Archie Davies

The University of Sheffield, Geography, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Co-author

Public Views

I am political ecologist with research interests in the geography of hunger, translation, and the history and philosophy of geography.

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/geography/people/academic-staff/archie-davies

less

József Böröcz

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

James Hollway

Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva

Marc Champagne

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Ricardo Padron

University of Virginia

Mauro Grondona

University of Genova

Ayça Çubukçu

London School of Economics and Political Science

Courtney J Campbell

University of Birmingham

Alexis Lycas

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

Flávio Eiró

University of Groningen

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Archie Davies

Josué Apolônio de Castro (1908–73)

Geographers

The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2020

In this paper I analyse the making and unmaking of amphibious urban modernity in Recife in the No... more In this paper I analyse the making and unmaking of amphibious urban modernity in Recife in the Northeast of Brazil between 1920 and 1950. I argue that the transformation of the city was predicated on an absorptive and eradicative notion of whiteness that necessitated the creation of dry, enclosed land. The process of urban transformation proceeded not only through a racial division of space, but through a racial division of nature. Racialised groups, and the houses, marshlands, and mangroves where they lived were subject to eradication not only as spaces but as ecologies and landscapes. Brazilian racial thought in the period was fundamentally imbricated with ideas about nature. Histories of coloniality, indigeneity, enslavement, and escape meant that forests, wetness, and the spectre of commonly held land were understood as threats to whiteness and its self-association with order, enclosure, purity, and dryness. To answer why the division between the wet and the dry was so important, and why whiteness needed dryness, I turn back to philosophical investigations of the foundational myth of Brazil. I argue that a peculiarly Brazilian philosophy of nature, which drew racial lines within nature itself, underpinned a familiar, if uncanny, white supremacy that ordered society along the material and symbolic contours of race. Under colonial modernity, this philosophy translated into a division of the purerational, cleansed, dry, modern, urban spacefrom the impuremuddy, fearful, tangled, forested landscape. Under the conditions of dependent capitalism, the process on which this racial division of nature relied was enclosure. Identifying the historical process of the racial division of nature is of particular significance in Brazil, given the still flowing undercurrents of racial oppression and environmental plunder.

Landscape semaphore: Seeing mud and mangroves in the Brazilian Northeast

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021

This paper explores how the amphibious landscapes of mangroves and mudflats of Northeast Brazil h... more This paper explores how the amphibious landscapes of mangroves and mudflats of Northeast Brazil have been seen and re-seen. The spatial and political ecologies of mangroves and mud interact with political aesthetics in specific ways. Reading landscapes as aesthetic encounters] with nature means recognising that ways of seeing are as historically and geographically specific as what they represent and produce. Thinking through the history of landscape from the Northeast exposes the coloniality of landscape thought but can also show how landscape has been reinvented and reconceptualised. Using Marilena Chauí's concept of semaphore, we can place landscape's symbolic force within the colonial encounter. This opens up not only the intellectual history of how geographers use landscape, but the relationship between aesthetics and nature, and between perception and territory, in a specific place. Putting these creative and intellectual practices together can draw out the rich specificity of responses to a singular, changing landscape, and multiply geographical ways of interpreting, representing, and conceptualising landscape. Seeing amphibiously allows us to revel in landscape's flexibility and stickiness. In this paper I pursue this argument through an analysis of cultural representations of the coastal landscape of the Brazilian Northeast. The Northeast's place within the emergence of European landscape histories reminds us of the under-emphasised coloniality of landscape. More importantly, in 20th-century representations of the territory of the estuarine Atlantic coast we find a re-calibration of perspective that is foreshortened, embodied, and muddied. They unsettle the fixities of colonial ways of seeing space, nature, and territory and amount to a regionally specific, counter-hegemonic political aesthetics of nature.

Archie Davies

Uploads

Papers by Archie Davies

Log In