Leonora S. Paula

This book examines the role of Afro-descendants, Black women, and spatially segregated artists and authors in transforming representations of urban life in twenty-first century Brazil. These writers and urban artists, often forced to occupy physical and symbolic peripheries, actively participate in the construction of an urban imaginary that directly opposes the historical exclusion of marginalized knowledge and the ultra-conservative cultural agenda currently sweeping Brazil. By analyzing an array of cultural manifestations, I demonstrate how rooted in gender, racial, social, cultural and spatial justice principles and practices, these artists reimagine the space they occupy. Their creative activity uses urban memory, spatial identity, space alteration, and ancestral urban history as ways to make claims about their rights to the city. This book situates Afro-Brazilian culture as a fundamental engine in the project of reclaiming a space of protagonism for Black people in Brazil, a movement that reverberates throughout the global Black diaspora.