City as mobility: a contribution of brazilian saraus to urban theory

Abstract

Abstract The article analyzes saraus movement - poetry readings in São Paulo’s periphery - as a cultural phenomenon that over recent years has transformed the city space into a vibrant socio-political project. The movement offers important insights for an anthropology of cities by highlighting the materiality of mobility and spatiality, understood here as a set of social and cultural practices that involve the existential knowledge, social networking, and local community empowerment gained from mobility between predominantly peripheral neighborhoods and urban labor centers. We examine how saraus contribute to the construction of a new imaginary of the city and public space occupied by the socially excluded and racialized peripheries. We provide an analytical and empirical contribution to city production and urban theory, and demonstrate that mobility and the encounter are not simply temporary extraneous interactions, but rather experiences constitutive of social knowledge.