“It smells like a thousand angels marching”: The Salvific Sensorium in Rio de Janeiro’s Western Subúrbios

Abstract

The density of the fragrance lands on our lips. They curl. We smell it as we breathe, the odors lodging themselves in our nostril membranes, coating the delicate scroll-shaped bones that make up the human nose. Milene, a devout Pentecostal believer (crente), purrs a short prayer in response to the rising fumes. Half of Milene's body disappears into a big blue fifty-five-gallon barrel of thick liquid fragrance. She draws a large scoop with a spouted jug she has cut from the bottom third of an old plastic bottle and then appears again. She pours the liquid gently through a funnel, also repurposed, down some green plastic tubing. The viscous, bright white substance seems to move rather idly down the tube, and at times Milene has to coax it by jiggling the hose or whispering it a little prayer of encouragement. The plastic tubing is feeding the fragrance into a reused two-liter soda bottle that we have already filled with one part water and one part bleach. The first steps-filling up the bottles with bleach and water-are easier, as bleach and water are cheap and plentiful. It's the fragrance we don't want to lose a drop of. Milene is careful and practiced in her movements and, this morning, we do not lose any of the fragrance in transfer. Its strong fumes swirl, burning my eyes and nose. The smell coats our tongues, where fragrance mingles with spit, so that we taste it.

(Un)making the manual scavenger

“…Given this, I resist reducing toxicity to a problem of contamination, reframing it instead as a maldistribution of uncertainty that concentrates undue harm as well as unnamed privilege (Stoetzer, 2018). This problematizes toxic burdens as an issue for redistributive politics rather than as one of containment (Langwick, 2018; Reno, 2016), moving us away from purity politics (Sarukkai, 2009; Shotwell, 2016) and toward a political imagination emergent in the lived, uncertain rhythms of toxic landscapes (Ahmann, 2018; Davies, 2018; Denyer Willis, 2018). Here, contemporary waste appears not as “matter out of place” in a single social order (Douglas, 2001), but as an “interscalar vehicle” (Hecht, 2018) for reordering nature‐culture entanglements across multiple temporal and spatial orders (Liboiron et al., 2018; Reno, 2014).…”

Eating pizza in prison

“…In Brazil, even as the everyday markers of race—music, language, “culture,” hairstyle—might be celebrated, banished, and discursively appropriated (Roth‐Gordon 2016), race and whiteness work in a “hyperconscious” (Vargas 2004) dialectic of knowing and negation. At the same time, sensorial and affective registers like smell, touch, and sound construct whiteness as neutral, providing a foil for denying racialization (L. Denyer Willis 2018). Always a problem of episteme and subjectivity, ordering through whiteness is necessarily legal, social, and affective in its everyday constitution of city and society, from an instance of fleeting eye contact—or its avoidance—to the segregation of a city (Silva, Leão, and Grillo 2020).…”