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Description of  Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro (Pitt Illuminations)

Defiant Geographies examines the destruction of a poor community in the center of Rio de Janeiro to make way for Brazils first international mega-event. As the country celebrated the centenary of its independence, its postabolition whitening ideology took on material form in the urban development project that staged Latin Americas first Worlds Fair. The book 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. Leu 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. Read more