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Contemporary Brazil is unequal and divided and Milton Santos’ geographical thought is still relevant

Geography is still the best tool ‘for observing what has happened, because it presents the results of spatial history; what is happening, because it registers the agents of contemporary spatial configurations; and what may happen, because it can grasp the lines of force of territorial dynamics and even, audaciously, point out the possibilities for the near future within the structure of space’ (Anjos, 2020). Yet we have lived for centuries with Geographies made and told from the perspective of the ‘winners’, those who think they ‘own the territory and control the society’. Geographies that present the dominant, state endorsed geo-economic systems, whose legitimacy is underpinned by legal and institutional structures. Here we are calling into question Brazilian Official Geography. In the face of irreversible marks made in the organisation of territory, an internally conflicted population, and the structure of a divided and multifaceted society, Official Geography pretends to be the only Geography of Brazil. In doing so, it continues a long process of denying reality. Amidst this ongoing construction of geographical invisibility, we recall For a New Geography by the great Milton Santos, published four decades ago. It offers us fundamental and revealing theoretical reference points for a Real Geography that provides evidence of how inequalities are configured in this terminally divided space, how they are presented in a marginal, unofficial, residual form, and how they fail to be seen in their fullness. This Geography, that bears the spatiality of exclusion and the historical conflict of the nation, is what we question here. The re-reading, re-interpretation, and recognition of this book, published in 1978, are key tools by which ‘conflicted’ and ‘rootless’ contemporary Brazilian Geography can regain its focus and realign its axis! We cannot lose sight of the fact that territory is the true support of human existence. What is Geography doing to mobilise itself to assume its scientific, political, technical, and educational role? Recognising that the geopolitics of Brazil are built on prejudice and that the nation has a precarious and hostile system of governance, is a way of acting upon one of the strategic mechanisms which maintain structural and institutional racism across the territorial and social non-existence that is inscribed in Brazil’s enduring colonial mentality. It is always the right time to ask ourselves why Brazil assumed, and still assumes, a slavocratic posture with so much enthusiasm. Let us remember that ‘throughout the 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 centuries the known world was enlarged, above all through the incorporation of “invaded” territories, the establishment and imposition of ‘new’ borders, and significant technical evolution. This long period in the history of human beings is characterised by a new phase in the relations between humans and nature. It is in this context that Geographical Science developed and came to serve the great project of globally justified, slavocratic domination, based on institutionally supported violence. In Book review forum