The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

The Anti-Black Cityreveals the violent and racist ideologies that underlie state fantasies of order and urban peace in modern Brazil. Illustrating how "governing through death" has become the dominant means for managing and controlling ethnic populations in the neoliberal state, Jaime Amparo Alves shows that these tactics only lead to more marginalization, criminality, and violence.

Reviews

"With impeccable scholarship and ethics, The Anti-Black City offers devastating, yet beautiful, narratives of resistance against brutality, poverty, and abandonment. Jaime Amparo Alves labored for years with maternal activists to resurrect critical thinking about communities suturing against evisceration and loss. In this impressive work, fighting for lives and the memories of their slain, resolute if not always resilient captives become the political doulas to a diaspora."Joy James, author of Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader

"Jaime Amparo Alvess poignant and powerful ethnography offers a vital critique of racialized forms of governance in the anti-black city of So Paulo. Beyond making a profound contribution to our understanding of the racialized and gendered inequalities which shape urban life in Brazil, this theoretically provocative work of activist scholarship also shows us a way forward."Erika Robb Larkins, author of The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil

"With the narrative drive of a captivating novel, the immanent critique of critical theory at its best, the empirical precision and accuracy of an anthropologist whose trust has been hard won in the field, and a bone-deep commitment to Black liberation, The Anti-Black City illustrates how police terror in the favelas of So Paulo constitutes a violence of genocidal proportions. This book is a game-changer in the field of anthropology."Frank B. Wilderson III, author of Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms

"Jaime Amparo Alvess book is a tragically timely contribution to this hypervisibility of violence in Brazil. It is a thoroughly rare accounting of violence that is only possible because of Alves years of community organizing."Antipode

"This book certainly offers a timely contribution to the fields of urban, transnational and globalization studies, mostly at the graduate level, particularly concerning the rampant reproduction of racial and social inequalities in contemporary cities."City & Society

"A current and necessary analysis of the impoverished black population in Brazil. "Urban Studies

Author Bio

Jaime Amparo Alves is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York and associate researcher at the Centro de Estudios Afrodiaspricos of Universidad Icesi/Colombia.