‘This is not a Favela’: Rio de Janeiro's Urban Quilombo Sacopã and the Limits of Multiculturalism

Abstract

Under Brazil's 1988 Constitution, quilombo communities have the right to the titles of the lands they occupy. This paper assesses quilombo titles' transformative potential through the experiences of Rio de Janeiro's urban quilombo Sacopã, an ethnic Afro‐descendant community once perceived as a favela. Unlike its neighbours, the community managed to resist the widespread favela removals of the 1970s. Based on an ethnographic approach during fieldwork conducted between December 2013 and January 2014, the article asks: how did Sacopã manage to remain, whilst its surrounding favelas were forcefully removed? Who counts as ethnic? What does this imply for Brazil's afro‐descendant majority?

Quilombist Utopias: An Ethnographic Reflection

“…In Brazil, quilombos are usually depicted as lacking development (Poets 2016). Due to this stereotypical backward image the quilombos share with rural indigenous and other traditional minorities, promoting quilombo heritage as a source of hope for modern society is demanding.…”

“…This chapter builds on the insights of studies on marginalization and resistance in local black spaces (e.g. Leu 2014;Junior 2012;Poets 2016;Guerrón 2017) by emphasizing how today social centers and cultural communities function as loci for emancipatory reinterpretations of Afro-Brazilian history and colonial globalization that constitute the utopian practice of quilombismo. Quilombismo can be analysed as a transgressive utopianism, an immanent utopia of here-and-now, or a prefigurative utopia not fixed into a predefined future (see Lakkala in this volume), but the relationship to the past and the future is most importantly defined by a decolonialist context of an Afro-Brazilian experience.…”

Western modernity, cities, and race: Challenges to decolonial praxis in the African diaspora in the Americas

“…Brazilian urban quilombos (Black ethnic groups) also exemplify the need to redefine what is urban. Poets (2017) explains that the Brazilian constitution recognizes Black ethnic communities' right to territory in a way that many quilombolas communities have received the title of their lands. Most of them were in rural areas.…”