Space, modernity and whiteness: notes from Cidade Ademar, São Paulo, Brazil ¹

Abstract

In this article I attempt to reclaim the notion of space and its construction as a modern category oriented by raciality, by the onto-epistemological pillars of separability, determinacy and sequentiality, based on a universal pretension. I contrast modern space with place-space, as proposed by Muniz Sodré, in order, in the midst of this contrast, to glimpse other possibilities of understanding and of inhabiting space. Thus, I present the ongoing movements of urban renewal in Cidade Ademar, São Paulo, while playing with affectability as a way to explore the cracks, which modern spatial representation seeks to hide in the district. Lastly, I attempt to present/confront the modern subject who hides himself under a cloak of rationality and universality, who organizes and appropriates the space he continually names, in order to denaturalize the modern/colonial violence that suppresses other spatial understandings oriented by relationality, or by affectability.

Keywords:
Place-space; Territory; Modernity; Whiteness; Whitening of the Territory

Resumo

Neste artigo intento retomar a noção de espaço e sua construção como categoria moderna orientada pela racialidade, pelos pilares ontoepistemológicos da separabilidade, da determinabilidade e da sequencialidade, pautada em uma pretensão universal. Contraponho o espaço moderno ao espaço-lugar, tal como proposto por Muniz Sodré, para, em meio a essa contraposição, vislumbrar outras possibilidades de compreender e habitar o espaço. Apresento assim o movimento de renovação urbana em curso em Cidade Ademar (SP) enquanto jogo com a afetabilidade como caminho para explorar as frestas que a representação espacial moderna busca ocultar no distrito. Trato, enfim, de apresentar/confrontar o sujeito moderno que se esconde sob o manto da racionalidade e da universalidade, aquele que organiza e se apropria do espaço por ele continuamente nomeado, a fim de desnaturalizar a violência moderna/colonial que suprime outros entendimentos espaciais orientados pela relacionalidade, ou pela afetabilidade.

Palavras-chave:
Espaço-lugar; Território; Modernidade; Branquitude; Branqueamento do Território

After writing this essay, I have been able to understand a little better what it was that moved me: I sought to pour discomforts onto paper and name them. I refer to these discomforts that move us toward research as urgencies, that which is conventionally termed a “research problem”. I do this, however, with the difficulties that begin from myself, understanding my body and the marks that it carries. How may I begin from myself, how may I expose myself, without making my body an object to be dissected by an academy founded on the bones of my ancestors? I attempt to follow the path which opened up through conversations with my grandparents and many others who lived in Cidade Ademar, São Paulo, bodies that produce and have always produced knowledge. And I ask myself where this path will take me while I investigate the district in which we live. My starting point is not taken from absolute rationality, from non-affectionate abstractions that some universal subject would use to analyze the distant object that he or she plans to know. My body rebels against its condition of object in the field of ideas and now I no longer wish to access this place that is denied me. On the contrary, I long for the dissolution of this abstract field, seeking something written that brings feeling and thinking closer together, that repositions my body into a place where theory and practice, affectations and abstractions are not separate, split apart fields. I arrive here tired of cloistering myself as far as modern grammar has allowed me to go, each day less insecure about the paths that open up through its critique.

Figure 1
My father and I in front of our home

The whole difficulty of this text, like the previous one[s], comes from the “omnipotent” will to disconnect myself from the masters, as if I could invent a language within the very one in which I write.² (NASCIMENTO, 2018, p. 420).

Introduction

I was born and raised in Cidade Ademar, a district located on the periphery of the South Side of São Paulo that borders Diadema and is occupied by a mostly Black population (IBGE, 2010). I learned my first words at the home of my grandparents, who received us warmly, let me know that I was welcome to this world, and who had lived in the region for half a century. It was from there that I made my first trips to the City,³ as we refer to the distant centers of commerce and services, and from where I began to experience urban life. It was during these long journeys on crowded- and, for us, expensive - buses that I began to expand my horizons and my understanding of the city, its places and its signs. It was within the process of expanding my world that I discovered that I should be hellishly careful when I was on the street, that my space for learning, sociability and leisure - my space for living - was already, even before I was born, a space of danger and violence, one of the most violent in the city during the 1990s (FOLHA, 1990). Gradually, as I moved around to access hospitals, parks, the free sports projects in the city center, I realized that I was far away, set apart from the City. “I hailed the world, and the world amputated my enthusiasm. I was expected to stay in line and make myself scarce”⁴ (FANON, 2020, p. 130).⁵

Maybe my world was expanding, but this expansion was also a sign that our home was far away, in a district of backwardness, danger, with little infrastructure and little security: a space in urbanization, to be civilized. There I saw the relationships of mutual care and support that had been established between my grandmother and our neighbors; the fact, which for me was so impressive, that most of the people who lived there had built their own homes; and the stories about how the neighborhood had managed to conquer some infrastructure over the years (with a lot of struggle from the residents, I learned later). However, all these signs of power, which for us, seemed to draw a future that was certainly hopeful, were never reflected, or taken into account, when constructing narratives and public policies aimed at Cidade Ademar - or, more specifically, Americanópolis and Vila Missionária, the neighborhoods where my grandparents’ home is located. “I would have liked to enter our world young and sleek, a world we could build together”⁶ (FANON, 2020, p. 128).

Discontented with the distance and inequality that demarcated my space in relation to the City we knew, we did what we could so that I could integrate, so that they knew that I too could be civilized, intelligent, that I could take care of the world, but that my world demanded care. It was only when I had just turned fifteen, blocks away from home, when I saw a revolver pointed at my head for the first time in a routine stop and search carried out by the Military Police, that I understood that I was not young and sleek.⁷ I was a wayward urchin, a nigga, a minor. Apparently, the process that signified my district through the violence also signified me as dangerous. My body symbolized the danger I was warned to fear. “Whereas I was prepared to forget, to forgive, and to love, my message was flung back at me like a slap in the face. The white world, the only decent one, was preventing me from participating.”⁸ (FANON, 2020, p. 130).

Today, Cidade Ademar is undergoing a process of intense urban renewal. With the approval, in São Paulo, of the new Master Plan (2014) and the Zoning Plan (2016), the district has been the scene of strong transformations, the epicenter of which is the neighborhood of Jardim Prudência, occupied mostly by a white population. In the midst of its verticalization, the urban landscape has changed quickly: small and large houses have given way to gated communities; small businesses have lost ground to large shopping arcades for rent; street-market stall holders and street vendors face regulatory, repressive State agents; new “solidarity neighborhood” posters inform that residents are ready to call the Military Police if they identify any suspicious behavior, in order to guarantee security in the neighborhood. These are signs that seem to set the stage for a new life, which the various projects launched within the region have announced (Figure 2).

Figure 2
Solidarity neighborhood, Jardim Prudência

The process of transformation in this district, informed by the experiences lived there, for me, raises a number of questions. Does raciality, which demarcates our bodies and experiences, somehow structure this process? How does the narrative of a “new life”, promised by the projects and mediated by the transformations in the district, relate to the narratives previously produced about the place? Lastly, what kind of understanding of space enables the forms of compartmentalization, appropriation and transformation to which it seems to have been submitted?

I have begun this article with memories, reflections and questions that have spurred the writing process of this text, moving it from a merely abstract-rational process to a process full of affectations that expose me as an author. The plot that I weave throughout this article is permeated by reflections, expositions and highlighted references, written in italics. My aim is to contribute, within these narrative spaces, by highlighting encounters and tensions that unfold from the practical and theoretical effort of understanding in order to dissolve modern grammar and its expressions of violence, as well as to expose (im)possibilities constructed and voiced outside the modern grammar that, although hidden, nonetheless exists.

Throughout the text I have articulated notions of space, modernity and territory⁹ so as to consider, in a racialized manner, the material and ideological construction of space as a modern category and to situate these revealed experiences and transformations. Herein, I seek a dialogue with various authors¹⁰ who reveal an understanding of raciality as being fundamentally imbricated in the construction of what we call modernity, ontological and epistemological¹¹ space and the basis for concrete practices of apprehending and transforming the world. Starting from different points and organizing their thoughts in different manners, these people have argued for raciality, and with it the racialization of the human species and the space we inhabit, as a structuring element of theories and practices developed during Western post-enlightenment.¹²

Ultimately, this is an exploratory piece of writing in which I wish to draw the discussed concepts closer to a concrete case of urban transformation in order to test the possibilities of understanding, which are opened up through the constructed theoretical plot. By not seeking answers, I outline a methodological path beneath which I may perform my investigation and deepen the ongoing research on Cidade Ademar. Here, I weave together bases that may support future reflections.

1. On modernity

Muniz Sodré opens his book O terreiro e a cidade [The terreiro and the city]¹³ (1988) dealing with the need for modern Western thought to reveal (or create) meanings to attribute to the reality that surrounds it. “It is necessary to transform the fact at any cost into an idea, into a description, into an interpretation [...]” (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 8). As the interpretation in itself originates from a symbolic base, also abstract, an “imaginary duplication of what is real” is created, “always interpreting [on the basis of] an already given interpretation” (id., ib., p. 8). This view is, to some extent, shared by the artist and academic Denise Ferreira da Silva, who affirms how modern practices and discourses aim to determine reality, and obliterate The Thing,¹⁴ based on its “form (as abstraction) or by the law (efficacy)”¹⁵ (SILVA, 2019b, p. 47).

Following the guidelines of modern thought, it is from the scientific field, in the midst of permanent conflicts and internal disputes, that determining truth (or truths, divided, compartmentalized), as an abstraction, is sought. Science, as a model of thought, which is intended to be universal, understands reality through signs, which are not presented as approximations of the real, but as reality itself, as “something complete, which fills a space, leads to the philosophical-scientific concept and satisfies production” (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 8).

Muniz Sodré understands that in the West it is universality, a self-attributed quality, that will establish the truth through science and that, in addition, will find its source of legitimacy in the scientific field, one of the bases for exerting its power. In order to forge itself, in contrast to the unavoidable singularities of The Thing - that which cannot be exhausted by theory, which is imbricated, indeterminate, relational -, the universal demands oppositions, its Others. While the category of universality, forged by rationality, allows an expression of diversity (CARNEIRO, 2005, p. 27) and carries the potential for self-determination, the Others occupy the field of difference; they are enclosed in narrower, less elastic categories; they are categorized by the gaze of someone other than themselves; they do not reach the sphere of interiority where reason rules; they inhabit the sphere of exteriority; and, affectively, should be incapable of self-determination (SILVA, 2014).

Presenting distinct theoretical constructions, although capable of dialogue, Sueli Carneiro and Denise Ferreira da Silva indicate raciality as a structuring element of these Others, constituting and constituted by modernity, which, in modern theory, are presented and represented as objects, not subjects, thus ensuring the (intended) concreteness of the universal. For these authors, raciality is a fundamental instrument of human classification (here also read hierarchy). Denise Ferreira da Silva may help us to observe this process by analyzing the notion of cultural difference, mobilized from raciality:¹⁶

It was not until the early twentieth century, after the analytics of raciality-through the notion of cultural difference-wrote the “other of Europe,” that these men in the raw could be written as variants of the Human. [...] [The Others] are constructed as specific kinds of human beings [...] as affectable subjects, those whose minds have no access to Reason, which is the cognitive capacity necessary for entertaining the idea of a moral law and the attendant conception of Freedom.¹⁷ (SILVA, 2019b, p. 51).

In this article, which desires to explore a movement of urban renewal in a space predominantly occupied by a Black population, attention should be paid to the constitution of the Other, radically the Other, imprisoned in an image that it did not produce about itself and that does not reflect it, the “universal inhuman” (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 28), “an otherness situated in the confines of a non-being, beyond the Others who were admitted, albeit with reservations, into its privacy” (CARNEIRO, 2005, p. 21). Here, I am addressing the Black body and its spatiality, onto which will fall, in a privileged manner, the oppositions created to build this universal subject and the space inhabited by this body.

In On Difference Without Separability, Denise Ferreira da Silva (2016) presents the three onto-epistemological pillars of modernity: separability, determinacy and sequentiality. In order to think about space together with a bibliography critical of modernity, and in dialogue with Frantz Fanon (1979), for whom “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world”,¹⁸ I will pay particular attention here to the instrumentalization of separability.

This principal considers the social as a whole constituted of formally separate parts. Each of these parts constitutes a social form as well as geographically-historically separate units, and, as such, stands differentially before the ethical notion of humanity, which is identified with the particularities of white European collectives.¹⁹ (SILVA, 2016, p. 11).

Mediated by raciality, a sociological signifier of human difference that presupposes inequalities in the face of the ethical notion of humanity, we observe separability also as a fundamental category for considering raciality, and vice versa. With regard to this work, I pay special attention to the racial hierarchy that has been built anchored on these categories and, at the same time, has conferred meaning onto the operation of the same categories. As the particularities of European white collectives are a sign that makes up the determination of this normative, and hierarchically higher, place, in the face of the notion of humanity, I here suggest bringing such particularities closer to the concept of whiteness as elaborated by Maria Aparecida Bento (2002).²⁰ For the author, this concept simultaneously refers to traits that make up the racial identity of white Brazilians; demarcates a position of power in relation to the racialized Other - eminently the Black, in the Brazilian case -; permeates the construction of whitening policies put into place in Brazil; and sparks from considering the white group as the universal standard of humanity.

With special attention to the propositions of Muniz Sodré and Denise Ferreira da Silva, I highlight three structuring characteristics of modern thought: i) its universalizing pretension; ii) raciality, which links the particularities of white European collectives to white/whiteness, the notion of humanity; and iii) separability as a tool for dealing with difference. In the development of this text, I will access these categories/characteristics of modern thought to discuss them in view of their implications in relation to the reading of space and its construction as a modern category.

2. On space

Following the path trodden by Sodré (1988), I present modern space as an abstract synthesis, a concept on which the understanding of space in modern theory(ies) will be established in a more or less generalized manner. I locate it in order to understand it from what it actually is: a particular concept, situated socially-spatially-historically, which, nevertheless, intends to be universal, normative.

In his historical reconstruction of the concept of space, and its various transformations, in the European Renaissance, Sodré found a movement that constrained spatial understanding. For Sodré, it is in this socio-spatial-temporal context that space becomes amenable to theoretical abstraction in a more radical form, and is understood as homogeneous, infinite and three-dimensional. It is a key movement that simultaneously comprises the continuous attempt to overcome space through rationality and abstraction, and its conceptual constraint, which, in the search for its determinacy, confines it to homogeneous abstraction. These were, for example, the foundations laid down for/by Descartes’ thinking. Such abstraction becomes possible based on the understanding of a supposedly universal, albeit subjective, absolute referential, as Kant was to argue centuries later, which is the eye of the observer. For Sodré (1988, p. 24-25), “such are the assumptions of modern geometry and physics”. Finally, “the gaze creates space” as “[...] a network of relationships between objects and an absolute reference in the face of the relativity of the movement of bodies. At the same time, it is just an extension, linked to the body, hence it is not possible to conceive of an empty space”.

It was not by chance that this was a theoretical movement that occurred around the fifteenth century. It was at the moment when space became increasingly deducible, fully understandable in its abstraction - separable, categorizable and hierarchical - that the encounters between the European territory and American territory, the civilized and the savage territory, took place. It is from this conception of space that the compartmentalized colonial space started to become demarcated, under the bones of native peoples and enslaved Africans. Modern theoretical and practical movements happened in continuity, often in conformity, applying on terra firma what the European mind pronounced in the field of ideas in the face of a known world in radical expansion. The unknown, the different, was faced with the technologies of modern abstraction, separation, ordering and determination, which would support the post-enlightenment construction of space as a “uniform extension, with no privileged place, equivalent in all its directions, but imperceptible through the senses” (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 26).

Before, during and after this process of reconstructing the meanings of earth and space, however, there were other spatial understandings, also with deep historical roots. When discussing these understandings, with particular attention to the notions worked by the native Latin American peoples, Rogério Haesbaert (2020, p. 86) indicated how “the ‘dualist ontology’ of hegemonic modernity, which separates culture from nature, the subject from the object, would face political ontologies, of a relational character”. Here, I will address one of those other possibilities of reading and practice that rebel against the universalist constraint of modern space: the place-space. Sodré (1988, p. 26), understands it as

[...] a qualitative space, not determined by any absolute point, but by the concrete objects, the things, to which it is attached. [...] [Within it] the way of existence of the human being, its presence [...] tends to exterminate the abstract generalizations of space while organizing the world.

The oppositional and self-determined importance of place-space, as presented by Sodré, is not only a function of its theoretical character. Just as modern theory, in its universal claim, needs to be put into practice so as to be guaranteed as universal, the conception of a place-space is also material, but of a plural nature. Its condition, as a space of affectability and indeterminacy, may be a path, or destination, opposed to the operations of modern separability, for the construction of spaces, or areas, not locatable (within modern grammar), “as singular expressions of each and every other existant [space], as well as of the entangled whole in/as which they exist”²¹ (SILVA, 2016, p. 11).²² In other words, the existence of the practical concept of place-space, affected by the life that emerges and composes it, simultaneously points toward the non-universality of the concept of modern space and to the existence of ways of being (such as interaction/ perception with reality) beyond those foreseen by modern theory.

3. On modern space: fictionalizing the universal, materializing the social

As I have pointed out, modern space is not restricted to a concept, to an abstraction. By informing the way, as a theory, in which we perceive and interact with the world, with reality, the concept reveals its strength as a transformer of reality itself. In order to understand the process of urban renewal that has been proclaimed with the launching of new residential projects in Jardim Prudência, made possible through the new urban legislation that governs the city, I take a brief look at this neighborhood, the centrality of which, in this movement, it is important to state, owes nothing to chance.

Jardim Prudência, located in the northwest quadrant of the district of Cidade Ademar, appears in most records as the founding neighborhood/region of the district’s urban occupation, which I refute when presenting the occupation processes of neighborhoods such as Jardim Miriam (SILVA, A., 2019, p. 53). By first looking at a real estate advertisement in what would become Jardim Prudência (Figure 3), I notice distinctions between the subdivision process of this neighborhood in relation to the subdivision of the poor neighborhoods of the period, where the population was racialized: instead of informal subdivisions, here we observe regulated subdivisions; instead of alleys along the edges of streams, we find streets following the most modern layouts; instead of beaten earth, paved streets. This is not intended for the unemployed or underemployed masses, particularly those coming from the Northeast and North of the country,²³ this subdivision is aimed at formal, better-paid workers who prosper in this moment of intense industrialization.

Figure 3
Sale of real estate and land in Cidade Ademar (1949)

These are almost details, albeit of great importance, when recognizing the hygienist perspective that organized a considerable part of the urbanization in São Paulo at the time. This was how the subdivision was established (symbolically and materially) as “decent and orderly” and differed from the images of marginality and violence that signified the favelas, tenements and other spaces where those who were considered destitute, vagrants and disorderly lived - important spaces for housing the poor and Black workers of the period (ROLNIK, 1989; 1994). I propose that it is precisely these racially informed distinctions, these operations of separability, determinacy and sequentiality of reality, that guarantee the neighborhood a vanguard position in the urban colonization of the district, as opposed to the erasure of the history of the neighborhoods that surround it.

The distinctions between the neighborhood and the rest of the district are not restricted to advertisements and subdivision processes carried out more than half a century ago. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the neighborhood stood out from the rest of the district, not only because of its appearance, but also because of its occupants and the condition of their occupation. Comprised of large houses, with backyards and tree-lined streets, the image of the neighborhood is distinguished from its surroundings in the district - with smaller houses, often marked as irregular, which amidst the concrete and asphalt characterize the neighborhood of Americanópolis, which neighbors (Map 1) Jardim Prudência, as one of the least wooded areas of the city. While almost the entire district has low-income rates and a strong Black presence, Jardim Prudência stands out as a space with an overrepresentation of the white population and high-income concentration (Map 2). The modern, regularized subdivision of yesterday, today is a housing space for a white, much better paid population and is the epicenter of a process of urban renewal.

Map 1
Racialized map with the launching of vertical residential buildings in Cidade Ademar - proportion of white people per census sector²⁴

Modern space does not need to be homogeneous, although it should be capable of homogenization - as well as any transformation that the human subject thinks of infusing into it: modern space is a sphere under human control. While being part of a whole, abstract, “uniform, with no place of privilege” (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 26), any point of this Cartesian space denies its singular characteristics and is available to man, so that he may appropriate it. Here, there is no subjection of man to space: there is no measure to which this man is affected by space. It is this man who appropriates space, who tames it, occupies it, subjugates it.²⁵

Map 2
Racialized map with the launching of vertical residential buildings in Cidade Ademar - proportion of Black people per census sector

The concept of trompe-l’oeil (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 33) may help us understand the colonial-modern-universalizing claim to colonial space. Put into practice in the most varied manners, the spatial theory that informs the construction of colonies is the same one that presupposes space as a field of domination by this unaffected man. In his urgency for rational domination, which demands a reflection of himself and his culture, the white colonizer creates an image that points toward a horizon of development and freedom (SILVA, 2019b, p. 51), while denying the preexisting space, its surroundings and the relationships that have already been established there. Currently, this is what I see in the process underway in Cidade Ademar: in the first moment, a movement of separation between formal neighborhoods - modern, legal, to be occupied by a white proto-middle class - and the other neighborhoods; and, in a second moment, a denial of the surroundings mediated by bringing together the projects launched in Jardim Prudência and in the “noble neighborhoods”, foreshadowing better infrastructure, access and freedom, but ensuring modernity, distinction and whiteness in these spaces.

In the space-time of colonial Brazil, architecture and urbanism may be understood as areas of science that dramatize nature, denying its surroundings and manufacturing the image of modernity (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 30). It is a process that aims at the radical transformation of the colonial space according to the image of the metropolis, and not its mere representation (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 33). In his argument, Sodré presents weird but frequent cases, such as the old manor houses that painted false windows on their walls, pretending to be on the banks of the Tagus²⁶, scenes far from being specific to colonial Brazil.

Juliana Góes argues that “urban spaces are often pictured as the spatial representation of Western modernity in modern/colonial discourses” ([n.d.], p. 8).²⁷ I maintain that, in the ongoing movement in Cidade Ademar, this colonial imagery is being put into practice not only in the form of the buildings - which indicate the way in which construction companies are “seeking world references”, by manufacturing images that reflect an imagery of the great cities in Europe and the United States. In this sense, the “distinction” and “modernity” that mask the desire to become a metropolis and achieve development, that make these buildings the promise of a “new life”,²⁸ that trick the eyes of those who observe their advertising (Figures 4 and 5), demand the annihilation of the preexisting place-space through recognizing the superiority of the metropolis. Here, dreams of possession are authorized and encouraged: let the colonized cast their eyes of desire, lust and envy onto the city of the colonists! Let them seek assimilation, desiring to install themselves in the place of the colonizer, to be the colonizer! (FANON, 1979, p. 24). Craving for a new life, another level of living, outside the constraints to which he is confined in his space of backwardness, the colonized is impelled to assume his alleged inferiority, constructed by modern theory, which demands and legitimizes the violence that the movement of civilization and modernization presupposes.

Figure 4
Advertising material for the Vidi Eleva Cupecê enterprise: “Leisure like in an American resort”

The relentless narrative of bringing together the enterprises and other “upscale districts” - richer, whiter and, consequently, with better infrastructure - links the enterprises launched to neighborhoods in the southwest axis of São Paulo, a region occupied by the white middle and upper classes, with strong social cohesion, which, through various direct and indirect strategies, keeps the Black population at a distance (FRANÇA, 2017, p. 176). Closer to the not-so-distant front of the real estate expansion of the City, these enterprises are also approaching the future and the progress that the new economic center of São Paulo promises - promises of a new life of freedom that only this modern rationality may achieve.

Figure 5
Advertising material for the Artis Jardim Prudência enterprise: “An upscale neighborhood near the districts of Campo Belo and Moema”. How the real estate development advertising brings their buildings together with upscale neighborhoods

Figure 6
Cidade Ademar, bandit territory: Crime and violence, the tragic routine of these neighborhoods

Located in an “upscale neighborhood” (WISE Jardim Prudência), these enterprises distance themselves from the racialized narrative of violence, crime and tragedy that was widely broadcast during the second half of the twentieth century regarding the peripheral district where I learned to live, once the most violent in the city (Figure 6). The ongoing renewal project - whose epicenter is a planned subdivision, outstanding in the district for its income level and its whiteness - offers within its surroundings the present of the future, of development, of valorization, as long as its particular history gives way to the universal history of progress, which compartmentalizes and separates spaces of backwardness and spaces of development, authorized in the present. In this game of narratives, I see an internal civilizational mission, “The technical, generally advanced development of the social group [colonizer] that has thus appeared enables it to set up an organized domination”²⁹ (FANON, 2018, p. 78), which passes through the erasure and distortion of the history of these low-culture bandits. Thus, from colonial memory to the reality of globalization, they repeat the movement of spatial transformation that has its guide in the north, in the metropolis, in the modern and western power centers. Such connections with the highlighted high-end neighborhoods are the other face of the process that constrains and invisibilizes spaces that are signified in opposition to this modern image, to this locus privileged by and for capitalist accumulation.

In this complex plot, I find capital, reality-abstraction that confers meaning onto the relations of capitalist production, as a possible vanishing point³⁰ for modernity: capital organizes, and thus produces, reality according to its own logic, eminently modern, based on a dynamic of its own accumulation. Since the capitalist system has a constant need to produce goods, a category in which it seeks to confine space (abstract, measurable, distributable, appropriable), the negation of place-space transpires in accordance with the capitalist (re)production of modern space, which is perennial and fundamentally unfinished, thanks to the resistances that opposes it. The oppositional radicality in which place-space is situated in modern thought, its place as a spatial Other, threatens universality, modern truth, from its very existence. It is a space which, as Beatriz Nascimento (2018) observed when reflecting on the Afro-Brazilian experience of the quilombo, may participate

[…] in the production of “subjectivities territorialized in the I, in the physical body”, free from the ethics of production and accumulation that sections man, according to the order of the Capital system. We would be talking about another system under construction coming from a territory of African origin, no longer a place from the past, but a modern one. (NASCIMENTO, 2018, p. 427; author’s emphasis).

As a way of confronting the place-space, the meanings regarding the space that emerge from it, a colonial management of space is put into practice, a regime of territorial expropriation, which is directly related to raciality (SILVA, 2019a). The space confined to the category of commodity (the quest to confine it as a modern space), spatial production as a mechanism of capitalist accumulation, the negation of place-space and the operations of separability between the fragmented space and its surroundings (as a signifier of a relational and not completely distributable space), as tools in the production of a homogeneous, modern space, meet and complement one another. It is a meeting that reflects the deterritorializing ideology of capital (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 26), which, in the search for the suppression of space, demands the destruction of the affective, relational space.³¹

4. On affectable space: possible ways of reading it

To create this capitalist spatial utopia, however, there are obstacles: what is real does not seem to become depleted, or even annihilated, when faced with its divergent representation. By seeking to consider Cidade Ademar through ties of affectability free from the ethics of production and accumulation, although not alien to it, I attempt to present scenes that clarify what the colonial management of space intends to bury. The relationships of affection and care that take place between residents who look after one another’s children while they are out, taking care of them as they took care of me; the memory of the struggles and conquests of the various friends from the neighborhood societies within the district, in search of infrastructure improvements for their space, today materialized even in the asphalted ground that guides our routes; the (increasingly scarce) gardens that beautify and protect the entrances of the houses with pepper trees, mother-in-law’s tongue and guinea leaves, while demarcating connections with ancestry and cosmologies of African origin; and even the love, the joy and sometimes the fights that have long filled the bars that the district has housed and promoted to the sound of forró³² (Figure 7).

Figura 7
Forró in Jardim Miriam

I present these everyday scenes, images permeated by the bodies of these Others, to indicate that, as Sabotage (2000)³³ once said, “from Santo Amaro to Pirituba, the poor suffer but live”; and, living is related to its space, gives it significance. When investigating Cidade Ademar, guided by the affectability that enables me to think of it as a place-space, I step closer to the life and history that it shelters. Racialized cultural expressions and community political mobilizations, which are intertwined, guided and guide, even today, locally informed pathways for the continued construction of this space. These are scenes that conflict with the narrative of violence, which summarized the district as bandit territory, which demanded external intervention under the banners of civility, security and progress. These are also scenes that make me think about to whom this district, in the process of being renovated, is actually destined. When shifting the residents’ careful gaze toward the surveillance of guard lookout posts, cameras and military police, I ask myself: Who is being protected? As my grandmother and I were saying the other day, we know that their kind cannot be trusted - no love for cops. When establishing rock bars and pubs where once there were bars playing “rap, forró and samba, the true sounds of the ghetto”, as GOG (1994) stated, what culture is being valued? By centralizing the images of development in the district as the images of new developments, to the detriment of popular political mobilization that make up the occupations of idle properties in the neighborhood, what future becomes possible for the neighborhood and what future prospects are discarded? Why, lastly, is the forgetting of history, of narratives, about the place-space of Cidade Ademar accompanied by the writing of a new history much closer to the signs of whiteness?³⁴

The place-space inhabited by the Other, for me, is not destined for creative capitalist destruction because it is the life space of the Other, or not just because of this. The place-space inhabited by the Other demands destruction also because it has been signified by presences, practices, rituals, because it is not appropriable, but constructed in relation to those who inhabit it, affectable. It is a space where the possibility that the land exists “not as property, but as an indispensable element for the whole of human life, in its spiritual meaning” resides and resists, as Beatriz Nascimento (2018, p. 210) described, when talking about the relationship that the quilombo established. Space and subjects are intertwined, imbricated.

By proposing another way of recognizing and relating to space, not organized by rationality, the place-space may be the stage for imagining other possible futures, other teleologies other than the modern-capitalist. Based on the words of Sodré, when dealing with the Nagô cosmovision and the space of the terreiro, we could consider one of the possibilities of affectability of space as its sacralization. The eradication of these forms that perceive and relate to space in other ways, and are therefore categorized as traditional and primitive, is voiced as part of capitalist/urban development by authors such as George Simmel and Louis Wirth, whereby, as revealed by Juliana Góes. “According to them, city life would erase sacred orders and tribal traditions through the rationalization of social structures.” (GÓES, [n.d.], p. 9).

The resistance of the place-space to the constriction that attempts to reduce it to a commodity and the impossibility of experiencing the mourning of the Other³⁵ are conditions that, respectively, demand and legitimize the destruction of such spaces. These are attempts at destruction, or assimilation, and are varied in form: from the most brutal to those that almost completely hide their violence. We may think about the strategies of criminalization, policing and violence that aim to annihilate the “black sense of place” narrated by Katherine McKittrick (2011), and that make up the notion of “racial banishment” expressed by Ananya Roy (2019), echoing the headline reproduced above (Figure 6, JORNAL DA TARDE, 1989), as well as some of the experiences narrated throughout the text. We may also refer to research by Raquel Rolnik (1989; 1997) on black territoriality and urban legislation in São Paulo at the beginning of the twentieth century, which narrate the process of criminalization and expulsion of Black bodies from the city. These are distinct forms, but which I consider to be intertwined in a common movement - modern, capitalist and evaluative of whiteness -, which is (aimed at) reorganizing reality using a specific repertoire of practices, discourses and imageries. It is precisely with the aim of analyzing this more general movement that Juliana Góes ([n.d.], p. 13;) argues that:

[...] to fulfill the expectation of being the spatial representation of Western modernity, cities’ governments seek to purify and eliminate racialized territories and residents, especially black dwellers (the direct opposition to humanity in modern/colonial logics). In other words, urban spaces are created by the denial of black spatial existence: from the body - the basic spatial unit - to the territory [...].

****

I feel as though I am tying myself in knots, weaving a confused and imbricated fabric, which expands into unknown directions and heads off without knowing where to. I am not so much concerned with the direction, but with the firmness of this web. I hope that the plot under construction supports the reflections of the future. In the undetermined, and often under-valorized, field in which the recognition of affectability as a quality of bodies and spaces, which enter and overlap, is the basis for the production of knowledge, including scientific, splits between body and mind, between researcher and resident, are dissolved. The affected research is built on fears, curiosities, violence and hopes that not only pass through the body, but which gain meaning from it, thereby become possible. Without any trepidation whatsoever of abandoning the scientific assumption of objectivity (perhaps, in fact, I find desire here), I ask myself, as I explore, what are the possibilities of a conceptually rigorous, but also affectable, research for urban studies? By demobilizing the principle of separability that also distances mind and body, what may emerge?

Thus far we have a complex plot in which abstractions, which allow us to understand space and relate to it, are intertwined with planetary dynamics, such as capitalist accumulation, and collide with relational subjectivity and the inexhaustibility of the real, proposed by place-space.

By making use of the concept of territory³⁶, Sodré (1988, p. 23) identifies this particular place-space and resumes the possibility that the space is determined (albeit in an open, unfinished manner) by the relationships that are maintained with it. It is these interactions that mark it, that confer collectively shared identities, that enable it to be exclusively significance (although permeable to other external meanings). This relational space, constituted by differentiation and indeterminacy, “the paradox regarding the perception of the real” (id., ib., p. 13), is the fruit of the territorialization process, which is defined “as a force of exclusive appropriation of space (resulting from a symbolic order), capable of engendering relationship regimes, relations of proximity and distance” (id., ib., p. 13).

Sodré’s conception of territory makes it possible to imagine that modern space, the modern-capitalist relationship of understanding and appropriation of space, may like other territories signified through other ways of relating to space, presuppose subjects. Thus, contrary to what has been boasted about, modern space would not just be an abstraction intended to be universal, but the result of a specific process of territorialization that demands a subject. Universality, separability, sequentiality, determinacy and other structuring characteristics of modern space would then be shared by this subject in the manner of inhabiting and organizing this space, this reality. To understand the re-signification process of the territory that the urban renewal in Cidade Ademar proposes - of deterritorialization, we could consider -, I suggest the concept of whitening of the territory put forward by Renato Emerson dos Santos (2009). Beginning with the recognition of a whitening project that has structured the Brazilian State in the post-abolition period, the whitening of the territory, in addition to indicating colonial or anti-Black violence, as the concepts and authors listed above have done, explains the subject interested in this project and favored by it - the white subject who inhabits the field of the norm, of the universal:

The idea of whitening of the territory implies redefining who occupies it and holds the power to define the use of the territory, its image, the culture that it expresses and which is allowed to be expressed within it, and lastly, its occupation. The movement comprises three dimensions: (i) whitening the occupation of the territory; (ii) cultural whitening of the territory; and (iii) whitening the image of the territory. (SANTOS, 2009, p. 60).

It is worthwhile concluding the exposition of this plot by taking a look at the subjects who create and are created by the modern-capitalist theory-practice.

5. From modern space to the modern subject: who is universal?

A theory that claims to be universal; that seeks to represent and appropriate an unaffected space; that stands on rationality as the foundation of truth, generates and is gestated by a subject that, in turn, also intends to be universal, “created by a concept of culture that has mirrored the realities of the European bourgeois universe” (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 28).

In order to forge himself, to fable his existence, this subject does with himself and with others the same thing he did with the space he attained: he divides it up, separates it in order to then determine who he is and goes about ordering himself and the Others in the category of humanity that he himself forged, bearing in mind that “identity is always something that defines boundaries between who we are and who the others are; therefore, it only exists in relation to an otherness” (SCHUCMAN, 2014, p. 89). Unto himself, the subject confers the benefits of the world he imagines: rationality, objectivity, unquestionable ethics, unshakable morality, the power of freedom, of peace. Onto the Others, he bestows that which he wishes to purge himself of. It is the movement of “having oneself as a model and of projecting onto the other the ills that one is not able to assume, since they tarnish the model”, described by Maria Aparecida Bento (2002, p. 11) in her study on whiteness in Brazil. This is the movement that would make Fanon (2020, p. 147) state

In Europe the Negro has one function: that of symbolizing the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark side of the soul. In the collective unconscious of homo occidentalis, the Negro-or, if one prefers, the color black-symbolizes evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war, famine.³⁷

This subject, I claim, also appears as an image, as a trick of the eye, which does not want to represent the existing [Western white man], but rather to be it, to falsify it, based on the image it makes of itself. It is an image that sustains the very definition of humanity. A subject who, through reason (and force), violently imposes on everyone whom he categorized as Others the enclosure in abstractions that, like all those orchestrated by rationality, are unable to recognize them in their entirety. This subject creates a world through the projection of himself and, as indicated by Fanon (2020, p. 130), demands that the Other confines himself, shrivels. What I would like here is to demarcate the constitutive pact between modernity and whiteness. As stated by Schucman (2014, p. 92),

[...] in a world where the idea of civility and progress is routinely associated with European culture and whitening, it is difficult to perceive such discourses [which treat civility, rationality and progress as virtues] of nation and culture in racially neutral terms.

The link between whiteness, modernity and space interests me because, from this viewpoint, I am able to try and understand the process that begins “in the twentieth century, when cities started to become symbol of Western modernity, associated to ideas such as progress and civilization [...]” (GÓES, [n.d.], p. 12-13). A split process, where

[...] urban spaces only represent Western modernity when they are white areas. Urban black spatialities, on the other hand, are seen as spaces that need to be purified and eliminated - areas that preclude cities from making progress. (GÓES, [n.d.], p. 22).

This process, far from concluding, is recreated, is repeatedly transformed, as part of the incessant reproduction of colonial violence. Here, the process of whitening the territory - continually destined for racialized spaces, place-spaces or territories occupied and signified by racialized groups - may be understood as a movement that (re)produces the city as a space of whiteness, which continuously organizes a structure of maintaining privileges and power by and for the white population, while relegating violence onto its Others. Thus,

[...] the violence of the colonizers emerges as a sign of “salvation” and “benevolence”, a necessary prerequisite for the supposed entry of colonized populations - which, until then, according to the logic of progress/development, would be located “outside” the “framework of temporal thinkability” - in the roll call of history. [...] Hierarchization ensures that violence may continue beyond a rite of entry into a “civilizational order”, becoming a continuous and systematic process. (TOSOLD, 2018, p. 47-48).

Within this colonial logic, which depends on raciality in order to structure itself, Jardim Prudência, a planned subdivision, a space of whiteness and high income, has always become a space for latent development, progress. It is the bodies, the culture, the civility, these signs of whiteness, which simultaneously make it a space capable of valorization, of moving closer to the southwest axis, and a space capable of continued development. On the other hand, this same logic separates space and differentiates and orders its segments, creating spaces averse to civility, to whiteness, to progress - these are spaces of delay, violence, crime, blackness and banditry. In both cases, its destiny is foreshadowed and the limits of its future pre-established. To the first, development and the future are intended. To the second, civilization and assimilation, as alternatives to the certain annihilation of those who live in a way that is insistently bequeathed to the past of human development, to barbarism, to something beyond the limits of true rationality (FANON, 2020, p. 108).

The practices, not only the discursive, that divide, reclassify and organize space, that remake it in the image of an ideal of modern urban space, are those that produce and expand the reach of modern space as a practice-category, which restricts the very imagination of possibilities of inhabiting (urban) space. As an attempt to interrupt the colonial violence that is directed at us, to go beyond it and the game of difference that institutes it (MOMBAÇA, 2020), I present the unknown. I reinforce the demand for understanding modern logic as a process of building tools that deny it and that, from that point, enable us to excavate all the possibilities of being and inhabiting, which modern space has sought to obliterate. I find in the relational form of place-space, which constitutes the basis for thinking about territory - both affectable spaces, which inscribe escape routes in the face of the determinability that forges modern space -, a crack for us to think and recognize other ways of inhabiting and understanding space, without, however, wishing to limit them to the possibilities inscribed in this categorization. And so as “fifty years later, there is no reason at all to imagine Fanon’s ‘new man’ existing in any other mode than Others-modes” (SILVA, 2019a, p. 80), I believe that there is no way of experiencing space in an anti-colonial way except in Other-modes, relational and affectable. By not writing solutions, but possibilities, I take refuge in the shelter and potential of the unknown. As Silva writes (2019b, p. 46),

And, if the task is unthinking this world with a view to its end-that is, decolonization, or the return of the total value expropriated from conquered lands and enslaved bodies-the practice would not aim at providing answers but, instead, would involve raising questions that both expose and undermine the Kantian forms of the subject.³⁸

****

I began this essay with discomfort, and I believe I have managed to initiate the appropriation process that has enabled me to name them and face them. As a way of closing the essay, I permit myself to name a fear that motivates me to research what I research. In this process of urban renewal that takes place in Cidade Ademar I see a process of transformation where I believe that soon, there will be no room for the neighborhood relations I once saw and built, the street markets or their noises, the Black children on the street. In this transformation, I find myself in a continuing story that dates back to ancient times. I see my grandparents dispossessed in different ways and expelled from their land in the hinterlands. I see my grandmother’s grandmother, an indigenous person who is “caught in the loop” and expropriated from her way of life, from her people, from the forest that no longer materially exists. I see ancestors who, without being able to state that they existed, were kidnapped in some part of the continent that is conventionally called Africa. What I see in this ongoing process is its potential for deterritorialization, the whitening of the territory that little by little expels me from a territory that was never mine, but where I am. Faced with this process, there is much we can do, and we do, either by proposing critical narratives regarding the region through newsletters such as the Expresso Periférico [Peripheral Express]; or working to maintain our life through initiatives of the “Coletivo de Orgânicos de Cidade Ademar” [The Organic Collectives of Cidade Ademar]; either by proposing a critical form of education, such as the “Citizenship School of Cidade Ademar e Pedreira”; i.e., writing articles that help to demarcate the existence of other understandings concerning space, to name but a few examples.³⁹ These are initiatives that may help to un-think this world, as they help to keep alive the memory of a territoriality (a fundamental movement for the decolonization process, as mentioned by Haesbaert (2020), demarcated by affections that allow us to recognize that our Black bodies, as Dona Linda told me the other day when we were returning from my grandmother’s house, are welcome in this world because they are loved, despite everything.

Referências

• BENTO, M. A. da S. Branqueamento e branquitude no Brasil. Psicologia social do racismo: estudos sobre branquitude e branqueamento no Brasil. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2002. p. 5-58.
• Intérprete: GOG. BRASÍLIA periferia. Dia a dia da periferia Brasília: Só Balanço. 1994. Faixa 1 (7’22 min). Disponível em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTQm8BD4JAM Acesso em: 9 nov. 2021.
  » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTQm8BD4JAM
• CARNEIRO, A. S. A construção do outro como não ser como fundamento do ser 2005. Tese (Doutorado) - Programa de Pós-graduação em Educação, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2005.
• CIDADE Ademar, território de bandidos. Jornal da Tarde São Paulo: Arquivo Histórico Municipal de São Paulo, 1989. Consulta: jan. 2019.
• CIDADE Adhemar: casas e terrenos em prestações. O Estado de S. Paulo São Paulo, 14 ago. 1949, p. 6.
• CIDADE Adhemar, em Santo Amaro, é o bairro mais violento de São Paulo. Folha de S.Paulo, São Paulo, 19 nov. 1990. Caderno Cidade, p. 1.
• FANON, F. Os condenados da terra Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1979. Ebook.
• FANON, F. Racismo e cultura. Revista Convergência Crítica, v. 13, Dossiê: Questão ambiental na atualidade, 2018.
• FANON, F. Pele negra, máscaras brancas São Paulo: Ubu Editora, 2020.
• FRANÇA, D. S. do N. Segregação racial em São Paulo: residências, redes pessoais e trajetórias urbanas. 2017. Tese (Doutorado) - Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2017.
• GÓES, J. Western modernity, urban spaces, and race: challenges to decolonial praxis in the African diaspora in the Americas. [2022]. No prelo.
• HAESBAERT, R. Do corpo-território ao território-corpo (da terra): contribuições decoloniais. GEOgraphia, v. 22, n. 48, 2020.
• IBGE. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. Censo demográfico Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2010.
• JARDIM Miriam, recanto nordestino. O Estado de S.Paulo São Paulo, 11 abr. 1976, p. 102.
• McKITTRICK, K. On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social & Cultural Geography, v. 12, n. 8, p. 947-963, 2011.
• MOMBAÇA, J. A plantação cognitiva. MASP Afterall-Arte e Descolonização São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2020.
• NASCIMENTO, M. B. Beatriz Nascimento, quilombola e intelectual: possibilidade nos dias da destruição. [S.l.]: Filhos da África, 2018.
• ROLNIK, R. Territórios negros nas cidades brasileiras: etnicidade e cidade em São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro. Revista de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, v. 17, p. 1-17, 1989.
• ROLNIK, R. São Paulo, início da industrialização: o espaço e a política. In: KOWARICK, L. (org.). As lutas sociais e a cidade 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1994.
• ROLNIK, R. A cidade e a lei: legislação, política urbana e territórios na cidade de São Paulo. São Paulo: Studio Nobel, 1997.
• ROY, A. Racial banishment. In: ANTIPODE EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE (eds.) et al. Keywords in radical geography: Antipode at 50. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2019, p. 227-230.
• SANTOS, R. E. dos. Rediscutindo o ensino de geografia: temas da Lei 10.639. Rio de Janeiro: Ceap, 2009.
• SCHUCMAN, L. V. Sim, nós somos racistas: estudo psicossocial da branquitude paulistana. Psicologia & Sociedade, v. 26, n. 1, p. 83-94, 2014.
• SILVA, A. C. Vila Missionária: constituição e desenvolvimento da periferia na cidade de São Paulo (1960-1990). São Paulo: Arquivo Histórico Municipal, 2019.
• SILVA, D. F. da. Ninguém: direito, racialidade e violência. Meritum, Revista de Direito da Universidade FUMEC, v. 9, n. 1, 2014.
• SILVA, D. F. da . Sobre diferença sem separabilidade. In: Bienal de Artes de São Paulo. Catálogo da 32a Bienal de Artes de São Paulo - Incerteza Viva, p. 57-65, 2016.
• SILVA, D. F. da A dívida impagável São Paulo: Casa do Povo, 2019a.
• SILVA, D. F. da . Em estado bruto. ARS (São Paulo), v. 17, n. 36, p. 45-56, 2019b.
• SMDUL. Secretaria Municipal de Urbanismo e Licenciamento. Geosampa, 2021. Disponível em: http://geosampa.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/PaginasPublicas/_SBC.aspx Acessos em: 10 ago. 2021.
  » http://geosampa.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/PaginasPublicas/_SBC.aspx
• SODRÉ, M. O terreiro e a cidade Petrópolis: Vozes , 1988.
• TOSOLD, L. Autodeterminação em três movimentos: a politização de diferenças sob a perspectiva da (des) naturalização da violência. 2018. Tese (Doutorado) - Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2018.
• Intérprete: Sabotage. UM BOM lugar. Rap é compromisso São Paulo: Cosa Nostra. 2000, faixa 3 (5’05 min.). Disponível em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA7LcSX8tYE Acesso em: 9 nov. 2021.
  » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA7LcSX8tYE

• 1
  I extend my thanks to Viviane Nogueira, Ana Cristina Araújo, Emmily Leandro, Karoline Santos da Silva, Lea Tosold, Natália Alves and Renato Emerson for the attentive readings and conversations, and for encouraging the writing of this text. I also thank all the people who make up the NEGRAM/IPPUR research and study centers and Coletiva GIRA – Collective for anti-racist and anti-colonial intervention-study, spaces for debate, reception and inspiration that have been fundamental to the development of this text.
• 2
  This and all other non-English citations hereafter have been translated by the author.
• 3
  In some moments of the text I write the word “City” with a capital letter to indicate the “distant (in relation to the peripheral place where I lived) centers of commerce and services”. I address these centers as a City starting from affective memories, as I describe them, because I understand that the current notion, popularly used, synthesizes central elements in an unequal city like São Paulo, insofar as it gains meaning as a result of recognizing the geographic distance, the difficulties of access, the divisions between the legal city and the illegal/irregular city, the oppositions and complementarities between center and periphery. Finally, I bring in the notion for its synthesizing potential and accessibility.
• 4
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of FANON, F. Black Skin, White Mask. New York: Grove Press 2008, p. 94. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann.
• 5
  At the end of these first three paragraphs, I have reproduced excerpts extracted from the chapter “The lived experience of the black man”, written by Frantz Fanon (2008). I introduce them here to indicate a common experience, where different times and spaces (those lived by me and those lived and narrated by Fanon) intertwine, and which, therefore, also integrate the narrative spaces constructed in this text by tensioning the form of scientific production through its modern organization/grammar. Further on, still in the introduction, I return to an explanation of such narrative spaces.
• 6
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of FANON, F. (2008, p. 92).
• 7
  “In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.” (FANON, F. The Wretched of the Earth. New York, Grove Press, 1963 p. 38).
• 8
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of FANON, F. (2008, p. 94).
• 9
  From the original território, here territory is less linked to the spatial notion that refers to the Nation-State and the demarcation of borders, a generalist sense of the term, but rather to the idea of place, as a community-collective significance of space [lugar in Portuguese] , therefore concerning the affirmation of ties, and the material basis of an existential production that references and is referenced by the subjects who produce it symbolically and materially. Thus, without imposing contradictions to the distinction demarcated here between place-space and territory, the category finds strong relationships with the notion of “lugar/place” as used by foreign authors. Possibilities of correlation between the concepts may be considered through “Black Sense of Place” by Katherine Mckittrick, quoted in the text, and in the paradigmatic “A global sense of place” by Doreen Massey.
• 10
  Here, I favor dialogue with authors from the diaspora, especially those who have produced their knowledge from Brazil, recognizing their power and the importance of valorizing their production in a context in which our work tends to be little appreciated. With no intention of exhausting the field, in footnotes throughout the text, I present some concepts and/or authors(s) that dialogue with the theme but that could not be explored further in this article, in order to present possible bridges and to help bring eventual readers closer to the academic production that surrounds the issues discussed herein.
• 11
  Or onto-epistemological, as suggested by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007). SILVA, D. F. da. Toward a global idea of race. [S.l.]: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, v. 27.
• 12
  Here, I am addressing Europe, the Americas and Africa, bearing in mind that the inclusion of the last two continents in this category, which to some extent harbors a common political, cultural and epistemic repertoire, stems from the realization of colonial violence.
• 13
  Terreiro is the name given to a yard, an open space, used for several different purposes, from playing Samba to the most usually referred to, the practice of worship for Candomblé or Umbanda - Afro-Brazilian religious cults.
• 14
  ‘The Thing’ here refers to the raw material, a “referent of undeterminacy” which the modern eye is capable of explaining in its plenitude. To explore this concept further, see Silva (2019b).
• 15
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of SILVA, D. F. da In the Raw. E-Flux Journal. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215795/in-the-raw/. Viewed on: June 10, 2022.
• 16
  Another very interesting critical analysis of the notion of cultural difference may be observed in Fanon (2018).
• 17
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of SILVA, D. F. da In the Raw. E-Flux Journal. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215795/in-the-raw/. Viewed on: June 10, 2022.
• 18
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of FANON, F. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press 2004, p. 3. Translated from the French by Richard Philcox.
• 19
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of SILVA, D. F. da. On Difference Without Separability. Available at: https://issuu.com/amilcarpacker/docs/denise_ferreira_da_silva. Viewed on: June 8, 2022.
• 20
  Aware of the broad debate surrounding the concepts of bleaching, whitening and whiteness (here resumed as a set of characteristics that refer to bodies and cultural frameworks, ideally, white), mobilized in different directions in recent decades, I suggest the discussion proposed by Lourenço Cardoso (2010), in order to complement and contextualize the use of the works and concepts discussed herein. CARDOSO, L. Retrato do branco racista e antirracista. Reflexão e Ação, v. 18, n. 1, p. 46-76, 2010.
• 21
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of SILVA, D. F. da, On Difference Without Separability. Available at: https://issuu.com/amilcarpacker/docs/denise_ferreira_da_silva. Viewed on: June 8, 2022.
• 22
  I introduce the slightly corrupted quotation from Denise, insofar as her reflection deals with existing ones - human and more-than-human bodies -, in order to, in dialogue, consider the possibilities of understanding and interacting with space situated beyond the explanations that modern grammar allows.
• 23
  Who are usually understood as racialized people/bodies.
• 24
  To consider the underrepresentation and overrepresentation of whites and/or blacks in relation to the district and the census sectors that comprise it, I take the racial composition of the municipality as a reference, measured by the 2010 Census data, which demonstrate a population with 63.9% of white people and 34.6% of brown and black people (29.1% and 5.5%, respectively) in São Paulo (SP). The black category symbolizes the sum of those who are brown and black. The launching of vertical residential buildings was selected based on the issuing of the respective permits, according to their land use classification and their adherence to the “R2v” category. Land use classifications available at: https://gestaourbana.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/classificacao-de-usos/. Accessed on: May 25, 2022.
• 25
  On modern theory and capitalist society as structures that organize an “image of the world as that which needs to be conquered (occupied, dominated, seized)” by man (SILVA, 2019a, p. 55), I recommend reading In the raw, by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2019b).
• 26
  A river that flows across the Spanish and Portuguese territories in Europe.
• 27
  A more synthetic version of the article which I am in dialogue with here, by the Political Scientist and Sociologist Juliana Morais de Góes, can be found in Góes, J. Western modernity, cities, and race: Challenges to decolonial praxis in the African diaspora in the Americas. Sociology Compass, e13033, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13033
• 28
  The idea that real estate developments in the region symbolize access to a “new life” is conveyed in different ways in almost all of the marketing observed. Due to its literalness, I refer here to that from the project “Open Marajoara”, available at: https://www.even.com.br/sp/sao-paulo/jardim-marajoara/residencial/open-marajoara. Viewed on: August 8, 2021.
• 29
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of FANON, F. Toward the African Revolution- Political Essays. New York: Grove Press 1964, p. 31. Translated by Haakon Chevalier.
• 30
  Vanishing point, “may be understood as: a point situated outside the spatial-temporal frame of the experience, outside the world, capable of granting the observer an absolute power of scope. In this space ordered by a vanishing line through depth, the representations (the images) ‘vanish’ before the observer’s gaze. In fact, the gaze ‘creates’ the space, the center or main point of which, as it coincides with the eye, even receives - from the wayfarer - the name of ‘subject’” (SODRÉ, 1988, p. 24; author’s emphasis).
• 31
  Considering the impossibility of delving into the theme in this article, I indicate two possible ways with which to analyze the plots between capitalist expropriation, appropriation of space and raciality. Along a Marxist route, there is the concept of “accumulation by dispossession”, coined by David Harvey in The New Imperialism (2003), which observes dispossession constantly spatiotemporally reordered and directed towards the Other. Denise Ferreira da Silva, on the other hand, proposes the concept of “negative accumulation” to indicate an accumulated continuum that unites “the effect of colonial expropriation and, later, legal, symbolic and everyday violence” (2019a, p. 180) of expropriations directed at the subaltern racial subject. HARVEY, D. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 2003.
• 32
  The term forró refers to a musical genre, a rhythm, a dance and the event itself where forró music is played and danced. Forró is an important part of the culture of the Northeastern Region of Brazil and, for a long time, was highly maintained by Afro-Brazilians.
• 33
  Here I bring in Sabotage and then, later, GOG, as two authors who help me to think about Cidade Ademar based on affectability, but also as exponents of the hip hop movement, the street culture that makes up my background and which has as one of its central themes the experiences of the black population in cities, a central element for (re)thinking the urban in the twenty-first century. Sabotage was one of the most important voices of South Side São Paulo in his last years, before his assassination. May he rest in power.
• 34
  Wikipedia, when referring to Jardim Prudência, edited repeatedly since 2014 (when the first major development began in the neighborhood, EQ Jardim Prudência), offers elements to consider regarding which characteristics came to be valued there. I highlight here the statement (fictitious and/or debatable) that the neighborhood is made up of people of German, Portuguese, American and Italian descent. Available at: https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jardim_Prud%C3%AAncia&oldid=58210539. Viewed on: August 2, 2021.
• 35
  For a view on the ethical-legal scenario that legitimizes the death of the Other, racially demarcated, I recommend reading Nobodies: Law, Raciality and Violence, by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2014).
• 36
  The concept of territory is widely used in different meanings, in addition to the one restored here by Sodré. A more general discussion on the concept, compatible with the notion discussed herein, may be found in Haesbaert’s Território e multiterritorialidade: um debate [Territory and multi-territoriality: a debate] (2010). Another text by the same author, the aforementioned “Do corpo-território ao território-corpo (da terra) [From the body-territory to the territory-body (of the earth)] (HAESBAERT, 2020), may also be of great value to the dialogue insofar as the relational approach that presupposes the notion of place-space could also be worked on in its approximations and tensions in relation to the bibliography that discusses coloniality, colonialism and decoloniality, to which the author resorts in a mediated way through the territorial understandings of the native peoples of Latin America. HAESBAERT, R. (2010). Território e multiterritorialidade: um debate. GEOgraphia, 9(17), 2010. https://doi.org/10.22409/GEOgraphia2007.v9i17.a13531.
• 37
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of FANON, F. (2008, p.p. 190-191).
• 38
  N.B. For direct citations, the English version was used of SILVA, D. F. da. In the Raw. E-Flux Journal. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215795/in-the-raw/. Viewed on: June 10, 2022.
• 39
  Initiatives available at: http://expressoperiferico.org/, https://organicoscidadeademar.org/ and https://www.facebook.com/escoladecidadaniacidadeademarepedreira/. Viewed on: August 10, 2021.

Data availability

Data citations

SMDUL. Secretaria Municipal de Urbanismo e Licenciamento. Geosampa, 2021. Disponível em: http://geosampa.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/PaginasPublicas/_SBC.aspx Acessos em: 10 ago. 2021.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  05 Dec 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  31 Mar 2021
• Accepted
  14 Feb 2022