Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro by Lorraine Leu (review)

Wonderfully written, compellingly argued, and richly documented, Lorraine Leu's Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro is a decisive contribution to understanding how race and spatiality were strongly intertwined in the making of Rio de Janeiro's urban reforms in the early decades of the twentieth century.

As she traces her debt to the multidisciplinary methodologies of cultural studies, Leu creatively posits connections between race, spatial usage, urban reforms, national imaginaries, and cultural practices, emphasizing that

the challenge of this book has been to unpack how race makes space in a country with one of the largest populations of color in the world, but where race has been notoriously obscured in powerful national discourses of racial harmony and color blindness. In unraveling these dynamics I highlight how urbanization functions as a technology of racial oppression and how racialized subjects defy the implantation of dominant spatial orders.

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Through a wealth of documentary sources that range from press cartoons, nineteenth-century paintings, chronicles, and the political discourses of federal and municipal authorities, Defiant Geographies emphasizes the overall linkage between race and space. Still, each chapter addresses a specific theme and offers insightful critical readings of Rio's urban reforms, visual representations of blackness, and how policies of modernization were closely coupled to whitening ideals espoused by the elite and government sectors. The epilogue addresses the ongoing dilemmas of social housing and exclusionary modernization, as exemplified by the eradication of the Vila Autodromo for the 2016 Olympics.

Dialoguing with past and recent scholarship and also with current political agendas, Leu argues that racial dilemmas and racist practices in Brazil were often downplayed by an overall reading of class struggle as the most defining element in the making of Rio de Janeiro's brutal social inequality. Since at least the 1970s, scholarly criticism of the discourses of Brazilian "racial harmony and color blindness" has been voiced, and the notion of "racial democracy" has been much disavowed. It is, however, revived in the rhetoric of national unity upheld by current ultrarightist political forces. Indeed, even the celebratory legacy of mestizo heritage has been increasingly disparaged as a coverup for the continuing discrimination against black Brazilians (190–91). Yet, as Leu points out, it is only more recently that the emphasis on racism, urban spaces, and the construction of cultural identities has been more vocally expressed by scholars, activists, artists, and the media.

Although the book's focus is the dismantlement of Morro do Castelo and the urban reforms for the celebration of the International Exhibit of the Centenary of Brazilian Independence, Leu's broad scholarship engages with key aspects of Rio de Janeiro's urban trajectory. The case study of Morro do Castelo, a poor neighborhood that was inhabited mostly by Italian immigrants and to a lesser extent by Portuguese and Galician immigrants, as well as by people of color, is one of the highlights of Defiant Geographies, as Leu offers a detailed account of the symbolic and material relevance of the neighborhood. As a foundational site of Rio de Janeiro, Morro do Castelo had architectural relics from the colonial past. As a neighborhood centrally located in downtown Rio, it had considerable potential for the real estate market. Finally, as a lower-class neighborhood, it was perceived as a place of backwardness by ruling elites intent on providing a cosmopolitan bourgeois veneer to what was then Brazil's tropical capital.

Defiant Geographies brings into perspective how the urban reforms of the early decades of Rio de Janeiro were tailored by the federal government, the municipal authorities, and the ruling elites. From the Haussmann-style bourgeois modernization project of Mayor Perreira Passos (1903–1906) that entailed the expulsion of the poor from the downtown area, the demolition of colonial edifices, the creation of new avenues, the reformation of the port, and vigorous...