Abstract
The following chapter is an essay that emerged from a thought exercise during anthropological fieldwork carried out in São Paulo, Brazil. Calvino’s Invisible Cities became both a methodology and epistemology with which I could interpret and re-create the city.
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Notes
- 1.
Phulano is a play on the Portuguese word “fulano,” which translates as “so-and-so,” a nameless, stand-in-for-all type of person. A version of this opening was published in Pardue (2008).
- 2.
A reference to the legendary warrior who fought against Portuguese and other European colonizers to protect the Quilombo of Palmares, a maroon, Afro-indigenous community, one of hundreds during the colonial period of Brazil. His death, which occurred during battle on November 20, 1695, is commemorated as the true day of Black Liberation in Brazil.
- 3.
Reference to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, president of Brazil from 1995–2003. He was trained in São Paulo as a sociologist and at one time was considered a cosmopolitan elite intellectual. He has been a leader of the PSDB, a center-right political party in Brazil.
- 4.
The name is a crass separation of the Portuguese word “ordinário” (Ordin Ário), which literally means ordinary but carries derogatory connotations in Portuguese as someone who is stupid, backwards, an idiot.
- 5.
A reference to Cidade Tiradentes, the massive neighborhood located in the extreme far east side of São Paulo. The name Tiradentes is a homage to Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, one of the leaders of a conspiracy (Inconfidência Mineira, “The Distrustful Group from the State of Minas Gerais”) against the Portuguese monarchy. The nickname Tiradentes or “pull teeth” was given to Xavier based on his experience as a dentist earlier in life. Members of the revolutionary movement were arrested; however, the colonial forces selected Tiradentes to make an example due to his relatively low class standing. The others came from families of reputation and property. Tiradentes became the scapegoat and ultimately a martyr for what would be Brazil’s First Republic (1889–1930) and not Brazil’s Independence, declared in 1808, due to its maintenance of the monarchical system of governance.
- 6.
This quote comes from Invisible Cities (Calvino 1974, 125). I simply substituted Tiradentes for Irene.
- 7.
FEBEM (State Foundation for the Well-Being of Minors) is an acronym referring to a system of youth correctional facilities in São Paulo. The city administration changed the name to Fundação Casa (House Foundation) in 2010. The attempt to clean up the institution’s violent past through euphemisms has had its limitations. Linguistically, most residents still refer to the place as FEBEM. Ilha Grande is an island in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro and has been a tourist destination since the late 1990s. However, during most of the twentieth century, it served as the site of the Penal Institution Cândido Mendes. Mandabala, literally “shoot the bullet,” is a nickname of Alta Mira, one of the most violent cities in Brazil located in the state of Pará on the edge of the Amazon rainforest.
- 8.
Truco is a card game, supposedly invented by the Moors in Iberia, what would become Portugal and Spain. Migrants brought the game in the late nineteenth century to Brazil’s Southeastern states, including São Paulo.
- 9.
Lyrics from rapper Mano Brown and the group Racionais MCs on the track “Genesis” from the 1997 album Sobrevivendo no Inferno.
- 10.
The list includes canonical figures of urban theory and public policy (Henri LeFebvre, Mike Davis, Michel De Certeau, Jane Jacobs, and David Harvey) with a targeted inclusion of Brazilian scholars (Raquel Rolnik, Ermínia Maricato, Nabil Bonduki). I purposefully juxtapose these scholars with contemporary fiction writers, who foreground the city as not only setting but social actor. To be clear, the list includes: Teju Cole (Nigerian-American), Ondjaki (Angolan), Paul Auster (author known for his New York Trilogy), Zadie Smith (English), and the famed Brazilian urban crime novelist Patrícia Melo.
References
Arabindoo, Pushpa, and Christophe Delory. 2020. Photography as Urban Narrative. City 24 (1–2): 407–422.
Calvino, Italo. 1974. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Pardue, Derek. 2008. Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip-Hop. New York: Palgrave.
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Pardue, D. (2022). Imagining São Paulo with Invisible Cities. In: Linder, B. (eds) "Invisible Cities" and the Urban Imagination. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_24
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