‘Christ the Redeemer Turns His Back on Us:’ Urban Black Struggle in Rio’s Baixada Fluminense by Stephanie Reist Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Walter Migolo, Supervisor ___________________________ Esther Gabara ___________________________ Gustavo Furtado ___________________________ John French ___________________________ Catherine Walsh ___________________________ Amanda Flaim Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 ABSTRACT ‘Christ the Redeemer Turns His Back on Us:’ Black Urban Struggle in Rio’s Baixada Fluminense By Stephanie Reist Department of Romance Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Walter Mignolo, Supervisor ___________________________ Esther Gabara ___________________________ Gustavo Furtado ___________________________ John French ___________________________ Catherine Walsh ___________________________ Amanda Flaim An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 Copyright by Stephanie Virginia Reist 2018 Abstract “Even Christ the Redeemer has turned his back to us” a young, Black female resident of the Baixada Fluminense told me. The 13 municipalities that make up this suburban periphery of Rio de Janeiro have suffered for decades from spectacular stigmatizing media narratives that cast the region as pathologically violent and culturally devoid due to its Blacker, poorer inhabitants. This has helped perpetuate government neglect, exacerbated by Rio’s hosting of the 2016 Olympic Games, through clientelist politics that thrive off the lack of jobs and basic public services in the region. My dissertation is an auto-ethnographic analysis that draws from three years of participatory action research with Black and brown youth in Rio de Janeiro’s stigmatized Baixada Fluminense. I argue that the music, films, social media driven journalism, and scholarly production of these youth contest the ways in which race, class, and place of origin often overlap through segregationist practices and media narratives that attempt to maintain racial, socio-geographic hierarchies by relegating Black, brown, and poor bodies to the social and geographic periphery of a country that once proclaimed itself a “racial democracy.” Through transnational dialogues, these vii youth movements employ diasporic cultural forms and digital media to re- configure the Baixada and its 13 municipalities as a “Black place” that is inherently intersectional in its claims to collective access to urban and social mobility within this urban periphery. viii Dedication To Bernice and Ulrich Reist, my parents, for raising me in a home full of books, music, and foreign currency. And to Anne Marie Reist and Edna Jones, my grandmothers, who passed before I finished college and graduate school, respectively. Milu, as we called Grandma Anne Marie, taught me to love traveling alone, learning languages, and eating chocolate bonbons like potato chips. Grandma Edna taught me to love puzzles, fried chicken, and my own grace and power as a Black woman. ix Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... vii List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. xii Acknowledgments .....................................................................................................................xiv 1. Introduction........................................................................................................................... 1 2. The Baixada Starts at Central do Brasil .................................................................................. 4 2.1 Autoethnography for an Interdisciplinary Misfit: Reflecting on Methods from the Periphery ............................................................................................................................... 22 2.2 Theorizing Peripheries Racially and Spatially ........................................................... 32 2.3 Christ Turns His Back on Us: The Fragmented Territoriality of Stigma ................ 41 2.4 The Invisibility of the Baixada in Internationally Acclaimed Film ......................... 53 2.5 Re-imag(in)ing the Baixada Fluminense as a Black Place ......................................... 73 3. Spectacle and Hyper (In)Visibility: Black bodies in Black Spaces during the 2016 Olympics .................................................................................................................................... 100 3.1 Misplaced Priorities to Keep People in Their Place ................................................. 108 3.2 Black Invisibility through Hypervisibility in the Work of Beatriz Nascimento and Lélia Gonazalez ................................................................................................................... 121 3.3 Criminalizing Black Leisure ........................................................................................ 143 3.4 Busing While Peripheral in the #CidadeOlimpica ................................................... 157 3.5 “Black Brazilians live a state of calamity”: Police Violence and the Pacification of Black Bodies and Space ...................................................................................................... 177 3.6 Making Black Lives Matter in the Baixada Fluminense .......................................... 200 x 4. “Logically, I am not from here:” The Collaborative Process of Making “O Custo da Oportunidade” .......................................................................................................................... 219 4.1 Filming: Becoming a Diretora ..................................................................................... 232 4.2 Editing: Making “O Custo da Oportunidade” ......................................................... 240 5. From Knowing your Place to Making your Place Known: Political-Epistemic Insurgency from and for the Baixada ..................................................................................... 300 5.1 Uma universidade com nossa cara ............................................................................ 305 5.2 ‘There won’t be any poor and Black people attending university nor traveling to another country,’ they said ............................................................................................... 326 5.3 “The more I deepened my knowledge, the more I rejected my Black condition”: Education and (Un)Learning to Be Black ........................................................................ 351 5.4 Defending Democratic Access to Free, Public Higher Education with and from within the Corporate University: The Cost of Opportunity Conference .................... 366 6. Conclusion: ‘Vai ter luta’...................................................................................................... 383 References .................................................................................................................................. 399 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 434 xi List of Figures Figure 1: View from Morro do Sapo in Mangueirinha. ........................................................... 5 Figure 2 UFRRJ-IM/ Duke research team. ............................................................................... 16 Figure 3: Map of Metropolitan Rio created by author. .......................................................... 43 Figure 4: Photo from the favela, Providênia, of Central do Brasil in the foreground with Pão de Açucar in the background on the left. ......................................................................... 55 Figure 5: Man wearing Rio 2016 T-Shirt watching ceremony for the Olympic Torch’s Arrival in Duque de Caxias. The banner reads: “Olympic Torch in Duque de Caxias- You in the Olympics.” ................................................................................................................ 75 Figure 6: “Torch of Shame” in downtown Nova Iguaçu ....................................................... 83 Figure 7: Woman passing torch at Fórum Grita Baixada “March of Shame.” Photo courtesy of Fórum Grita Baixada .............................................................................................. 85 Figure 8: Protestor’s shirt reads “I ❤ Paracambi.” Photo courtesy of Fórum Grita Baixada ......................................................................................................................................... 87 Figure 9: Family at the Official Torch Relay in Duque de Caxias. ..................................... 105 Figure 10: A friend in front of a re-print of the “Black Rio” spread in Jornal do Brasil at a party in Lapa celebrating the article’s 50th anniversary. ...................................................... 137 Figure 11: Reprint of a flyer for a soul music party in Mesquita........................................ 142 Figure 12: Protestor at the Torch of Shame relay holding a sign from Amnesty International’s campaign