Rio de Janeiro is home to over one-thousand favelas (slums), the majority of which are controlled by armed drug traffickers engaged in a long-standing war with police. This article shows how state legitimacy is challenged by the everyday reality of dual power, postcolonial legacies of inequality and marginalization, and a porous culture of law. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in one of the largest favelas in the city, I argue that police actions revolve around the enactment of violent spectacle, performed by the Elite Special Forces, BOPE. The use of performative violence, however, rather than shoring up state control at the margins of city life, works instead to undermine police (and state) authority.The night before the police invaded the Rio de Janeiro favela of El Dorado where I lived and conducted fieldwork, my narco-trafficker neighbors were preparing for war. The static of their walkie-talkies intermittently broke the silence in the unusually quiet favela. Part of an armed gang who controlled many of the city's nearly one-thousand slums, my neighbors were donning black police uniforms and strapping on extra weapons. Tipped off first by informants within the police station and later by the conspicuous movement of the hundreds of officers it took to invade the favela, the men next door took to the forest trails above the favela, taking care to leave their front doors open before they left so that they would not be kicked in by the invading police.At first light, several black police helicopters dropped into the valley, sharpshooters hanging off the sides, their guns poised to fire. As the ground troops advanced through one of the slum's main entrances, snipers picked off a lookout, a young kid in the first year of his short career as a trafficker, as he tried to light the firecrackers intended to alert the population of the police arrival. 1 Tragically, his signal and the police effort to quell it were completely unnecessary; everyone in the favela knew the

We apply the concept of antiblackness and a Deleuzian approach to sociopolitical events to analyze Jair Bolsonaro's 2018 election in Brazil. Historically, Brazilians turned from overt expressions of antiblackness to subtler forms of racial prejudice, what Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1956) called the “cordial man” who practiced a “gentlemanly” form of white supremacy. Recently, however, cordial racism has eroded in favor of more virulent and explosive manifestations of antiblackness that fueled the sociopolitical climate that enabled Bolsonaro's rise to power. We examine the antiblack backlash against race‐conscious laws and policies implemented during the Workers’ Party era (2002–16), showing a gradual shift toward more overt expressions of antiblackness that Bolsonaro wielded to political effect in his 2018 campaign. [affirmative action, blackness, Bolsonaro, Brazil, race]

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Security-whether public or private-is a key tool for managing populations and integral for creating urban spaces. This paper examines how mall security practices in São Paulo work to create safe and clean worlds for customers, distinguishing it from an cityscape that is seen as violent, dangerous, and populated with criminals. Drawing on five months of ethnographic research and interviews with the security team of the “Rivertown” shopping center in São Paulo and various private security employees, we show how the mall is secured by means of a set of practices based on “hospitality security,” paying special attention to the key role that security guard behavior plays in this process.

Historically, policing in Rio de Janeiro has been shaped by the equation of racialized violence and masculinity. Attempts to reform the police have paradoxically drawn on forms of male violence that are centered on the rational and professional use of force and on “softer” practices, such as dialogue and collaboration, symbolically coded as feminine. The failure of police reform reflects the cultural salience of understandings of masculinity centered around violence within the police, historical patterns of policing in Rio, and political actors’ strategic cultivation of male violence. Through Rio de Janeiro's failed attempt at police reform, we theorize the relation between racialized state violence, authoritarian political projects, and transgressive forms of male violence, arguing that an important appeal of authoritarianism lies in its promise to carve out a space for performing what we call wild masculinity. [masculinity, race, police, violence, gender, politics, favela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil]

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Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the private security industry, this article focuses on the training of low-level guards, examining the centrality of the body and embodied experience to their work in hospitality settings. In a racially stratified society in which lower-class, dark-skinned bodies are oft en equated with poverty and criminality, security guards are required to perform an image of upstanding, respectable, law-abiding citizens in order to do their jobs protecting corporate property. Guards learn techniques of body management at security schools as part of their basic training. They also learn how to subdue the bodies of others, including those of white elites, who represent a constant challenge to their authority. Working from my own experiences as a student in private security schools, I argue for the relevance of an understanding of the body and its significations to private security work.