Artes

The city of São Paulo has been a source of inspiration for musicians of different generations. Important moments of its urban history were recorded in famous songs such as “Saudosa Maloca” and “Sampa”, which good examples. This paper focuses on the representations of the city found in RAP music, an African-American music style that was appropriated and reelaborated by the youth from the outskirts of São Paulo. It was possible to notice that as the rappers compose their music they build a dialogue which includes the urban changes which have occurred recently. I conclude that the images that they draw express a radical critique of the new status of urban segregation. Their denunciations are about the violence that affects them and that goes beyond the boundaries of the neighborhoods where they live and which makes evident the lack of democratization processes.

In this article, the author examines urban development plans in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as of 2014. Particular focus is given to how this relates to the art scene in the city. Additional topics include Brazilian urban design, the summer 2016 Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro and the Favela da Rocinha slum in the city.

A regular tourist destination since the early 1990s, Rocinha - the paradigmatic touristic favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - has seen the number of foreigners visitors grow considerably after the successful international release of City of God in 2003. In dialogue with the new mobilities paradigm and based on a socio-ethnographic investigation which examines how poverty-stricken and segregated areas are turned into tourist attractions, the article sheds lights on the ways tourists who have watched Fernando Meirelles's film re-interpret their notion of 'the favela' after taking part in organized tours. The aim is to examine how far these reinterpretations, despite based on first-hand encounters, are related back to idealized notions that feed upon the cinematic favela of City of God while giving further legitimacy to it.

This article draws upon theories of performance, everyday life, social space, and community to explore an ethnographic vignette juxtaposing two scenes: in one, neighbors form an improvised huddle around a young gang member dying of a gunshot wound in the streets of the favela, or squatter town, of Rocinha, in Rio de Janeiro; in the other, a Palm Sunday procession passes through the same spot later that night. Contextualizing this illustration with detailed information on Rocinha (including police and gang activities there and changing trends in favela activism in recent decades) and a framework for distinguishing the live, "organic" spaces of performances from the still-life, "inorganic" spaces of abstract settings, I argue that Rocinha residents use popular performances to create refuges from the desolation facing them in the poverty, violence, and injustice of their lives and to reposition themselves in spaces of abundance, peace, and community.

Sneed's first contact with Rocinha, Rio's biggest favela, occurred in 1990, a year after the first Brazilian funk record was released in Portuguese.3 At the time he was not interested in researching the music genre but more in the experiences of Rocinha residents and the drug gangs that ruled the favelas (17). Paul Sneed's book Machine Gun Voices: Favelas and Utopia in Brazilian Gangster Funk is the first ethnography about this Afro-Atlantic electronic scene to be published in English. More than a mere outcome of a social context - Rio's favelas - Sneed sees gangster funk as a kind of mediator between drug traffickers and the favelas' inhabitants (214). The literature on Brazilian funk has expanded since Sneed's PhD dissertation in 2003 on gangster funk