Defiant Geographies: Race & Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro by Lorraine Leu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Defiant Geographies: Race & Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro by Lorraine Leu Jamie L. Worms Lorraine Leu Defiant Geographies: Race & Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro. Place of Publication: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. CCXXXVIII + 238 pp. Maps, diagrams, tables, ills., notes, appendices, references, index. $42.00 paper (ISBN); $00.00 cloth (ISBN); $00.00 electronic (ISBN 9780822946007). Defiant geographies is written to honor the people of color who, in the face of racialized violence, continue to live and occupy spaces in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Lorraine Leu, Associate Professor at the University of Texas Austin and the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies contributes a well-researched and thought-provoking cultural studies project to analyze how race, not class, makes place in Rio in 1922 alongside the construction of the Centennial World Fair. Leu utilizes a stunning array of primary sources and cultural texts including, but not limited to, news articles, photographs, lithographs, poems, and advertisements to analyze how urbanization and the pursuit of modernity coincided with racial oppression in Rio. This book also provides a perspective on the ways in which racialized people resist, reinvent, reorganize, and generally, “defy” the ambitions of dominant spaces. The greatest strength of this book comes in the form of these rich and fascinating examples of defiance. While Leu does not provide a definition for race, which may be problematic for some, she does explain that the terms whiteness and blackness are necessary to understand the production of space in Rio. At a time when 60 percent of the Brazilian population was black, urbanization and modernization associated with the Centennial World Fair provided Rio the opportunity to change its image as a black city in phenotype and culture. In preparation for the Centennial World Fair, hosted in Rio to celebrate Brazil’s 100th anniversary of independence from Portugal, public discourse employed descriptors like “backward, colonial, criminal, indolent, [and] unsanitary” (p. 8) to justify the removal of Castelo Hill, a historic community located in downtown Rio. Leu argues that the perception of Castelo Hill in the public imaginary as a black space is why the community was vehemently destroyed and replaced with a newly envisioned modern city, that had no room for blackness or a legacy of slavery. The four chapters and epilogue that follow the introduction, all make the same basic point: urbanization obscures racialized people and practices and is often used as a mechanism of topocide, “the deliberate annihilation of place” (p. 37). Yet, this book is never boring. Leu cleverly highlights cultural examples of the ways in which black bodies defy the ambitions of this dominant space. Leu organizes her examples of how race makes space thematically by chapter 1) discourse, 2) visuality, 3) spatial practices, and 4) material form. Leu’s examples are diverse, intriguing, and thoughtfully analyzed. Defiant Geographies contributes an overwhelmingly unique and intimate analysis of race making place in Rio and its multitude of examples would make this a great book for in-class discussion. [End Page 213] In Race, Ethnicity, and Urbanization, Leu provides examples of discourse to explain that while Brazil was modernizing through the implementation of immigration policies, public health campaigns, and urban renewal projects, it was simultaneously reconfiguring its “class and racial composition” around ideals of beautification and whiteness (p. 27). I loved the example Leu used from Revista da Semana, a national magazine that hosted beauty contest promoting “diverse types of beauty” that upheld the ideals of the raça Brasiliera (Brazilian race) (p. 32). Meanwhile, the first seven winners were white. It is this type of discourse consumed by the governing and middle class that help justify the violent demolition and topocide of black communities like Castelo Hill. In Race, Ethnicity and Visuality, Leu explains that images like lithographs and photographs were influential texts for a largely illiterate populations and could be used strategically to reflect the ambitions, modernity, and progress of dominant geographies. Photographs like the one Leu uses on her book cover, had power to fix and embed notions of race in the landscape, highlight incompatibilities with modernization, and obscure the city’s legacy of slavery. As such, the gaze...