The Nature of Space By Milton Santos, translated by Brenda Baletti Duke University Press (2021)
2022; University of Texas Press; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/lag.0.0191
ISSN1548-5811
Autores Tópico(s)Urban Development and Societal Issues
Resumopretativas para o campo da Geografia e das Ciências Sociais. Antônio Carlos Malachias Centro de Estudos Periféricos (CEP/ UNIFESP) Laboratório de Geografia Política (Geopo/USP) Diogo Marçal Cirqueira Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) Tathiane dos Santos Vitorino Instituto de Geografia (IGEO) Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) Referências Malachias, A. C. (2006). Geografia e relações raciais: desigualdades sócio-espaciais em preto e branco [master’s thesis]. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo. Santos, M. (2000). Ser negro no Brasil hoje. In O país distorcido. Publifolha. Santos, M. (2021). The Nature of Space. Duke University Press. Translating Milton Santos Inhiscontributiontothissymposium,Trevor Barnes notes that Milton Santos opens The Nature of Space by apologizing for the fact that the book took twenty-five years to write, explaining that it was due to care rather than negligence. Barnes adds that writing this magnum opus took twenty-five years in part due to the complex, cosmopolitan nature of thecontent,andinpartbecauseitwasforged through an intellectual life based in Santos’ political dissidence, which kept him on the move and actively dedicated to intervening in the world. My translation of Santos’ tour de force took nearly a decade for reasons that I would like to think Santos, as Federico Ferretti put it in his contribution to this symposium, “would have loved” (this issue, p. ZZZ) To translate this work with the care that it merited often required that I (re)visit the texts that Santos dialogued with to best interpret what he was saying—a time-consuming intellectual endeavor. I also translated this book in the off hours, where they existed, of work in a community political organization, where constant crises kept us on the move and a rigorousstudyoftheworldrequiredengaging a heterodox body of theory and history, all of which also informed this translation. That is all to say that in the same way that Santos’ life andworkwereinterwoven,sowasthelifeand work of this translation. I hope that he would find it adequate to his ideas. In this brief response to the reviews in this symposium,ratherthanofferingatranslator’s notethatexplainshowItranslatedTheNature of Space, I’d like to highlight why I translated it—what I argue are Santos’ most important contributions to understanding our world today—and in the process to shed light on sometranslationdecisionsthatundergirdthe 23 Book Review Forum ideas at stake in the text. In The Nature of Space, Santos was in dialogue with philosophical and disciplinary traditions spanning several continents, languages, and at least a century of thought. As Ferretti and Pedrosa (2018) have made clear,becausethatdialoguealsohappenedin real time, particularly when Santos lived and worked in exile, we must understand that his work on globalization, development, place, and territory has already exerted an important influence—if largely unacknowledged or unknown until recently—on Anglophone geography. Despite the influence of his work, however, I think it would be fair to say that the frustrations that he expresses with Geography in his introduction still stand and can arguably be extended to other areas of the contemporaryU.S.academy.Hisclaimisthat geographers—generally,thereareimportant exceptions—have failed to rigorously theorize their disciplinary object—space—and as a result the discipline lacks the analytic conceptsandmethodsthatoughttodefineit. Instead, he argues, geographers tend to draw concepts from other disciplines that are not adequatetotheiranalysis,thatfunctionmore as metaphors than as analytical frameworks, andthefieldisthereforesubjecttothewhims of what is theoretically in fashion and tends toward description rather than explication. On the one hand, lacking a disciplinary object can make geography exciting and open. In its long disciplinary tradition, geography can arguably be the study of anything that happens on the face of the earth and geographers often study the most cuttingedge subjects. Santos, however, explains why ultimately so much of that analysis can be limited: lacking a clear method and object, geographical scholarship can easily fall into the promiscuous application of disparate frameworks to describe localized situations in ways that simply affirm the validity of the framework in a rather tautological fashion. “Methods” in this construction tend to be treated as the ways that we acquire information regarding the empirical, be that through geographic information systems, surveys, ethnography, or other means, to which we often only retroactively apply...
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