Frontier/Fronteira: A Transnational Reframing of Brazil's Inland Colonization

The following essay examines Portuguese and Brazilian understandings of the frontier as a term and concept applicable to Brazil's colonial history. It argues that Brazilian scholars often rejected the frontier as an analytical concept because of perceived excesses in its application to U.S. history. These reservations proved prescient, as their North American colleagues would come to share many of the same objections. In pushing the idea aside, however, Brazilian scholars sometimes overlooked the historical relevance of frontier incorporation during the colonial period. A renewal of scholarly interest in the subject points to a growing conviction that the colonial history of Brazil cannot be adequately rendered without close attention to internal territorial consolidation, whether or not the term frontier is used to describe this process. This foreign paradigm from the past century, one that never quite caught on among Brazilian intellectuals, has now been reshaped and rehabilitated.