Redai dili (Apr 2024)
Brazil's Imaginative Geographies under Postcolonial Thoughts: An Analysis Based on Gilberto Freyre's China Tropical
Abstract
At the height of the national independence movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the first half of the 20th century, postcolonial thought began to emerge in Brazil, reconstructing the self-other relation between Brazil and the West. The imaginative geography of Brazil, one of the most important southern countries, is of great local and global geopolitical significance. In contrast to the general imagination centered on the West and other developed countries, Brazil has the particular imaginative geographies of another large southern country, China. One of the symbolic imaginaries of China in Brazilian scholarship is human geographer Gilberto Freyre's China Tropical, which he likens to China in Latin America. Freyre studied under American geographer and anthropologist Franz Boas, who was a vocal opponent of scientific racism. Therefore, in China Tropical, Freyre advocates for the equality of Brazilian civilization by imagining its structure, continuing Boas's thoughts, and developing a series of postcolonial critiques. This article uses Freyre and his book China Tropical and related thoughts as analysis objectives to explore Freyre's view of Brazil as a tropical China in the process of spatial othering. This study finds that Freyre constructed his postcolonial ideology of Brazil's nation-state development both geo-culturally and geopolitically by imagining Brazil's tropicality and Chineseness. Freyre's portrayal of Brazil as a third space belonging neither to the West nor the East disrupts the colonial hegemony of the discourse of a uniform and homogeneous culture between suzerain and colony and seeks the subversive power of postcolonialism through hybridity and in-betweenness. Second, Freyre conducted an analysis of the human-environment relation in cultural geography from the perspective of historical science, refuted the natural science perspective of environmental determinism, which was prevalent in Western academia at that time, and reshaped the visual balance within the framework of the human-environment relation. This is a side effect of the transformation and change in human geographical thinking. Third, Freyre's concept of tropical China is a prominent achievement in the embryonic period of postcolonial thought in Brazil as well as an important ideological foundation for contemporary Sino-Brazilian exchanges and cooperation. Freyre proposed commonalities and identities between China and Brazil in this field of thought, offering more possibilities for international cooperation beyond human- and poverty-based interactions. This article focuses on the imaginative geographies of former colonial countries, which are conducive to promoting China's understanding of Brazilian society. In addition, we believe that, in the future, Chinese scholarship should pay greater attention to small languages, such as French, Spanish, and Portuguese, which are widely spoken in the former colonial countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. With these small language texts at the core, we will continue to study imaginative geographies and country and area studies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to improve the global understanding of Chinese scholarship.
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