Vital properties and Afro-Brazilian lives: on promiscuities of gentrification and personhood in Salvador, Bahia’s Pelourinho Historical Center

Abstract

ABSTRACTTo argue that gentrification is one facet of capitalist property regimes is rather obvious. But to demonstrate how the relations usually bundled as gentrification come to play a key role in the conjuring of human qualities and even essences–and thus persons, families, their abodes, and their politics–is to begin to gesture at the real effects of imbrications of property and personhood in heritage centers today. Drawing on the making of Salvador, Brazil’s Pelourinho Historical Center, I argue that, more than an exchange of existing properties, gentrification involves webs of relation whose alterations impact people’s very notions of who and how they are. Gentrification is a part of a broad set of mutually-implicating knowledge practices and semiotic ideologies that habituate how humans perceive the world, and themselves. Property is thus a key moralizing idiom through which people compose themselves and their worlds. Seen in this light, gentrification is much more than an exclusionary market relationship to be bewailed. Rather, it is a pathway into understanding more clearly how human perspectives on selves and the world emerge in dialogue, or at least as touched by, property discourse and techniques for fostering often highly unequal property relations.