UM MUNDO SEM FOME: JOSUÉ DE CASTRO E A HISTÓRIA DA GEOGRAFIA

Abstract

This piece outlines the contribution of my book, “A world without hunger: Josué de Castro and the history of geography”, to transatlantic conversations about the history of thinking about space, nature, and social justice. Focussing on the fragmentary and open-ended archival bases for reading Josué de Castro’s biography, this paper introduces the chronological and biographical structure of the book, which is held together by thematic concerns that emerge out of a contextual and intertextual reading of the life and work of Josué de Castro. It begins from his nutritional approach to the geography of hunger to interpret his life and work as a critical geography in theory and practice, following Castro from his place in a French influenced Brazilian tradition, through to putting geography into less familiar sites at the UN and the FAO, and in the radical regionalism of the Brazilian northeast, until Castro’s last years in the proto-revolutionary academic context of the parisian 1960s.