{"title":"“When I saw the skull approaching, I died”: Transatlantic communicative flows in response to racial terror in Brazil","authors":"Daniel N. Silva","doi":"10.1080/14788810.2023.2250966","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This 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.","PeriodicalId":44108,"journal":{"name":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Atlantic Studies-Global Currents","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2023.2250966","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This 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.