Cultural Responses to Urban Violence in 21st Century Brazil: New Writers Speak from the Margins

Discussions concerning contemporary Latin America often focus on old and new forms of organizing and controlling marginalized groups in the massive urban spaces continuously spreading across the territory. The fear of violence, the emergence of middle and upper-class essentially self-sufficient fortified citadels, the expansion of violent criminality, and the continuous infringement of citizenship rights – ironically within a context of recent re-democratization – all contribute to the representation of an experience of the city as inherently violent. While the dominant discourse of violence and fear of violence is outlined by the reinforcement of excessive use of force against socially and racially marginalized populations, its superimposition on the social cartography of the city does not suppress the existence of forms of mobilization that resist such segregationist program. Amidst the many manifestations that embody this contesting attitude in contemporary Latin American urban culture, a number of literary productions partake in the critical intervention of portraying the urban experience by representing the particularities of socio-cultural realities and problematizing the ways in which urban violence is represented. In that regard, these new cultural productions offer provocative discussions that complicate the debate about violence and representation.

In this essay, I discuss how the works produced by authors identified with the twenty-first century literary movement known as Literatura Periférica respond to and intervene in the representation and reproduction of urban violence in Brazil by putting forward a new imaginary for the symbolic and material space occupied by a socially excluded and racialized marginality. Having lived in these spaces themselves, these authors have been writing about life on the margins while centering their works on traditionally excluded groups such as the urban poor. Different from works that celebrate an oversimplified culture of violence, such as the notorious film phenomenon Cidade de Deus (2002), periphery literature renders visible a different frame of reference regarding Brazil's most impoverished spaces, one that is concerned with representing the dire experiences of racial discrimination, social inequality, and spatial segregation associated with being poor in contemporary urban Brazil. This is because Literatura Periférica promotes a social vision of the world from within in which the periphery is understood and represented not as an inherently crime-ridden and culturally impoverished space, but as a legitimate site of enunciation for representing lived experiences. While the almost ubiquitous presence of everyday violence is by no means excluded from these works, the dominant discourse of violence that equates peripheries to spaces of crime is challenged for its overtly discriminatory bias. Conversely, Literatura Periférica's most powerful critique of violence lies in disrupting a model of cultural production that has historically excluded the marginalized by intervening with their own production of culture and affirming the periphery as a dynamic cultural space. As a cultural response to different forms of violence, Literatura Periférica reveals that, even though not recognized by society as a cultural product typical of the periphery, the literature produced in that space is a legitimate form of cultural expression that generates discursive and material spaces for negotiating between Brazil's social realities and its representations.

My research and analysis are carried out against the backdrop of the cultural landscape of São Paulo, whose vast peripheries bear the largest, most prolific, and most visible production of Literatura Periférica. In the context of Brazilian cities, especially São Paulo, periferia (periphery) is a term used to identify vast areas of habitation and settlement outside the central zones of the city, which have been historically occupied by low-income and non-white populations. Formed in the late 19^th century, the first settlements were home to freed slaves and low-income workers with no land ownership, and with only meager job opportunities. In the early decades of the 20^th century, while Brazil promoted massive European immigration to whiten the nation and to fulfill the demands of its incipient industrial development, São Paulo grew rapidly without a matched commensurate urban planning. By mid-century, rural migrants attracted by the city's wealth settled in the peripheries...