Racial geographies of the Anthropocene: Memory and erasure in Rio de Janeiro
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211026470 |
| Author | Mariana Reyes-Carranza |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211026470
Politics
2023, Vol. 43(2) 250 –266
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957211026470
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Racial geographies of the
Anthropocene: Memory and
erasure in Rio de Janeiro
Mariana Reyes-Carranza
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Abstract
This paper interrogates the extent to which imaginaries of climate and ecological breakdown
attend to the memories, knowledges, and experiences of communities already impacted by
histories of racism, colonialism, and poverty. Drawing on insights from Black studies and decolonial
thinking, the article reflects on how the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change can be
mapped onto geographies of racialised violence and social dispossession. Specific emphasis is given
to Rio de Janeiro, notably its port area, a geographical space where future-oriented narratives
remain oblivious to the city’s history of anti-Black violence and Indigenous genocide. In parallel,
the paper looks at the recently built Museum of Tomorrow and its public representations of
the Anthropocene. Overall, the article contends that pluralising accounts of the Anthropocene
might offer alternative epistemic entry points for understanding and interrupting the mounting
ecological catastrophe.
Keywords
Anthropocene, Brazil, climate change, museums, racism
Received: 2th August 2020; Accepted: 24th May 2021
Eles combinaram de nos matar
Mas nós combinamos de não morer.
Conceição Evaristo
Introduction
This paper discusses forms of racial segregation, marginalisation, and erasure in a time of
accelerating climate change and ecological decline. Drawing on understandings of the
Corresponding author:
Mariana Reyes-Carranza, School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London
E1 4NS, UK.
Email: l.m.reyescarranza@qmul.ac.uk
1026470POL0010.1177/02633957211026470PoliticsReyes-Carranza
research-article2021
Special Issue: Race & Climate Change
Reyes-Carranza 251
connections between racial formations and the designation of the Anthropocene as a new
geological epoch (e.g. Baldwin and Erickson, 2020; Eichen, 2020; Saldanha, 2020;
Vergès, 2017; Yusoff, 2018), this article considers how the causes and effects of climate
and environmental change can be mapped onto geographies of racialised violence and
social dispossession.
Climate change, extinction, and global environmental decline are processes that, over
recent decades, have been associated with the thesis of the Anthropocene, that is, the
proposed name for an epochal time period wherein humans have become the main agents
of geological change (Crutzen, 2002). Drawing on insights from critical race studies,
decolonial feminism, and Black geographies, this paper examines the idea of a new
‘human epoch’ in connection with the history of European colonisation of the Americas.
I centre my discussion on Rio de Janeiro, a city marked by the historical violence of trans-
atlantic slavery and the genocide of Indigenous people. In looking at the multiple and
widespread reverberations of Brazil’s colonial past, this paper interrogates how the lives,
histories, and experiences of Black and Indigenous people can inspire an alternative spa-
tial politics in the Anthropocene.
In order to discuss public understandings of the new planetary phase, I provide a
close reading of Anthropocene representations in museum exhibitions. In particular, I
engage with the Museum of Tomorrow, a cultural venue recently built at the centre of
Rio’s harbour area. An eye-catching and futuristic landmark, the museum’s main theme
is the environment, specifically climate change and the deepening of global environmen-
tal degradation. Using this museum as a case study, I offer a discussion of cultural rep-
resentations occurring in spaces other than Europe and North America, two regions
over-represented within studies of the Anthropocene.1 Drawing on six months of ethnog-
raphy conducted in this institution, I examine the museum’s philosophy and practice,
and analyse the ways in which epistemological and political orders are established and
reproduced within its space.
Throughout the article, I combine decolonial theory with geographical readings of
climate and environmental justice. Hence, my argument builds on a precept advanced by
the decolonial turn in Latin America: the thesis that there is no modernity without colo-
niality. According to decolonial theorists (Mignolo, 2012; Quijano, 2007), coloniality
can be defined as the imposition of racialised, patriarchal, and class-based hierarchies
that marginalise non-Western cultures and histories.2 In a similar vein, I draw on the
work of scholars for whom modernity has been marked by the spatial arrangements of
colonisation and domination (e.g. Bledsoe, 2015; McKittrick, 2006; McKittrick and
Woods, 2007). As Katherine McKittrick (2006: x) notes, the modernity project has ben-
efitted from ‘the profitable erasure of subaltern subjectivities, stories, and lands’.
Therefore, from a geographical perspective, modernity has contributed to the production
of space through the subjugation of ‘the other’, notably the Black and Indigenous body
(McKittrick, 2006).
This article is divided into four parts. The first part outlines the broader research con-
text of Brazil, a territory marked by the interlinked histories of African slavery and
Indigenous genocide. The second part engages with Rio de Janeiro and its harbour area,
focusing on its past as a slave-trade port and examining the afterlives of racial violence in
its geography today. The third part reviews the Museum of Tomorrow, notably its
Anthropocene gallery. It positions the museum exhibition as one that fails to critically
interrogate racism as one of the most profound social relations shaping the current eco-
logical crises. The paper concludes by arguing that accounts of the Anthropocene must be
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