with radical scholarly networks, from which he reflected on how to build “an alliance between peasants and the urban working class” (Davies 2021:15) in his country.…”