Afro Reggae: Parlaying Culture into Social Justice

Most of the literature on social movements assumes that the media, the market, consumerism, and new technologies are adjuncts to if not the causes of subordination and oppression, particularly in a globalizing conjuncture led by "Americanization." My work on youth cultural groups, briefly exemplified here by reference to the group Afro Reggae, suggests that these venues can also be mobilized in the pursuit of social justice under certain circumstances. I also focus on the importance of public spectacle, not only as a feature of the cultural activism of groups like Afro Reggae, but more generally. The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, are an excellent example of indigenous mobilization that depends to a great degree on spectacle for the few successes that they have achieved (Yúdice 1998). The synergy of all these factors, in conjunction with the insertion of groups like Afro Reggae into the "global civil society" of grassroots community movements, NGOs, foundations, and other initiatives, produces what I call a "performative injunction." The performance of identity and cultural styles is partially overdetermined by these groups' insertion into these networks of articulations. Consequently, rather than view certain social movements' collaboration with the media and markets as simply a form of co-optation, it is also accurate to see this as the strategic management of the use that these groups make of these venues and vice versa. An interesting outcome of this kind of activity is the transformation of all cultural practices into resources that are used and counterused to gain position by any of these articulated actors.

In the Beginning Was Violence

The Grupo Cultural Afro Reggae came into being in 1993. Like various other citizen initiatives, it aimed at countering the violence that racked Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the 1990s. In the final months of 1992 and again in the winter of 1993, a series of arrastões (looting rampages) was carried out by youths from the outlying favelas and opportunistically overdramatized by the media, sending the middle classes into panic. But it was the brutal violence against the poor that immediately prompted the formation of a "citizen action initiative" known as Viva Rio. On 23 July 1993, eight street children were murdered by a "social cleansing" death squad made up of off-duty police in front of the Candelária Church at the major intersection of Rio's downtown avenues. At the end of August, twenty-one innocent residents of the favela Vigário Geral were massacred. Apparently, on the previous day, the local chapter of the narcotraffic gang Comando Vermelho (Red Command) had killed four cops who tried to extort a drug shipment from them. The military police stormed the favela the next day and shot people indiscriminately. In one house they murdered all eight family members, parishioners of the evangelist church the Assembly of God. The parents died, Bible in hand.

All three of these events disrupted the sense of place that cariocas (Rio's residents) associated with the spaces in which they occurred (Soares 1996, 244). The arrastões on the beaches introduced an element of fear into the space of leisure. The murders in front of the Candelária Church undid the assumed sociability among classes that is taken for granted at this inevitable space of encounter. The massacre in the favela reversed the role of the police, much like the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. The police became the criminals who defiled a now-sacred space otherwise identified with abjection. While the arrastões saw quick action from the authorities, the response to the other two events came from "civil society." Viva Rio emerged not only to demand effective action from the authorities but also to communicate a new sense of citizenship, of belonging and participation, that included all classes, especially the poor, and that largely sought to use culture to bring the two parts of the divided city together. This communication also had to target the media, which reproduced and sometimes...