Black place-making and epistemic decolonisation in Brazil: Rio de Janeiro’s Pequena África

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article approaches the interconnections between Black place-making and epistemic decolonisation in contemporary Brazil. It discusses a region popularly known as Pequena África (Little Africa) in Rio de Janeiro’s harbour district. Taking Little Africa as a case study, the article contends that community organisers and members of the Black movement in this region are active knowledge producers via their everyday experiences and understanding of time and space. As such, the article suggests that acts of spatial reading and writing contribute to the decentring of Euro-Western perspectives and the valuing of subaltern epistemic projects. Considering these connections, it is argued that the social appropriation of space and meaning-making based on Little Africa’s material landscape has gone hand in hand with forms of resistance, encounter, and anti-colonial thinking. Accordingly, and in close dialogue with theorisations from decolonial studies and Black geographies, the article concludes that processes of knowledge decolonisation occur when historically underrepresented communities assert their spatial and temporal existence.