Dr Jake Blanc, University of Edinburgh
My current research aims to develop the framework of ‘interior history’ as a way to rethink the conceptual and spatial boundaries of Brazilian history. This project has two main branches: a solo-authored book that I am writing on the Prestes Column rebellion in the 1920s, and also an edited volume with fourteen contributing scholars. I was very fortunate this past spring to receive two fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for this work, which will enable a multi-level project that seeks to challenge the dominant narrative between coast and interior.
The idea of interior history emerged from my first project on the Itaipu hydroelectric dam and the rural experience of dictatorship and democracy in Brazil. In thinking about how the positioning of Brazil’s countryside shaped the experience of living under different political systems, I wanted to find a way to explore similar imaginative constructions that were applicable across the country. When I began researching my new project on the Prestes Column—one of the most mythologized events in modern Brazil—I became increasingly drawn to the study of how notions of backwardness (a default trope for the interior) served to bolster dominant notions of national development. I explore how the myth of the Column’s 25,000-kilometre march through the interior emerged from, and remained tethered to, the stigmatised and racialized myth of Brazil’s interior.
For the edited volume, I am working with Frederico Freitas (historian at North Carolina State University) to bring over a dozen scholars together, where each will contribute a chapter that rethinks a seminal moment in Brazilian history from the perspective of the interior. We have a really exciting roster of colleagues lined up from the UK, Brazil, and the USA, and we will hold a series of workshops in the coming year to share our work and to collectively map out the contours and potential contributions of interior history. (Covid-willing, one of the workshops will be in person in Edinburgh in 2021). We believe that as a case study, Brazil is particularly well-suited for an exploration of the interior as it both engages and challenges the historiographical focus on frontiers. In Brazil, the interior is similar to a traditional frontier with its histories of exploration and state-formation, yet it is imbued with insurmountable cultural tropes of backwardness that, unlike frontiers, are resistant to settlement. And moreover, there is no single interior—either geographically or in the national imagination. Our goal is to not only establish interior history as a new subfield, but to actually create a new subject of history itself: the interior. Similar to how borderlands history opened the study of borderlands, we see this project as the catalyst for new histories of interiors across Latin America and globally.
UKLAH 