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.