Perceiving a sociopolitical void is a settler colonial disposition: Beatriz Jaguaribe, ‘Lost and Future Cities: Explorations in the Wilderness and Imaginaries of Modernities in Brazil’, Portal, 25/09/24 | settler colonial studies blog

Perceiving a sociopolitical void is a settler colonial disposition: Beatriz Jaguaribe, ‘Lost and Future Cities: Explorations in the Wilderness and Imaginaries of Modernities in Brazil’, Portal, 25/09/24

08Dec24

Excerpt: By the 1920s, few places on Earth remained hidden to Western eyes. Yet huge swaths of the Amazonian rainforests in South America continued to challenge Western mapping. Cast as “blank spaces” on European maps and also in the cartography of the nations that contained portions of the Amazonian rainforest, these territories were inhabited by myriad Indigenous populations. Their inaccessibility, wildness, and Indigenous peoples made them fertile ground for a plethora of narratives, films, illustrations, and news reportage consumed mostly by urban audiences. Alternatively portrayed as a lush Eden or a terrifying green inferno, the Amazon evoked imaginaries that were and are very much produced by the congested landscapes of modernity.

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