Frontiers, environments and landscapes in the formation of Colonial Space of Brazil and the construction of the German National Territory (XVIIIth and XIXth centuries)

Abstract

During the second half of the 18th century the idea of ​​ “natural frontier” occupied an important place in social thought, helping to weave important considerations in the systematic advance on the colonial world and in the formation and legitimization of colonial territories. An effort that causes strangeness between subjects and landscapes that are always new or untamed. In the 19th century, in Europe, romantic thought took hold of the concept of frontier as borders and boundaries between territories and built mythologies of radical identities between environments, landscapes and subjects in the transformation of modern states into national states, imagined communities, anchored in a tradition that wants to be remote. In this work we seek to trace some research notes comparing the historical processes of the formation of the Brazilian colonial space and in the construction of the German national territory. Thinking about the concepts of frontier, territory and landscape, we try to understand what role the “frontier” plays in these processes, how the narrators list the natural world in their narratives and finally how the narratives built around such concepts generate effects on relations between subjects and territories. We also consider perceiving the effort to close the borders in the colonial world and at the national level as faces of the same historical process in modernity, which has its reverberations in the construction of national feeling on the one hand and, on the other hand, in the ambiguous bond of strangeness and otherness of the relationship with the landscape and the natural world in the colonial world.