My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Katherine Verdery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 344 pp (original) (raw)
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International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2020
Brazilian favelas are known as spaces of criminal enterprise, of poor to non-existent infrastructure and extreme violence. They are places of informal industry conducted by unregistered workers, living in unofficial settlements, beyond the boundaries of sanctioned society. But favelas are also spaces of class solidarity, close-knit convivial communities and hardworking people existing within an area where the state does not have a monopoly on violence. Unprotected by conventional social contract, residents of favelas are regularly victims of state violence, with officers routinely conducting raids, torture and extrajudicial killings. Much of the literature about Brazilian urban violence focuses on gangs, drug lords and territory, with discussion of police brutality logically focusing on the police. Little work exists to highlight the everyday plight of those existing within the sphere of influence of both groups, but this book brings such lived experience to the fore. Cavalcanti's account of police violence is not that of the Hollywood drama of favela life in the film City of God, nor the examination of police taking the law into their own hands found in Elite Squad, but focuses on the real-life frustrations and experiences of those encountering violence as part of daily existence. Cavalcanti also situates this experience in its post-colonial context, highlighting the relevance of previously formed hierarchies of power and legacies of slavery for contemporary critical analysis. Cavalcanti provides critical analysis of the existing literature, but a substantial part of the book relates to her own ethnographic work, which centres on residents of two favela communities in Recife, North Brazil, and the communities' relationships with violence and policing. She writes openly about her approach to fieldwork with a reflective awareness of her own positionality and includes this as an integral part of her analysis. As with all ethnographic interviewing, building rapport with the community is vital and Cavalcanti reflects on how this process may have been aided by her pregnancy. She observes how people connected with her via what she perceived to be a bond based on the creation of family. The suggestion is that the notion of a shared future or humanity meant that the communities did not see her as a threatening or alien presence in their space, and were open and honest with their opinions. Cavalcanti's use of jeitinho-the Brazilian notion of being able to find a way, via formal or informal connections, to achieve one's aim-to access the communities, is unapologetic and its subjective nature is shown to be a positive factor.
The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2019
Brazilian society and culture, and that its customs are still influential for the population of all, or almost all, other regions. In short, regionalism is not only about ethnic and cultural mixture, but regional mixture as well. In other words, regionalism acknowledges and nourishes ethnic and cultural mixture across regions. If not, how can one interpret the entrance of folk and country music into Brazilian radio and TV charts, broadcast nationally since the 1980s? And what of the effervescent appropriation of this music by mass media companies? But the author has deep expertise in Brazilian studies and seeks to amplify, in the book's epilogue, his analysis of the linkages between race, regions and national identity across the debate over the imagined community throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to the introduction and the six chapters that make up the book, chronologically organised, the epilogue grapples with the difficult challenge of discussing the status of Freyre's ideas today and in the future. Historians, social scientists and intellectuals, in general, cannot ignore Eakin's words on the future of mestiçagem. They are relevant to the assessment of contemporary policies conducted to respond to racial inequality. For example, is the binary white/non-white affirmative action system suitable in such a heterogenic society as Brazil? Readers will find a contribution to this issue in the book's epilogue. This reviewer agrees that Becoming Brazilian is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as for non-academic debates. The book has the virtue of providing a compelling synthesis of the history of Brazilian culture with clear and accessible language.
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2016
View related articles View Crossmark data citizens when governmentsirrespective of their ideological inclinationput partisan interests before the needs of the population. Even so, researchers focused on crime and violence in the Americas will need to contemplate how to conduct fieldwork in hazardous circumstances, how to access social groups with whom they share no racial, class, or gender attributes, and how to enter institutional settingssuch as prisonsthat have access restrictions.
Plunging into the underground: poverty and violent crime in contemporary Brazil
Asia Pacific Media Educator, 2007
Exhaustive news coverage of violence and organized crime in Brazil, usually sensationalist in nature and designed for immediate impact, have contributed to banalizing the issue and stifling more indepth reflection. However, the voices that are silenced by the mass media, find an outlet in another kind of journalism that aims to plunge into the reality of contemporary Brazil. Literary journalism has investigated this realm in minute detail, setting events in their proper context and revealing the everyday life of people who are directly affected by violent crime a world that is familiar to few outside the Brazilian slums. This article looks at the work of Brazilian journalist Caco Barcellos and analyses the literary techniques and procedures he employs in his book Abusado. The analysis of this book seeks to reveal another perspective on the issue of violent crime, which differentiates itself from the stigmatising view of poor people and slum-dwellers presented by the police, the State and the Brazilian elite.
The racialisation of security apparatus in Brazil
University of Manchester, 2019
Declaration and Copyright Statement Acknowledgements 9 Patricia and Juan: at the threshold of the camp 174 Conclusion: on abjection and the logic of coloniality 168 Concluding thoughts 176 Bibliography 183 Appendix 1 197 Appendix 2 200 Word Count 76,800 Note on translations All translations from Portuguese texts, articles and interviews are by the author, and any errors in translation are solely her responsibility. A Litany for Survival "…And when the sun rises we are afraid, it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid, it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid, of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid, we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid, love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid, love will never return and when we speak we are afraid, our words will not be heard, nor welcomed but when we are silent, we are still afraid So it is better to speak, remembering, we were never meant to survive".-Audre Lorde These links follow two different aspects: the embodiment of racialised notions by the security apparatus and the association of favelas and peripheries to blackness. As a consequence, the killings and disappearances of favela dwellers remain unproblematized.
urbe. Revista Brasileira de Gestão Urbana
The Pacification Police Units – UPPs – implemented in Rio de Janeiro since 2008 have as one of their stated goals the promotion of the integration between the pacified favelas and the ‘formal’ city, aiming to overcome the view of Rio as a ‘divided city’. Intending to problematize the reasoning behind this stated goal in order to question the UPPs’ very foundations, this article examines the political and sociospatial background in which they were introduced. The implementation and operation of the UPPs is outlined in the context of the militarization of Rio’s spaces, and especially of its urban poor regions, within an analysis of what assumptions about favela residents the UPPs imply. The UPPs are analyzed in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s work as a sovereign act of ‘drawing lines of distinction’ between lives worth living and politically worthless ‘Others’. It becomes clear that they are guilty of articulating and reinforcing what Teresa Caldeira has named the ‘talk of crime’, a Manicheistic discourse through which Brazilians articulate and cope with their daily encounter with violence. The disjunctive nature of Brazil’s ‘inclusively inegalitarian’ democracy, as explored by James Holston, is emphasized. Brazil emerges as a post-dictatorial country, in which neoliberal reforms and democratic opening have simultaneously implied an increasingly authoritarian penal state that targets the urban marginalized as its ‘internal enemies’.