City as mobility: a contribution of brazilian saraus to urban theory

Abstract

The article analyzes saraus movement - poetry readings in São Paulo’s periphery - as a cultural phenomenon that over recent years has transformed the city space into a vibrant socio-political project. The movement offers important insights for an anthropology of cities by highlighting the materiality of mobility and spatiality, understood here as a set of social and cultural practices that involve the existential knowledge, social networking, and local community empowerment gained from mobility between predominantly peripheral neighborhoods and urban labor centers. We examine how saraus contribute to the construction of a new imaginary of the city and public space occupied by the socially excluded and racialized peripheries. We provide an analytical and empirical contribution to city production and urban theory, and demonstrate that mobility and the encounter are not simply temporary extraneous interactions, but rather experiences constitutive of social knowledge.

“Onde a ação se une com a ideia: produção do espaço urbano e sociabilidade juvenil em uma batalha de rimas”

“…A batalha de rimas aparece num primeiro momento como esse lugar em que os jovens terão contato com um conjunto, um universo de conhecimentos que resulta em processos não só internos de cada um -construindo e reconstruindo identidades múltiplas, hí� bridas -mas que também criam e transformam territórios dentro da cidade. Através das rimas, os jovens externalizam suas subjetividades e criam discursos que fazem parte do processo de produção da cidade (PARDUE, 2018). Dentro do hip-hop, a subjetividade está diretamente conectada à ideia de formas de expressão diaspóricas, noção trabalhada por Gilroy (2001).…”

Favela Studies: Disrupting Higher Education and Research on Brazil's Urban Periphery

“…The sarau embraces antropofagia periférica (peripheral cannibalism) (Almeida 2011), "an imaginary interlocution with the 'culture of the center,' a mode of production that emphasizes difference" (Nascimento 2011, 24;Fontoura et al 2016, 154). Ethnographers have been invited to use the surau to collaborate with social movements and embrace nonhierarchical knowledge production (Pardue and Oliveira 2018). These ethnographies suggest a goal of communicative models, where favela residents are presented in their own words and have greater authority over how their communities are presented on the global stage.…”

“…Over the course of ten years (2010–20), I was a tourist and a tour guide, a hostel doorman, a volunteer English teacher to school children, a gentrifier paying rent in dollars, and a university researcher supported by a grant from the US Department of State. At the beginning of my research, I was, in Derrick Pardue's words, a “clueless gringo wanderer” (2018, 6). I had only a library knowledge of Brazil and I transited in many of the epistemological realities regarding knowledge production in the favela that I now critique.…”

Literatura como ação e cooperação

“…Sobre o processo, cf. :Bertelli (2012), D'Andrea (2013), De Tommasi (2016), Oliveira (2017,Pardue & Oliveira (2018),Patrocínio (2013),Proença (2002) eSalles (2004).…”