A Coffin for Malthusianism: Josué De Castro’s Subaltern Geopolitics

This paper addresses the idea of geopolitics of hunger as proposed by a Brazilian geographer, Josué de Castro, whose originality and international impact in the fields of critical geography and development studies still merit fuller acknowledgement both within and beyond the discipline of geography. Drawing upon archival research on de Castro’s correspondences and scholarly networks and on the editorial history of his key book Geopolitics of Hunger, first I argue that de Castro was a forerunner of the definition of geopolitics in a critical sense and that this nonconformist attitude has been one of the primary reasons for his persistent scholarly neglect. Second, I argue that de Castro’s anti-colonial geopolitics, based on subaltern agency, furnishes powerful arguments to present-day critics of ‘food security’, who challenge the revival of Malthusian concepts, Euro-centric views and neo-colonial recipes in development debates, a clear geopolitical matter for contemporary scholarly and political conversations. Finally, de Castro’s international networking and his biography as a political dissident and exile provide some useful practical examples of performing geopolitical discourses outside institutional and statist frameworks.