In recent years, a vibrant international literature has called the attention of scholars to the life and work of Josué de Castro and his relevance to current debates on social and political ecology, liminal and subaltern geopolitics, critical development, ‘food security’, population geography, Malthusian and anti-Malthusian debates in the ‘Global South’, and Latin American radical geographies and geopoetics. Famous during his lifetime thanks to the international success of his books and to his bright political and diplomatic career, Castro was later forgotten by many geographers, with notable exceptions such as Milton Santos and Manuel Correia de Andrade. An exile in Paris after the 1964 military coup in Brazil, Castro never established his own academic ‘school’, although he had served as the Chair of Geography at the University of Rio de Janeiro for many years. A certain blindness of geography’s histories towards interdisciplinary contributions might also have contributed to Castro’s relative neglect within geography. As Santos wrote to Florestan Fernandes, some geographers did not even recognise Castro as belonging to their discipline, given that he was first trained as a medical doctor and his work might be defined variously as sociology, anthropology, development studies, nutritional studies or just, more broadly, as political writing. Above all, perhaps, the military coup in Brazil and a deliberate process of amnesia in his home country undermined his legacy until recent times. In the last couple of decades, he has been recovered as a key figure in the history of the Brazilian left not only by academic geography, but by social movements such as the campaigns against hunger associated with the sociologist and activist, Betinho (Herbert de Souza), and indeed by Lula’s own government. Complementing the recent renewal of the ‘biographic turn’ in the history of geography, this biobibliographical chapter aims at restabilising Castro’s position wholeheartedly within, though always testing the edges of, the discipline of geography.

Josué Apolônio de Castro (1908-1973)

Federico Ferretti
2022

Abstract

In recent years, a vibrant international literature has called the attention of scholars to the life and work of Josué de Castro and his relevance to current debates on social and political ecology, liminal and subaltern geopolitics, critical development, ‘food security’, population geography, Malthusian and anti-Malthusian debates in the ‘Global South’, and Latin American radical geographies and geopoetics. Famous during his lifetime thanks to the international success of his books and to his bright political and diplomatic career, Castro was later forgotten by many geographers, with notable exceptions such as Milton Santos and Manuel Correia de Andrade. An exile in Paris after the 1964 military coup in Brazil, Castro never established his own academic ‘school’, although he had served as the Chair of Geography at the University of Rio de Janeiro for many years. A certain blindness of geography’s histories towards interdisciplinary contributions might also have contributed to Castro’s relative neglect within geography. As Santos wrote to Florestan Fernandes, some geographers did not even recognise Castro as belonging to their discipline, given that he was first trained as a medical doctor and his work might be defined variously as sociology, anthropology, development studies, nutritional studies or just, more broadly, as political writing. Above all, perhaps, the military coup in Brazil and a deliberate process of amnesia in his home country undermined his legacy until recent times. In the last couple of decades, he has been recovered as a key figure in the history of the Brazilian left not only by academic geography, but by social movements such as the campaigns against hunger associated with the sociologist and activist, Betinho (Herbert de Souza), and indeed by Lula’s own government. Complementing the recent renewal of the ‘biographic turn’ in the history of geography, this biobibliographical chapter aims at restabilising Castro’s position wholeheartedly within, though always testing the edges of, the discipline of geography.
2022
Geographers Biobibliographical Studies, n. 40
117
149
Archie Davies; Federico Ferretti
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/835893
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