Abstract: Haiti has experienced a series of United Nations interventions, most notably the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which operated from 2004 to 2017. This article examines the diverse perspectives surrounding MINUSTAH, highlighting the support it received from UN agencies and contrasting it with the resistance from social movements opposing what they perceive as foreign domination. I intend to argue here that the Haitian Revolution is a powerful discursive framework that shapes Haitian resistance against international interventions and provides a historical and future-oriented narrative that empowers Haitians to challenge foreign control. The UN’s bureaucratic mechanisms, which aim to stabilize Haiti through peace operations, stand in sharp contrast to the activists’ perspectives on overthrowing an oppressive system linked to colonialism and neoliberalism. While the UN seeks stabilization, Haitian social movements draw on the legacy of the Revolution to advocate radical change, sovereignty, and development beyond institutional channels. This analysis reveals a broader critique of Western notions of freedom, democracy, and development, advocating a more inclusive and emancipatory future for Haiti.
Abstract: This research investigates how sounds are present in the production of memories and spaces in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Based on an acoustemological perspective (Feld 1996, 2018, 2020), I seek to understand the listening to the other and the history of how and what is heard. Starting from the Santa Marta favela, in Rio de Janeiro’s South Zone, I investigate how sounds permeate the formation of identities (Oosterbaan 2009). This research follows public events in different parts of the favela, producing an understanding of their sounds and forms of listening, vocalization, and resonance. In this article, I highlight baile de lenta, a recurring event organized on the laje of an interlocutor. I then accompany my interlocutors in spaces and events that form their memories and affective practices. The work focuses on the production of space and time through ways of creating leisure, listening, and dancing.
Abstract: Considering urban peripheries vivid and complex subjects, I articulate a key concept - sonic narratives - that may provide relevant insights into the dynamics of peripheral life. I attempt to present the sonic dimension at the research locus, Cohab Feitoria, a neighborhood in the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, often characterized as working-class; it is based on the sonic dimension of the neighborhood that I explore the musical narrative of a rap crew, Mesclã. As I aim to demonstrate, Mesclã’s performances emerge as sonic narratives from Cohab, with the group facing challenges and responding through socio-musical strategies shaped by their condition as a crew from southern Brazil. Sonic narratives from Cohab dynamize life in the urban periphery, creating meaning where there are “shots from here and there,” both literally and symbolically; sounds from “here and there” also become sonic entities that reverberate the very existence of cohabeiros and the sense of belonging immersed in a sonic ethos.
Abstract: In this article, I turn to the verbal, visual and sonoric discourses of two peripheral fashion designers in their conversations with a black visual artist, proposing that the fashion they create encapsulates memory, kinship, locality and history - an interweaving that translates through the style of their productions, bringing together ethics and aesthetics. I also demonstrate that they aim at the epicentre of taste production while resisting to maintain their non-hegemonic character. With the coincidence between ethics and aesthetics and the residual character with which these creators occupy the formal fashion industry, I consider that each city produces its own ways of narrating what it means to be peripheral and its own mode of conceptualising the periphery. I suggest, therefore, that Rio de Janeiro is governed by a utopia of connections and that Rio funk provides the material for peripheral subjectivation.
Abstract: The present article discusses some of the meanings attributed to the periphery as portrayed in a film circuit in the Baixada Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro. Based on ethnography carried out between 2018 and 2024, the work presented below investigates audiovisual collectives organized by the Baixada Filma movement, whose activities and productions are often described as “periphery cinema”. Taking as our starting point the problematization of this concept, we reflect upon the ambivalences and disputes surrounding the term periphery in order to highlight its polysemic uses as a category of representation and its impact on the construction of subjectivities and relationships with the city.
