A Review of The Interior: Recentering Brazilian History

The Interior: Recentering Brazilian History edited by Frederico Freitas and Jacob Blanc (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024, 300 pages)

The focus of The Interior, an edited collection of articles, is to “recenter Brazilian history,” as editors Frederico Freitas and Jacob Blanc establish in the book’s subtitle. Drawing on the multiplicity of meanings of the term “interior” (and its sometimes extension, sometimes counterpart: sertão) in Brazil over time and across the country’s vast inland spaces, the editors put together a collection of texts that span most regions, representing several types of Brazilian interiors. With this, they have a bold goal: “not only to establish interior history as a new subfield but to create a new subject of history itself: the interior” (The Interior, p. 2). While the category of interior (broadly viewed as opposed to the coast) may not fit smaller countries’ national histories, it is hard not to agree with the claim that “Brazil is an ideal case study to inaugurate interior history” (p. 2). The country is indeed blessed with (or plagued with, depending on context and interlocutor) large swaths of land, holding several different ecosystems, from the grasslands of the pampas in the south to the Amazon rainforest in the northernmost part of the country.

The volume encompasses all these regions, providing much nuance to the initially amorphous interior. With this approach, the book establishes that Brazil both engages and challenges the historiographical focus on frontiers and borderlands. Scholarship on borders has tended to trace the more dissonant qualities of noncoastal space: boundary-making leads to competition and the formation of divisive, if porous, frontier zones. And Brazilian history is full of cases in which the interior fits into traditional frontier narratives of exploration and state formation. But “the interior” adds nuance to the U.S.-centered discussions on frontiers and borderlands as it gives the lands away from the coast a particular Brazilianness.

The several chapters are divided into four parts, highlighting different facets of the interior (“knowledge,” “national,” “roving” and “transformed”), and they move both in geographic scope and time frame, covering from colonial to 20th-century history throughout the country. As a reader, one could add another category: the eventful interior. Throughout the volume, the reader learns much about these lands and witnesses several intriguing encounters. The interior of colonial Brazil is where watchful eyes of Indigenous groups remain hidden and yet feel omnipresent, as Colgate University Professor Heather F. Roller recounts in the first chapter; it is where many an explorer has gone nearly mad looking for fabled lands of unmeasurable riches in silver and gold, as we learn from University of New Mexico Professor Judy Bieber in chapter two.

As the book roves around Brazil, we see other interiors: literally the “edge of Empire” in the text by College of William and Mary Professor Fabricio Prado about the southernmost parts of the country and its borders. This is a place of interactions far beyond the scope of the coastal, imperial control, where Portuguese and Spanish settlers show just how porous the frontier is. The interior, mainly in its sertão iteration, can be a place that harbors outlaws and bandits, characters as dry and rough as the environment around them. The sertão was well represented that way, too. We encounter these tough characters a couple of times through the book (in the contributions, for example, by  Universidade de São Paulo Professor Carlos de Almeida Prado and Lucia Sa, a professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Manchester) and learn how landscapes and people have been tied into a joint narrative. Both the sertão and the sertanejo seem to be in need of some degree of “civilization.” In Sa’s piece, animals appear as actants, in novels set in the interior, where they interact and are understood only by those who are from the sertão.

As the narrative progresses in time, colonial and imperial distant borderlands appear more “pacified.” More integrated into the country’s growing structure, they slowly became “the interior,” rather than an open frontier. But the vast inlands of Brazil have long posed problems for those who seek to fully integrate the whole country. Several of these attempts are portrayed in the chapters. Like in the guaraná piece by Yale Professor Seth Garfield, in which guaraná (the now famous Amazonian berry) trade appears as both an economic opportunity as well as a salvation of the backwardness of frontier populations (including Indigenous groups), who would benefit from joining a supply chain that kept them settled in agriculture and connected to the rest of the country. Integration into the nation is also at the heart of the discussions of North Carolina State University Associate Professor Frederico Freitas’ article about the long, drawn-out dream of building a capital in Brazil’s central plains (Planalto Central). Goiás State University Professor Sandro Dutra e Silva’s text complements Freitas’ piece very well as he describes the history of how the very idea of a Central Brazil came to be realized.

These stories of shifting meanings and interpretations appear throughout the chapters. They are very varied, but the thread that weaves them together, the multifaceted interior, is never lost. The richness of this multifaceted approach to the interior provides an engaging perspective for a non-specialist audience, but the recurring conceptual explanation of the terms interior, sertão, and frontier in nearly every chapter might appear redundant for a reader going through the book in its entirety. However, for a reader selecting a specific chapter of interest, the contextualization offered by each author on what these words signify in their particular research area is valid and useful.

Susanna Hecht’s epilogue brings the collection to a close, stating that the volume charts a course “from early colonial contact to 20th-century consolidation” and the continuous reshaping of the region. To Hetch, the volume portrays the interior not as a simple opposite to the coast, but as a complex space defined by a “gradation and interdigitation and contest” among various categories, actors, as well as its immense scale and political and moral ambiguity (Hecht, 272). The interior is a region where the typical markers of civilization recede, yet multiple actors and unexpected possibilities emerge. The interior is not merely a frontier, but a durable set of ideas and places, a site for political and economic experimentation, and even a “dreamscape of futurities” (Hecht, 272). This perspective explains its long-standing importance in Brazilian national history, particularly regarding sovereignty, military concerns and long-contested boundaries that ran up against diverse Indigenous polities.

The epilogue ultimately directs the reader’s attention to the massive, lasting transformations enacted upon the Brazilian interior. Hecht suggests that the extraordinary scale and pace of this landscape change in the 21st century have set the stage for the most significant challenge yet. The final, sober message of a book spanning over 500 years of history is a stark warning about the “next major transformational actant: climate change.” (Hecht, 284). The volume thus ends by tying centuries of interior Brazilian history to the contemporary environmental crisis.

Natascha de Vasconcellos Otoya is an environmental historian whose work explores deep-time narratives of human pursuits and environmental change, blending timescales of natural and human history. She is currently a postdoc researcher examining the conversion of Brazil’s native Cerrado into large-scale plantations for export crops.

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