Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Artigo Produção Nacional Revisado por pares

BIBTEX RIS

“When I saw the skull approaching, I died”: Transatlantic communicative flows in response to racial terror in Brazil

2023; Taylor & Francis; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14788810.2023.2250966

1740-4649

Daniel Silva,

Migration, Refugees, and Integration

ABSTRACTThis study delineates the “culture of survival,” a trope that my research group encountered during fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro favelas. For Raphael Calazans, a young Black composer, the culture of survival emerges from solidarity: in the absence of housing policy for freed slaves, people created their own neighborhoods and improvised everyday solutions. The culture of survival is a practical means of grappling with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. It is enacted through different communicative practices, including the papo reto (straight talk) activist register. I draw from conversations with local intellectuals to examine these language flows as a rhizomatic ensemble of tropes emerging from confrontations between life and death, as in police raids. In responding to current iterations of racial terror, the culture of survival displays dynamic resources – including solidarity, self-formation, humor, defiance and strategies for handling liminality – that favela residents deploy in their everyday life.KEYWORDS: culture of survivalAfrican diasporaracial terror(in)securitizationfavela AcknowledgementsThis paper results from various interlocutions, both within and beyond the Complexo do Alemão favelas. Alan Brum Pinheiro, Alan Carneiro, Ben Rampton, Branca Fabrício, Inês Signorini, Jerry Lee, Joel van de Sande, Joel Windle, Mariluce Mariá, Raphael Calazans, Luiz Paulo da Moita Lopes, and Viviane Veras have variously debated the ideas that I present here. I would like to especially thank Jamie Duncan for the detailed reading of a previous version of this manuscript, and Chris Jenks for the interlocution. All remaining mistakes are my own.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.2 Ibid., 42.3 Ibid., 76.4 Ibid., 73.5 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Portuguese into English are my own. For the sake of brevity, many of the original excerpts in Portuguese have been omitted.6 Lopes and Facina, “Cidade do Funk”; Palombini, “Funk Carioca.”7 In this paper, I draw from critical approaches in sociolinguistics, security studies, and the sociology of violence to discuss (in)securitization. In this literature, Huymans defines securitization as “a practice of making ‘enemy’ and ‘fear’ the integrative, energetic principle of politics displacing the democratic principles of freedom and justice” (Security Unbound, 3). I follow Ben Rampton, Constandina Charalambous and other authors in contextually using the parenthetical form “(in)security/(in)securitization”, to “capture […] the fact that the effects of these practices are both unstable and relational” (“Sociolinguistics and Everyday (In)securitization,” 79).8 Valladares, Invention of the Favela; Caldeira, City of Walls; Fabrício and Melo, “Us for Ourselves.”9 Silva, “Papo Reto”; Silva and Lee, Language as Hope.10 Goffman, “On Face-Work.”11 Brown and Levinson, Politeness.12 See Silva and Lee, “Marielle, Presente.”13 Nascimento, Racismo Linguístico; Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body; Sales, “Racismo Cordial”; Turra and Venturi, Racismo Cordial.14 Bhabha, Location of Culture; Derrida, “Living On”; Cheah, “Spectral Nationality.”15 Facina, “Papo Reto”; Lopes, Funk-se Quem Quiser.16 However, currently, the UPPs are being phased out, and confrontations between the police and the “world of crime” have become more frequent and violent (see Franco, UPP; Menezes and Corrêa, “From Disarmament to Rearmament”; Silva, Facina, and Lopes, ““Pacification” of the Complexo do Alemão”.17 Gondon, João, Rafaldo Galdo, Taís Mendes, and Zean Bravo. “Ocupação da Mangueira fecha cinturão em torno do Maracanã; Maré é desafio.” O Globo, 3 November 2011. http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/ocupacao-da-mangueira-fecha-cinturao-em-torno-do-maracana-mare-desafio-2873566#ixzz34GMcAIGk.18 da Silva and Antonio, “Criminalidade Violenta”; Telles and Hirata, “City and Urban Practices.”19 Beltrame, Todo dia é Segunda-feira.20 Leitão, “Prefácio,” 10.21 Marques, “Slavery in Colonial Brazil.”22 Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands.23 Valladares, Invention of the Favela, 20.24 Ibid.25 Martins, cited in Valladares, Invention of the Favela, 20 (italics by Valladares; translation by Robert Anderson).26 Ibid.27 See Derrida, Limited Inc. Butler, Excitable Speech.28 Carr and Lempert, Scale.29 Briggs, “Anthropology, Interviewing, and Communicability.”30 Borges, Encarceramento em Massa; Padovani; “Na Caminhada”; Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.”31 Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism.32 Ibid., 5.33 Ibid.34 Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, cited in Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, 8–14.35 Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, 8.36 Foucault, The Politics of Truth; Milani et al., “Citizenship as Status.”37 Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, 52, cited in Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, 8.38 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 57.39 Habermas, Public Sphere.40 Kilomba, Plantation Memories.41 Ibid., 16–23.42 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 57.43 Ibid.44 Ibid.45 See Feltran, Entangled City, Biondi, Sharing this Walk, da Silva and Antonio, “Criminalidade Violenta.”46 The oral data from interviews and podcasts were transcribed by using a simplified version of the Jefferson Transcription Conventions: (.) A micropause(0.7s) A timed pause, long enough to indicate a time(()) Analyst commentsUnderlining A raise in volume or emphasisword – A cut-off:: Stretched sound.47 da Silva, Antonio, and Menezes, “(Des)continuidades na Experiência,” 533.48 See Rampton and Charalambous, “Sociolinguistics and Everyday (In)securitization.”49 Agha, “Tropes of Slang.”50 Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body; Fabrício and Melo, “Us for Ourselves,” Duncan, Researching Protest Literacies.51 Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body; Sales, “Racismo Cordial.”52 Rio Prefeitura, “UPP Social.”53 See Valladares, Invention of the Favela.54 In non-standard Brazilian Portuguese, verb agreement is much more simplified than the standard register, possibly due to the creolization of non-standard varieties with Brazilian indigenous languages and the Bantu languages spoken by enslaved Africans (see Lucchesi, Baxter, and Ribeiro, Português Afro-Brasileiro). While the standard’s verbal paradigm has four possible inflections for person and number (eu olho, tu olhas, ele/ela/você olha, nós olhamos, eles/elas/vocês olham), the non-standard differentiates only the first person from the rest (eu olho, tu olha, ele/ela/você olha, nós olha, eles/elas/vocês olha). The standard register varies considerably across Brazil, and in Rio de Janeiro, generally in informal discourse, the verb agreement of the second person (tu) in the standard is similar to the non-standard (tu olha). Yet in an interview, a speaker familiar with the standard would have preferred the alternant second person pronoun você (você olha, você vê), which inflects the verb alongside the “unmarked” dominant form in the creolized paradigm (olha). In this sense, Calazans’s choice of tu olha in a semi-formal situation indexes his preference for the non-standard, in line with his papo reto style.55 See Valadares, Invention of the Favela; Passos, Lan House na Favela.56 Caldeira, “Peripheral Urbanization,” 3.57 See Derrida, “Living On.”58 Mbembe, “Necropolitics”; Rampton and Charalambous, “Sociolinguistics and Everyday (In)securitisation.”59 Austin, Things with Words, 15.60 Agência Solano Trindade. https://agenciasolanotrindade.com.br.61 Duncan, Researching Protest Literacies; Martins, Militarização e Censura; Souza, Cria da Favela.62 Fridolfsson and Elander, “Securitization and Counter-Securitization”; Rampton and Charalambous, “Sociolinguistics and Everyday (In)securitisation.”63 Rampton and Charalambous, “Sociolinguistics and Everyday (In)securitisation”; Martins, Militarização e Censura.64 See, for instance, Carrión and Dammert, Seguridad Ciudadana; Mesquita Neto and Loche, “Police-Community Partnerships.”65 See Duncan, Researching Protest Literacies; Rampton and Charalambous, “Sociolinguistics and Everyday (In)securitisation.”66 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism.67 Graden, “Cape Lopez Africans.”68 Bhabha, Location of Culture.69 Ibid., xii–xiii.70 Derrida, Specters of Marx.71 Deumert, “Sociolinguistics of the Specter.”72 Derrida, “Living On,” 112–113 (italics in the original).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [grant number 313998/2020-5].Notes on contributorsDaniel N. SilvaDaniel N. Silva teaches applied linguistics and pragmatics at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil.