Contemporary Afrographies in São Paulo
From Samba to Slam
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59490/footprint.20.1.8428Abstract
Spanning from mid-twentieth-century samba to contemporary slam poetry, this vissual essay traces a genealogy of Afro-Brazilian urban cultural expressions in São Paulo’s Zona Leste, examining how bodies, voices, and places operate as spatialised diasporic archives. Grounded in Leda Maria Martins’s concepts of afrographies of memory, oraliture, and encruzilhada (crossroads), the essay investigates how performance and orality materialise Afro-diasporic knowledge within the context of peripheral urbanism. Through the case studies of the Samba School Nenê de Vila Matilde and the spoken-word movement Slam da Guilhermina, the article demonstrates how minor literatures and embodied practices inscribe memory onto urban space, producing alternative cultural geographies that resist racialised marginalisation. By foregrounding the continuity and transformation of Afro-Brazilian expressive forms across generations, the essay argues that samba and slam constitute interconnected modes of cultural transmission that reterritorialise the city, revealing Afro-Brazilian urban culture as an ongoing process of diasporic negotiation, resistance, and re-signification.
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