Alessandro Angelini | Johns Hopkins University (original) (raw)

Peer-Reviewed Articles by Alessandro Angelini

(If you cannot access the article at the link above, please contact the author by email at a[dot]... more (If you cannot access the article at the link above, please contact the author by email at a[dot]m[dot]angelini(at)lse[dot]ac[dot]uk to request a PDF copy.)

Abstract

In an ethnographic investigation of how repetition produces difference as well as sameness, this article presents a role-playing game cum cultural project, known as Morrinho, created and maintained by a youth collective in a Rio favela. Focusing on the replica models they have built at international art exhibitions, the article describes encounters among artists, curators, and collaborators in Rio, Venice, and London. Morrinho's valorization as artwork inflects anthropological debates on iteration and mimesis, as well as the aesthetic and political history of the Brazilian urban periphery. While the artistic travels of Project Morrinho reflect the favela's shifting place in an urban world, conversations around the model reveal anxieties over how it is taken to represent everyday life. Morrinho youth playfully call into question who or what constitutes creativity and authorship, defying their acquired identity as artists. They reshuffle the symbolic order of the city, bringing markers of marginality to its cultural center.[Afro-Brazilian, art, Brazil, urban, youth]

Resumo

Em uma investigação etnográfica de como a repetição produz a diferença, bem como mesmice, este artigo apresenta uma brincadeira que virou projeto cultural, conhecido como Morrinho, criado e mantido pelo coletivo de jovens de uma favela carioca. Focalizando nas maquetes que têm construído em exposições internacionais de arte, o artigo conta sobre encontros entre artistas, curadores e colaboradores no Rio, Veneza e Londres. A valorização do Morrinho como obra de arte aborda debates antropológicos sobre a iteração e a mimesis bem como a história estética e política da periferia urbana brasileira. Morrinho juventude brincam ironicamente quem ou o que constitui a criatividade e autoria, desafiando a sua identidade adquirida como artistas. Uma colaboração em Londres com jovens imigrantes inverte a ordem simbólica da cidade, levando traços da marginalidade ao centro. [afro-brasileiros, arte, Brasil, urbano, juventude]

Book Reviews by Alessandro Angelini

Living in the Crossfire seeks out personal experiences, institutional failures and historical leg... more Living in the Crossfire seeks out personal experiences, institutional failures and historical legacies shaping public security in Rio de Janeiro. The book is of a certain moment, a political juncture. It is a historical snapshot depicting the endgame of what the authors refer to as the “policy of confrontation.” This purview might make the book feel dated in light of the highly-publicized “pacification” strategy of occupation and community policing. However, the valuable interview material collected here shows the political ground, as well as the historical forces, with which shape the discussion about public security reform.

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Nov 15, 2012

Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 2008

Social Forces, Nov 16, 2012

"Favela" is the generic term to designate squatter settlements in Rio de Janeiro and other Brazil... more "Favela" is the generic term to designate squatter settlements in Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian cities. But favelas, as Janice Perlman warns in the final pages of her eponymous book, are a slippery object of analysis: “what-ever generalization you make about favelas can be contradicted by a counter-example. If you show their vibrant side, you risk romanticizing poverty. If you dwell on the violent side, you obscure their vitality and you risk propagating wrong-minded stereotypes and stigma that residents battle every day. Everything in a favela contains its opposite.” (338-39) In the time between her landmark study, The Myth of Marginality (1976), and this follow-up, Janice Perlman has observed that Rio de Janeiro exemplifies how mega-cities in the global South are broadly imagined: as spaces of social inequality, armed violence, rampant informal-sector growth and uneven development. Drawing upon interviews with participants of her original doctoral research project as well as with their children and grandchildren, Perlman’s goal is to make individual like histories speak to broader social changes. In particular, she seeks to square away evidence of material improvement over the last 40 years of favela residents’ lives with their sense of insecurity and deepened marginalization.

Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 2009

Course Syllabi by Alessandro Angelini

This studio is a partnership between Parsons, activist community group Casa Nuestra Gente in Comu... more This studio is a partnership between Parsons, activist community group Casa Nuestra Gente in Comuna 2: Santa Cruz, and the URBAM program of EAFIT University both located in Medellin, Colombia. With on the ground research and constant input from local agents we look to develop a community urban action plan around issues of new labor relations while fostering networks of economic sustainability, social cohesion and projects of community development that lie within the mission of Casa Amarilla’s Community Development Project.
Furthermore, we will engage in research and community engagement and development projects with the potential of creating self-sustaining improvements in economy and socio- spatial dimensions of the city of Medellin. In the initial phase of the project our team will engage in developing community relationships and commence exhaustive research of the surrounding areas, of Santa Cruz, Medellin. The team will also engage in necessary field research to confront the realities that condition the city, experience the sites to be intervened and to reinforce the participative dialogue of all project participants.

Media Coverage by Alessandro Angelini

“O turismo nas favelas daqui é muito mais avançado economicamente, e simbolicamente, do que no Mé... more “O turismo nas favelas daqui é muito mais avançado economicamente, e simbolicamente, do que no México e Los Angeles, por exemplo. Talvez mais do que em qualquer outra cidade do mundo”,

“There has always been this industry of seizing on a local practice, calling it culture and turni... more “There has always been this industry of seizing on a local practice, calling it culture and turning it into something that becomes a commodity and spectacle,” said Mr. Angelini, who teaches at Mount Holyoke College. “What Morrinho’s doing with the bricks is more or less what hip-hop did with records in the verbal form, in terms of taking what’s around you and working and reworking it. They’re doing a material version of sampling.”

Papers by Alessandro Angelini

Space and Culture, 2019

Reversing decades of fear and neglect as no-go zones for outsiders, Rio de Janeiro’s most iconic ... more Reversing decades of fear and neglect as no-go zones for outsiders, Rio de Janeiro’s most iconic favela communities have become tourist attractions offering a glimpse of the purported “other side” of Brazilian society as well as panoramic vistas over the Marvelous City. Since 2010, tourism has become a vehicle and justification for security, infrastructure, and capacity-building projects in Rio’s favelas. Promoted as an exemplary favela in this social uplift scheme, Santa Marta has received thousands of tourists per year. In an unprecedented step, Santa Marta guides organized themselves into a committee to collectively manage the tourism enterprise and to promote themselves as a brand of community-based tourism in contradistinction to outside commercial tour operators. Their authority and authenticity as local experts hinge on the emergent perception of the favela itself as a resource and that their labor makes that value economically productive. This article analyzes the work of th...

Urban Studies, 2019

The emergent field of ‘sensory urbanism’ studies how socio-spatial boundaries are policed through... more The emergent field of ‘sensory urbanism’ studies how socio-spatial boundaries are policed through sensorial means. Such studies have tended to focus on either formal policies that seek to control territories and populations through a governance of the senses, or on more everyday micro-politics of exclusion where conflicts are articulated in a sensory form. This article seeks to extend this work by concentrating on contexts where people deliberately seek out sensory experiences that disturb their own physical sense of comfort and belonging. While engagement across lines of sensorial difference may often be antagonistic, we argue for a more nuanced exploration of sense disruption that attends to the complex political potential of sensory urbanism. Specifically, we focus on the politics of sensation in tours of low-income urban areas. Tourists enter these areas to immerse themselves in a different environment, to be moved by urban deprivation and to feel its affective force. What embod...

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2016

Geoforum, 2015

Rio de Janeiro is undergoing a makeover that is undeniably spectacular. Redevelopment schemes are... more Rio de Janeiro is undergoing a makeover that is undeniably spectacular. Redevelopment schemes are dramatically rearranging the urban landscape, and crucially, this economic growth hinges on the production and circulation of images of the city. This paper explores a site of alterity and resistance where a favela youth collective has recreated Rio from its margins. This miniature world, known as Morrinho and built of bricks, mortar, and re-used materials, hosts a role-playing game featuring thousands of inch-tall avatars. This paper argues that re-visioning the world anew through play makes the society of the spectacle inhabitable and thus contestable. How does the society of the spectacle become a terrain for struggle in Rio? Locating spectacle production in nation-state formation and the urban process, the paper provides a genealogy of the spectacle beyond the modern North Atlantic metropole. Locating the favela within a Brazilian geographical imagination frames ethnographic data collected as an observer and participant in the Morrinho game. While the spectacle may hinge on the relationship between visuality and power, this essay observes how signs take on material lives through ludic re-appropriation. Play becomes a form of commentary, an alternative mode of knowledge about the city, and functions dually as both description of and participant in the social world in which it is embedded. Keywords play; visuality; spectacle; urban; youth; Rio de Janeiro; Brazil Under a thick canopy of jackfruit and mango trees in the forested edge of a small favela 1 in Rio de Janeiro lies a peculiar model of the city. Known as Morrinho, or "Little Hill," the mock-up is largely built with tens of thousands of terracotta hollow tile bricks-the kind used to construct (life-size) housing in the favela-each cut by mason trowel and hand-painted vibrant 1 Favela has been translated into English variously as "slum," "shantytown," "informal settlement," and "squatter settlement." In Rio, favela residents often use the less pejorative alternatives comunidade (community) or morro (hill). The 1950 General Census first defined favelas as opposed to the formal city by a set of criteria regarding size, construction type, legal status of land tenure, and absence of public infrastructures and official signage system. Briefly, scholars have analyzed the historiographic construction of the favela as a social and political category