Dialectics of the African Diaspora: The glocality of race and resistance in the Brazilian economy of violence

Abstract

This article looks at the dialectics of race, space and death in the structuring of black urban life and in the making of the African Diaspora. It argues the African diaspora should be understood not only within the perspectives of the historical trauma of racial terror but also through the spatial agency developed by people of African descent as a way to reconstitute the self and forge a political community. Based on fieldwork with black youth in a shantytown in the city of São Paulo, the article aims to investigate the political subjectivities created through the state’s (morbid) interpellation of black youth in the global city. In order to answer this question, it pays attention to the spatial praxis developed by the direct victims of state violence to reclaim their right to a city divided along racial lines. Finally, it suggests that the global and local articulations of race and racism also convey a transnational explosive black political identity of which black youth spatially grounded strategies of resistance are just one example.