Inside the Favelas

Inside the Favelas
Author:
Publisher: Glitterati
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780982379943

Behind Rio de Janeiro's beautiful beaches and the beautiful people who adorn them reside the Brazilian people who live on the other side of the socio-economic mountain. This extraordinary and breakthrough document, Inside the Favelas, explores for the fi

Favela

Favela
Author: Janice Perlman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2010-06-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199709556

Janice Perlman wrote the first in-depth account of life in the favelas, a book hailed as one of the most important works in global urban studies in the last 30 years. Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom she had first met in 1969--as well as their children and grandchildren--Perlman offers the only long-term perspective available on the favelados as they struggle for a better life. Perlman discovers that while educational levels have risen, democracy has replaced dictatorship, and material conditions have improved, many residents feel more marginalized than ever. The greatest change is the explosion of drug and arms trade and the high incidence of fatal violence that has resulted. Yet the greatest challenge of all is job creation--decent work for decent pay. If unemployment and under-paid employment are not addressed, she argues, all other efforts will fail to resolve the fundamental issues. Foreign Affairs praises Perlman for writing "with compassion, artistry, and intelligence, using stirring personal stories to illustrate larger points substantiated with statistical analysis."

Technology of the Oppressed

Technology of the Oppressed
Author: David Nemer
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262543346

How Brazilian favela residents engage with and appropriate technologies, both to fight the oppression in their lives and to represent themselves in the world. Brazilian favelas are impoverished settlements usually located on hillsides or the outskirts of a city. In Technology of the Oppressed, David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.

The Invention of the Favela

The Invention of the Favela
Author: Licia do Prado Valladares
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2019-04-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469649993

For the first time available in English, Licia do Prado Valladares's classic anthropological study of Brazil's vast, densely populated urban living environments reveals how the idea of the favela became an internationally established—and even attractive and exotic—representation of poverty. The study traces how the term "favela" emerged as an analytic category beginning in the mid-1960s, showing how it became the object of immense popular debate and sustained social science research. But the concept of the favela so favored by social scientists is not, Valladares argues, a straightforward reflection of its social reality, and it often obscures more than it reveals. The established representation of favelas undercuts more complex, accurate, and historicized explanations of Brazilian development. It marks and perpetuates favelas as zones of exception rather than as integral to Brazil's modernization over the past century. And it has had important repercussions for the direction of research and policy affecting the lives of millions of Brazilians. Valladares's foundational book will be welcomed by all who seek to understand Brazil's evolution into the twenty-first century.

The Spectacular Favela

The Spectacular Favela
Author: Erika Mary Robb Larkins
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520282760

"This book examines the political economy of violence in the Rio de Janeiro favela of Rocinha. Based on over two years of research and residence in the community, it offers an ethnographic account of how entangled forms of violence become essential forces shaping everyday social relations in the favela. The first part of the book shows how armed actors--drug traffickers and police--use spectacle to perform power. Yet despite the prevalence of physical violence, the favela has itself become a valuable global brand, consumed in disembodied fashion through media and in embodied fashion through tourism. Exploring media and favela tourism, the second part of the book demonstrates how the social relationships that arise from ongoing favela violence have a direct relationship to the market economy"--Provided by publisher.

Hard Times in the Marvelous City

Hard Times in the Marvelous City
Author: Bryan McCann
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2014-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822355388

Beginning in the late 1970s, activists from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro challenged the conditions—such as limited access to security, sanitation, public education, and formal employment—that separated favela residents from Rio's other citizens. The activists built a movement that helped to push the nation toward redemocratization. They joined with political allies in an effort to institute an ambitious slate of municipal reforms. Those measures ultimately fell short of aspirations, and soon the reformers were struggling to hold together a fraying coalition. Rio was bankrupted by natural disasters and hyperinflation and ravaged by drug wars. Well-armed drug traffickers had become the new lords of the favelas, protecting their turf through violence and patronage. By the early 1990s, the promise of the favela residents' mobilization of the late 1970s and early 1980s seemed out of reach. Yet the aspirations that fueled that mobilization have endured, and its legacy continues to shape favela politics in Rio de Janeiro.

Favelization: The Imaginary Brazil in Contemporary Film, Fashion, and Design

Favelization: The Imaginary Brazil in Contemporary Film, Fashion, and Design
Author: Adriana Kertzer
Publisher: Bowker Identifier Services
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2014-02-11
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9780692844328

In Favelization, a book originally published by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (Smithsonian Institution), Adriana Kertzer sets out to understand the ways in which specific producers of contemporary Brazilian culture capitalized on misappropriations of favelas (informal squatter settlements that grow along the hillsides and lowlands of many Brazilian cities) in order to brand luxury items as "Brazilian." Through case studies that look at films, fashion, and furniture design, she explains how designers and filmmakers engage with primitivism and stereotype to make their goods more desirable to a non-Brazilian audience. Favelization looks at the films Waste Land and City of God, shirts designed by Fernando and Humberto Campana for Lacoste, and furniture by Brunno Jahara and David Elia. Kertzer argues that the processes of interpretation, transcendence and domination are part of the favelization phenomena. The book locates design as part of a broader constellation of representations that includes a variety of forms from printed media to film. It provides visual and material analyses, as well as theoretically discussions that draw on works by scholars in cultural and postcolonial studies such as John Tagg, Edward Said, Mariana Torgovnick, Mike Davis, and Trinh T. Minh-Ha. While focused on favelization, this work raises questions about the ethical conundrums associated with using the "Other" in commercial design work.

Favela Media Activism

Favela Media Activism
Author: Leonardo Custódio
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498530001

What explains the engagement of low-income young people in media initiatives for political mobilization and social change in everyday life? Favela Media Activism: Counterpublics for Human Rights in Brazil responds to this question using an in-depth ethnographic and interdisciplinary study about the trajectories in media activism among young residents of low-income and violence-ridden favelas in socially unequal Rio de Janeiro. Leonardo Custódio provides multifaceted analyses of how favela youth engage in individual and collective media activist initiatives despite social class constraints and neoliberal imperatives in their everyday life. This book details processes experienced by young favela residents while becoming individuals who act to challenge and change patterns of discrimination, governmental neglect and drug-related violence. It is an important resource for scholars interested in the nuances of political engagement among marginalized youth in today’s world of hyper-connectivity, information abundance, and the persistence of racial and social inequalities.

The Sun on My Head

The Sun on My Head
Author: Geovani Martins
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374719748

A bestselling literary sensation in Brazil, a powerful debut short-story collection about favela life in Rio de Janeiro In The Sun on My Head, Geovani Martins recounts the experiences of boys growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the early years of the twenty-first century. Drawing on his childhood and adolescence, Martins uses the rhythms and slang of his neighborhood dialect to capture the texture of life in the slums, where every day is shadowed by a ubiquitous drug culture, the constant threat of the police, and the confines of poverty, violence, and racial oppression. And yet these are also stories of friendship, romance, and momentary relief, as in “Rolézim,” where a group of teenagers head to the beach. Other stories, all uncompromising in their realism and yet diverse in narrative form, explore the changes that occur when militarized police occupy the favelas in the lead-up to the World Cup, the cycles of violence in the narcotics trade, and the feelings of invisibility that define the realities of so many in Rio’s underclass. The Sun on My Head is a work of great talent and sensitivity, a daring evocation of life in the favelas by a rising star rooted in the community he portrays.