Interior History: Rethinking Space and Nation in Brazil

In the five centuries of European presence in Brazil, a contrast has developed between the coastal and interior regions. The coastal areas around Rio de Janeiro and Salvador have been depicted as the centre of 'civilised' and 'modern' society, inhabited by European-descendant elites seen as the creators of national culture and politics. In contrast, the vast interior regions have been stigmatized as the so-called 'backlands'. As the perpetual foil to the more advanced coast, the backlands have stood as an imagined spaced useful only for its natural resources and the labour of its local populations. Over hundreds of years, this traditional view has become implanted in national imaginations, where the interior is relegated to the conceptual and political periphery of Brazil.

To challenge the dominant narrative between coast and interior, this project re-examines Brazilian history from the inside, a framework that we call 'interior history'. Seeking to invert the conceptual and geographic boundaries often used to study the history of Brazil-and of Latin America more broadly-we show how the people and spaces of the interior have been central to the development of national identities, politics, economy, and culture.

Brazil is an ideal case study as it both engages and disrupts the historiographical focus on frontiers. In Brazil, the interior is similar to a traditional frontier with its histories of exploration and state-formation, yet it is imbued with cultural tropes of backwardness that, unlike frontiers, are resistant to settlement. And moreover, there is no single 'interior'-either geographically or in the national imagination. By asking what, if anything, changes when we use interior rather than frontier, our project will rethink the formation of space and nation.

Bringing together a research team of fourteen historians, cultural scholars, and social scientists from Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we aim to show how an interior history of Brazil-and by extension, of other countries across and beyond Latin America-can not only challenge the assumed hierarchies and boundaries between regions, but also recapture the agency of communities long-stigmatised as inconsequential to national narratives.

We will produce two outputs: an edited volume where each chapter uses an interior perspective to revisit a seminal moment in Brazilian history, and an interactive digital atlas that integrates each chapter from the book. The edited volume-to be published in English and Portuguese versions-will showcase the work of both established and up-and-coming scholars from multiple countries and disciplines. Through its individual chapter contributions and also the collective cohesion of its case studies, the book will open new intellectual terrain for studying Brazilian history.

Although the online visualization was initially designed as a digital companion to the more traditional academic output of the edited book, it has acquired even greater importance in the aftermath of the devastating fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro in August 2018. One of the greatest losses of historical documents in recorded history, the fire has challenged scholars and archivists across Brazil and abroad to think about how to preserve historical patrimony in the twenty-first century. So along with providing an innovative tool to explore numerous case studies from the past 500 years of Brazil's interior history, the online atlas will showcase how a digital humanities project can offer a new platform for making historical knowledge accessible to public audiences.

The project's Principal Investigator (PI) is Dr Jacob Blanc, a lecturer in Latin American history at the University of Edinburgh and an expert on rural Brazil. The Co-Investigator (Co-I) is Professor Lúcia Sá, an expert in Brazilian literature and indigenous cultures at the University of Manchester.

In terms of non-academic audiences, our project will benefit three main groups.

The first is primary and secondary school students in Brazil. Given the project's focus on local history, the interactive maps are particularly well-suited to contribute to the curricular structures in Brazilian public schools: Article 26 of the Law of National Education Guidelines (LDB, Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional) emphasises the need for school curriculum to include the regional and local characteristics of society and culture. As such, the digital atlas, in its Portuguese-language version, can be used in Brazilian public schools as a way to visualise and interact with local history for the numerous regions showcased in the interactive maps.

The second group is community organisations in Brazil that are involved with local heritage and culture, such as museums, church groups, and local charities. Here, our two main contacts are IPHAN (the National Institute for Historical and Artistic Patrimony) and IHGB (the Brazilian Institute for Historical Geography). At IPHAN, we will work primarily with the offices of Luiz Roberto Liza Curi, the representative for the Minister of Education, and Marcelo Mattos Araújo at the Brazilian Institute for Museums. The IHGB, for its part, will be particularly useful for ensuring that the digital atlas will be used in school education: the Institute has branches in almost every state and partnerships with local groups, such as the Historical Institute of Tiradentes and the Historical and Geographic Institute of Chapada dos Guimarães, to name two examples from regions in Brazil's interior whose history will be researched on this project.

While the project will hopefully be of interest to communities across Brazil-very much including the coastal regions-it will be particularly beneficial to those living in the interior. We hope that seeing the history of one's own region, above all in places often overlooked in national narratives, will provide a reaffirming experience. For example, someone in the interior of Minas Gerais can click through images of colonial-era diamond mining in the hills above where they now live, or a family living in Mato Grosso can trace the progression of Marechal Cândido Rondon's famous expedition to stretch telegraph lines deep into Brazilian territory. By providing a digital space to benefit communities and organisations, the online atlas will not only showcase the importance of local history, it will also create pathways to impact through which through which civic pride and regional heritage can grow.

The third group is museum curators and archivists. This arena of public history and patrimony has taken on added urgency since a fire destroyed almost the entire holdings of Brazil's National Museum in August 2018. The overnight loss of some twenty million documents and artefacts accelerated long-standing concerns over the preservation of historical materials and national heritage. Originally, the digital atlas of this project was conceived solely as an interactive tool for exploring the select case studies. But in light of the fire and the conversations that have taken place in Brazil and abroad, it has become a question of professional duty and solidarity to enable the online tool to also amplify its contributions to wider audiences. At the National Museum, we will coordinate with Wagner William Martins, an archaeologist currently overseeing the restoration of the museum. In all likelihood, it will take Brazil's National Museum years, if not decades, to construct a new building and to try and start amassing anew its archival collections. In the meantime, smaller projects and collaborations like our digital atlas will become vital avenues for keeping alive discussions about historical memory and preservation.