Abstract

AbstractThis paper discusses the relevance of radical scholarship by exploring the case of the Centre International pour le Développement (CID), founded by Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro during his exile in Paris. Drawing upon Latin American works on the “Lettered City” and the evolving role of intellectuals in constructing critical knowledge, I explore new archives revealing the CID’s daily (net)working. My argument is that this case suggests new interpretations of the notion of Lettered City, exposing slipperiness and potentialities of radical intellectuals’ roles in influencing politics and proposing solutions for global problems. On the one hand, despite Castro’s international renown, the CID failed in its mission of involving politicians and “enlightened” businessmen during the Cold War because its purposes clashed with the interests of most of its interlocutors. On the other, the CID’s archives show that Castro performed a powerful global networking to circulate ideas that still inspire radical geographers.

Highlights

  • This paper discusses the relevance of radical scholarship by exploring the case of the Centre International pour le Développement (CID), founded by Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro during his exile in Paris

  • A political opponent of the Brazilian military dictatorship and author of successful books on geographies of hunger that were translated in dozens of languages, Castro is a famous name in Brazil, but international scholarly work on his contribution is just beginning (Carter 2018; Davies 2019b and c; Ferretti 2020a and 2021b)

  • Recent scholarship has highlighted the originality of Castro’s contributions to explore nature-society relations (Davies 2019b) and subaltern geopolitics (Ferretti 2021b), calling for a discovery of Brazilian and Latin American critical geographies (Melgaço 2017). This paper extends these works in connection with literature addressing histories of radical geographies inside and outside the Anglosphere (Craggs and Neate 2019; Clayton 2020; Barnes and Sheppard 2019; Ferretti and Pedrosa 2018), as well as works addressing anti-racist and anti-colonial networks (Davies 2019a; Featherstone 2012) and geographies of internationalism and mobilities of knowledge (Hodder 2016; Hodder, Legg and Heffernan 2015; Jöns, Meusburger and Heffernan 2017)

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Summary

Introduction

This paper discusses the relevance of radical scholarship by exploring the case of the Centre International pour le Développement (CID), founded by Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro during his exile in Paris.

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