Book Talk: Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro - Sept. 24

The LLILAS Faculty Book series kicks off with an online presentation by Lorraine Leu (LLILAS, Department of Spanish and Portuguese), author of Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro, moderated by Seth Garfield, Department of History and director, LLILAS Benson Brazil Center, with Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, serving as discussant.

Livestreaming from the LLILAS Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/UTLLILAS/

Defiant Geographies examines the destruction of a poor community in the center of Rio de Janeiro to make way for Brazil’s first international mega-event. As the country celebrated the centenary of its independence, its post-abolition whitening ideology took on material form in the urban development project that staged Latin America’s first World’s Fair.

Leu explores official efforts to reorganize space that equated modernization with racial progress. It also considers the ways in which black and blackened subjects mobilized their own spatial logics to introduce alternative ways of occupying the city. She unpacks how the spaces of the urban poor are racialized, and the impact of this process for those who do not fit the ideal models of urbanity that come to define the national project. Defiant Geographies puts the mutual production of race and space at the heart of scholarship on Brazil’s urban development and understands urban reform as a monumental act of forgetting the country’s racial past.

For more information, contact Paloma Díaz. To RSVP and view event updates on Facebook, visit Book Talk: Defiant Geographies.

Co-sponsored by the LLILAS Benson Brazil Center and the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Dial-In Information

Visit https://www.facebook.com/UTLLILAS/ and click on the live video.

Thursday, September 24 at 3:00pm to 4:00pm