Abstract
The article explores the regimes of representation of young Black men in the film City of God . The main argument is that the movie deploys pathological scripts of Black men as criminal and deviant to disseminate meanings over black masculinity in Brazil. The author suggests that the controlling image of Black men bodies as a source of danger and impurity sustains Brazilian racial hegemony; ultimately, the narratives of violence makes explicit the ways the Brazilian nation is imagined through racial underpinning. The dual bind through which the nation is ambiguously imagined is made explicit also in the consumption of Blackness as exotic at the same time that it represents a threat to the national harmony. The nation is then written and re-imagined as a racial paradise even/and mostly by inscribing death to the black body.
Highlights
CITY OF GOD’S controlling images of Black men need to be contextualized within the system of beliefs and practices in which Black manhood is constructed as synonymous of violence, virility, and savagery
That the urban geography of Brazilian metropolitan cities is forged in such racialized narratives of violence is evidenced in the statistics of deadly violence
How is the narrative of violence constructed and structured in City of God? Drawing on Bordieu’s earlier formulations on symbolic violence, this paper suggests that the mass media is a privileged place where hegemonic pathologized discourse on Black masculinity is symbolically constructed
Summary
CITY OF GOD’S controlling images of Black men need to be contextualized within the system of beliefs and practices in which Black manhood is constructed as synonymous of violence, virility, and savagery. In an attempt to develop such ideas, my provisional conclusions are that i) City of God exemplifies common-sense understanding on the public image of Black men as criminals; ii) the pathologization of communities of color (the favelas) as place of criminality, danger, and fear are discursive ideological apparatus by which racial domination effectively takes place in urban Brazil.
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