Finish the The writing prompt(about 400 words):write one page (2-4 paragraphs) comparing Zora Neale Hurston's and Christen Smith’s ethnographies. Describe at least two moments you found interesting or memorable. Also answer the following question: if you were an ethnographer, whose approach (Hurston’s or Smith’s) do you think would be most helpful as a guide to your own fieldwork, and why?
Afro-Paradise Christen A. Smith Published by University of Illinois Press Smith, Christen A. Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil. University of Illinois Press, 2016. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/44404. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book [ Access provided at 25 Aug 2020 17:45 GMT from University of California, Berkeley ] https://muse.jhu.edu/book/44404 https://muse.jhu.edu https://muse.jhu.edu/book/44404 Interlude I Culture Shock I knew that I had arrived when the public bus I was riding slowed to a crawl because of the people parading in the streets. Some were dressed as clowns and some as giant-sized puppets. Many people just walked along with the parade, following the beat of a small band of teenage boys drumming. When I got off the bus to catch up with the members of Culture Shock, I soon found one of them laughing and joking around, holding the daughter of another actor. They were wearing their faded black-and-white insignia T-shirts with their motto emblazoned on the back: “Nós somos a voz da favela que faz parte dela” (We are the voice of the favela that comes from the favela). It was dusk, not quite dark yet, and everyone was enjoying the night summer air and the lighthearted atmosphere of the parade. People were laughing and joking as they walked through the streets. I walked along with the parade through Fazenda Grande do Retiro past store- fronts, houses, and tiny squares. This part of the city exemplifies the demography and topography of Salvador’s periphery—the low-income, mostly black literal and figurative margins of the metropolis (Espinheira 2004). At the time of the performance, the neighborhood had one of the higher indices of violence in Salvador (Paim et al. 1999). As we walked, we joked around, sang, and chanted slogans. By the time we circled the central hub of the neighborhood, we arrived back at the bus stop. The streetlights were on now and the paradegoers gathered around the concrete Smith_Afro text.indd 31 12/8/15 11:18 AM 32 interlude i: culture shock plaza to wait for the show to start. It was the kick-off event for the Tenth Meeting of the Cynics of Scenic Arts (X Encontro de Cínicos de Artes Cênicas), a theater festival that brought together amateur dramatists from across the state. The concrete plaza that would serve as the initial stage was the depot at the end of the bus line. It sits tucked away in the middle of the commercial district of the neighborhood, just next to the community school where the next two days of the theater festival would be held. The sandy-colored concrete of the plaza’s awnings and benches are a sharp, sterile contrast to the loud, buzzing energy of the children, teenagers, adults, and elderly people who are chatting and playing while waiting for the opening performances to begin outside. About half of the crowd consists of children still hyper and smiling from the parade. The gatherers are a mix of brown faces. The monotonic concrete is the perfect stage—a contrast that emphasizes the theater’s role as a symbolic interruption of everyday routine. As people come to watch under the streetlamps, they form a circle in the middle of the plaza, creating an em- bodied stage for which the audience members are the human markers. A group of about a dozen young boys, all around ten or twelve years old, climb on top of one of the concrete awnings covering a bench to get a better view—a makeshift balcony. When the acting begins, more people gather from the com- munity, drawn by curiosity, word of mouth, or a bit of both. There seem to be as many people from the neighborhood observing as there are dramatists and actors. Everyone appears comfortable and it is hard to tell who is a theater participant and who is not. Some who stop to look veer from their paths to the grocery store or the lottery to see what is going on. Many of them stick around, and others stay for a bit and then pick up and move on. Through- out the evening, people come and go as they please. Although the presentations are a clear disruption of the normal space of the bus stop, it is not an uneasy one.1 As the actors perform, the crowd laughs and jokes loudly, creating a constant hum of voices over which the actors project their lines. Several theater groups present that opening night of the Cíni- cos festival. The first play is by a group from the Bahian coun- tryside. This is a more traditional moralistic play about poverty and caring for others. The second play is Stop to Think by Culture Shock. Smith_Afro text.indd 32 12/8/15 11:18 AM interlude i: culture shock 33 In 2003, seven years before the death of Joel da Conceição Castro, black street-theater troupe Culture Shock performed its signature play Pare Para Pensar (Stop to Think) across the city of Salvador. When I met them, there were five principal actors—four men and one woman—and three to five actors that participated off and on. Everyone was under thirty-five. The play explores the overlapping injustices of classism and gendered racism that disproportionately affect black working-class residents in Salva- dor’s peripheries, focusing principally on racial violence. It is a sharp and edgy form of theater that interrogates local, national, and global power structures and challenges those who live in Bahia to “stop to think” about how being “black” in Brazil means something more than just carrying certain phenotypical traits or the unifying force of historical experience. Stop to Think discusses everything from “sell-out” soccer players to the absence of black faces on national children’s television programs. However, the primary focus of the collection of short vignettes is the state terror that defines the lived experience of working-class soteropolitanos and its social and political significance. On May 1, 1994, Giovane Sobrevivente and Jorge Arte founded Culture Shock in the peripheral neighborhood of San Martins on the lip of the Subúrbio Ferroviário region of Salvador. Motivated by the constant “shock and siege” of police raids, racial profiling, poverty, and inequality in the region, the two wanted to create a community-based organization that would provide a positive form of recreation for neighborhood youth, while allowing them to speak out against the injustices they experience every day. They attributed these injustices to racism, and their goal was to use the theater to bring attention to what they perceived to be this structural link. Inspired by the politics of long-standing black Brazilian political organizations such as the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) and the Afro-carnival group Ilê Aiyê, the founders positioned themselves as an antiracist, problack organization (Covin 2006; Dunn 1992). The result was a sharp and edgy form of theater that interrogates everything from Bra- zil’s infamous racial cordiality to the transnational and translocal interconnections between the United States’ wars on Iraq and Afghanistan to police invasions of the peripheral neighborhoods of Bahia. However, their performances are much more than just a reflection on the dehumanizing effects of racism. Culture Shock Smith_Afro text.indd 33 12/8/15 11:18 AM 34 interlude i: culture shock also reveals how antiblackness and state violence are part of the very fabric of black life in Bahia, and define the space of the city itself. The theater in this case decodes the layers of secrecy and silence that define Bahia as an Afro-paradise. Stop to Think’s interventions are as much content as they are structure. The fifteen-minute play is a series of allegorical vi- gnettes that metaphorically and literally denounce the racism, white supremacy, and antiblackness that frame the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Brazil. It is not only a play, but also an ethnographic narrative itself, one that in some ways brings ethnography into conversation with magic realism by refusing to privilege tropes of truth telling over parody, satire, poetry, and dance as media for remembering, telling, and producing com- munity. For Culture Shock, community is the periphery. The periph- ery region that they called home during my time working with them was the Subúrbio Ferroviário (Railway Suburbs), and the peripheral region north of the city, particularly the neighborhood of Sussuarana. These zones played a key role in their identity formation. The Railway Suburbs are situated on the western half of the city and expanding along the coast of the Baia de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints). It extends from the neighborhood of Calçada just north of Cidade Baixa (the lower city) to the neighborhood of Paripe situated at the far north of the city and it is home to an estimated 500,000 people (Espinheira 2004). The name literally refers to the train that runs from Calçada to Paripe. After some of Culture Shock’s performances in the region, we would catch the train back toward downtown instead of taking the bus. Along the trip, we would watch the house lights come on in the neighborhoods in the hills that line the track. The lights would beautifully illuminate the sky at dusk like stars, and the cool breeze from the ocean would set in. Historically, the suburbs were fishing communities. Yet de- mographic changes over the past thirty years have increased the population considerably, attracting “squatters” and low-income residents looking to settle somewhere more affordable in the met- ropolitan region of Salvador. The influx of low-income residents, the majority of whom are of African descent, has caused main- stream society to stigmatize the region. Sociologists describe the Subúrbio Ferroviário as one of the most violent areas of the city Smith_Afro text.indd 34 12/8/15 11:18 AM interlude i: culture shock 35 (Espinheira 2004). Government officials describe the suburbs as a set of “disorderly settlements . . . without any planning, with precarious and inhumane living conditions” that were set up by an influx of “impoverished residents” who rushed to the region to squat (Viana 2004, 9; my translation). The news media’s de- scription of the region is similar (Fonsêca 2003). However, this perspective is acutely dismissive of the state’s role in failing to provide