“When I saw the skull approaching, I died”: Transatlantic communicative flows in response to racial terror in Brazil

Abstract

This study delineates the “culture of survival,” a trope that my research group encountered during fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro favelas. For Raphael Calazans, a young Black composer, the culture of survival emerges from solidarity: in the absence of housing policy for freed slaves, people created their own neighborhoods and improvised everyday solutions. The culture of survival is a practical means of grappling with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. It is enacted through different communicative practices, including the papo reto (straight talk) activist register. I draw from conversations with local intellectuals to examine these language flows as a rhizomatic ensemble of tropes emerging from confrontations between life and death, as in police raids. In responding to current iterations of racial terror, the culture of survival displays dynamic resources – including solidarity, self-formation, humor, defiance and strategies for handling liminality – that favela residents deploy in their everyday life.