What is Freedom in a Brazilian Favela? (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 2015
With the holding of the Football World Cup in Brazil this year and the Olympics in 2016, the situation of the poor in Rio de Janeiro and the chasm between the poor and the rich in that city is receiving more attention than usual in the world press. However, it is still difficult for outsiders to understand the reality of the situation. Who controls the favelas? Why do favela dwellers not move out of their environment and settle in other parts of the city? How can one reconcile the harsh conditions inside the favelas with the popular imagery of the carioca spirit: carnival, bossa nova, Carmen Miranda and her fruit hats, and the passion for football? Are these real but separate worlds, or are they just stereotypes which an outsider employs to simplify a much more complex picture? The authors of a recent book that explores these issues are Sandra Jovchelovitch and Jacqueline Priego-Hernandez. Because of their background, experiential and academic, they are ideally placed to bring to this work the sensibility of those who know well the situation in the favelas together with the analytic gaze of professional researchers of social psychological issues. This book examines the complexities of life in a favela. The book does not provide a historical exposition of how the favelas came to be or predict the future course of events. The authors give an in-depth analysis of the situation now, which they present with some optimism without minimising the arduous tasks ahead for everyone who is working to improve the circumstance of favela-dwellers. Rio de Janeiro is a cuidad partida, a divided city. The favela-dwellers, those living in the morro, the hills, are living a life made underground through social, political and geographical exclusions. But in spite of this, the authors describe how the favela-dwellers managed to construct an intricate web of sociabilities, which is often built around the festive, gutsy and defiant carioca nature of life within the favela itself. In the preface, Jovchelovich writes that the researchers 'wanted to understand how communities living under poverty and exclusion could produce positive responses and new pathways for social and individual development'. The protagonists of the book, apart from the favela-dwellers themselves, are the NGOs AfroReggae and Central Única das Favelas (CUFA) and the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora-Police Pacification Units (UPPs). The backdrop to the story is organised crime and the drug trade, which often replaces the State in shaping life within the favelas. Residents must always take into account rules for daily life set by drug cartels and the police. Made famous in the 2005 award winning documentary 'Favela Rising', AfroReggae is an NGO established in 1993 by an ex-drug dealer in response to a massacre in 1993 when police entered a favela and killed 21 people as a retaliatory attack against the drug trade. This NGO attracts youths from the favelas by organising workshops on ethnic dance and music such as reggae, hip-hop and percussion. It shows young residents that education offers their best opportunity for social emancipation away from a life of violence of the drug trade on the one hand and police oppression on the other. CUFA is another movement, set up in 1999, which focuses its activities on education, culture and sports in order to empower the inhabitants of favelas to be able to help themselves, rather than relying on the State or the protection of the drug barons. The research described in this book draws on various data collection techniques, such as interviews and surveys. The authors employ narrative and factor analysis, amongst other techniques, to analyse the data. They try to understand how the activities of these NGO's, which are deeply embedded in the culture of the favelas, furnish the favela-dwellers with identities that
Exception and resistance in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro
2019
The articulation between basic material restrictions, the implementation of special public policies, the criminalization of territories, the demonization of poverty, and violence exerted by armed forces contribute to the ‘apartheidisation’ of favelas and to their definition as “territories of exception”. The state of exception mediates the relationship between the favela and the “asphalt”, the inside and the outside, the center and the margins, between a sense of belonging and extraneousness. It is sustained by a peculiar iconism that ascribes the favelas the epicentrality of forms of criminality and social deviance that are sought to be contained and administered. By operating through policies of “inclusive exclusion” (Agamben, 1995: 26), the state of exception culturally shapes the favelas on the base of apologetic expressions that are functional to the exercise of power: it yields to the centralized control of the state the management of contradictions, thus reproducing the racist devices discussed by Michel Foucault.
Minoritarian Liberalism: a Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela
The University of Chicago Press, 2022
A mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favela in Rio, where residents articulate their own politics of freedom against the backdrop of multiple forms of oppression. Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights—usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois—at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ people, and slum dwellers. In this visceral ethnography of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Moisés Lino e Silva explores what happens when liberalism is challenged by people whose lives are impaired by normative understandings of liberty. He calls such marginalized visions of freedom “minoritarian liberalism,” a concept that stands in for overlapping, alternative modes of freedom—be they queer, favela, or peasant. Lino e Silva introduces readers to a broad collective of favela residents, most intimately accompanying Natasha Kellem, a charismatic self-declared travesti (a term used in Latin America to indicate a specific form of female gender construction opposite to the sex assigned at birth). While many of those the author meets consider themselves “queer,” others are treated as “abnormal” simply because they live in favelas. Through these interconnected experiences, Lino e Silva not only pushes at the boundaries of anthropological inquiry, but also offers ethnographic evidence of non-normative routes to freedom for those seeking liberties against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation, transphobia, racism, and other patterns of domination.
Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 2015
With the holding of the Football World Cup in Brazil this year and the Olympics in 2016, the situation of the poor in Rio de Janeiro and the chasm between the poor and the rich in that city is receiving more attention than usual in the world press. However, it is still difficult for outsiders to understand the reality of the situation. Who controls the favelas? Why do favela dwellers not move out of their environment and settle in other parts of the city? How can one reconcile the harsh conditions inside the favelas with the popular imagery of the carioca spirit: carnival, bossa nova, Carmen Miranda and her fruit hats, and the passion for football? Are these real but separate worlds, or are they just stereotypes which an outsider employs to simplify a much more complex picture? The authors of a recent book that explores these issues are Sandra Jovchelovitch and Jacqueline Priego-Hernandez. Because of their background, experiential and academic, they are ideally placed to bring to this work the sensibility of those who know well the situation in the favelas together with the analytic gaze of professional researchers of social psychological issues. This book examines the complexities of life in a favela. The book does not provide a historical exposition of how the favelas came to be or predict the future course of events. The authors give an in-depth analysis of the situation now, which they present with some optimism without minimising the arduous tasks ahead for everyone who is working to improve the circumstance of favela-dwellers. Rio de Janeiro is a cuidad partida, a divided city. The favela-dwellers, those living in the morro, the hills, are living a life made underground through social, political and geographical exclusions. But in spite of this, the authors describe how the favela-dwellers managed to construct an intricate web of sociabilities, which is often built around the festive, gutsy and defiant carioca nature of life within the favela itself. In the preface, Jovchelovich writes that the researchers 'wanted to understand how communities living under poverty and exclusion could produce positive responses and new pathways for social and individual development'. The protagonists of the book, apart from the favela-dwellers themselves, are the NGOs AfroReggae and Central Única das Favelas (CUFA) and the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora-Police Pacification Units (UPPs). The backdrop to the story is organised crime and the drug trade, which often replaces the State in shaping life within the favelas. Residents must always take into account rules for daily life set by drug cartels and the police. Made famous in the 2005 award winning documentary 'Favela Rising', AfroReggae is an NGO established in 1993 by an ex-drug dealer in response to a massacre in 1993 when police entered a favela and killed 21 people as a retaliatory attack against the drug trade. This NGO attracts youths from the favelas by organising workshops on ethnic dance and music such as reggae, hip-hop and percussion. It shows young residents that education offers their best opportunity for social emancipation away from a life of violence of the drug trade on the one hand and police oppression on the other. CUFA is another movement, set up in 1999, which focuses its activities on education, culture and sports in order to empower the inhabitants of favelas to be able to help themselves, rather than relying on the State or the protection of the drug barons. The research described in this book draws on various data collection techniques, such as interviews and surveys. The authors employ narrative and factor analysis, amongst other techniques, to analyse the data. They try to understand how the activities of these NGO's, which are deeply embedded in the culture of the favelas, furnish the favela-dwellers with identities that
Favela Women: Repression and Resistance in the Shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro
Anyone even vaguely acquainted with the favelas (squatter settlements, shantytowns) of Brazil will understand that in this grossly male-chauvinist and racist society it is Afro-Brazilian women who represent the plight and promise of the urban poor. Whether speaking of Carolina Mária de Jesus and her diary of survival in São Paulo during the 1960s or Benedita da Silva, a former favelada (female squatter) who rose to represent a destitute constituency of Rio de Janeiro in the federal legislature, the public image of the favela conflates poverty, race and femaleness. 1 This is not by itself a remarkable or even uniquely Brazilian phenomenon. In many nations with large black populations, including the United States, state agencies have produced a whole body of literature that ascribes to poor urban women the malignant persistence of poverty. 2 The notion that the urban poor bear both a moral and medical stigma that makes them responsible for their own predicament is nothing new in Brazilian history.
Rethinking favela governance: Nonviolent politics in Rio de Janeiro's Gang Territories
Politics & Society, 2018
Since the 1980s, when drug gangs became embedded in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, or poor urban neighborhoods, much has been written about the violent regimes that govern these spaces. This article argues that a nonviolent political regime run by activist residents also plays a critical role in favela governance by expanding the provision of services, promoting social development, fighting for their citizenship rights, and inserting favelas into political networks across the city. This claim is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017 in the City of God, one of Rio’s most dangerous gang-controlled neighborhoods. Paradoxically, in activists’ efforts to improve the neighborhood and fight for their rights, the nonviolent political regime in the City of God not only subverted violent politics but also helped to provide the conditions for its survival. Nevertheless, scholarship must account for nonviolent political actors in order to fully theorize favela governance.
Favela Associations: Between Repression, Violence and Politics
The article analyzes the dynamics and structures of oppression and marginalization of favela residents in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as the modalities of agency that members of favela residents’ associations have used to respond to the changing situation. I analyze the spatial differentiation between favelas and the formal parts of the city, and how this is reflected in the notion of how the favelas and their residents are characterized. Some single elements, such as violence, have been taken as markers to define the whole space of the favelas as well as their residents. In state policies, the views as well as the agency of favela residents have often been ignored, thereby treating the favela residents as only subjects of different politics and measures. The study presents the analysis the members of favela associations make of state politics, and how their own modalities of agency have contributed both to maintaining the structures of oppression as well as challenging it. The focus is on the favela residents’ associations in two favelas of Southern Rio. The article can be found online at the page of the Journal of Finnish Anthropological Society, vol. 40, No 2 (2015): http://ojs.tsv.fi/index.php/suomenantropologi/issue/view/4169/showToc