Janaina Tavares is an invited researcher at MIRCo during the year 2025-2026. She’s a doctorate researcher in Discourse and Literacy (Letramento) in the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).
On November 25th, I had the great honor and opportunity to meet the Brazilian anthropologist Adriana Facina, known for her research of peripheric neighborhoods, samba, funk and cultural workers. Facina was part of my academic career, since she was my teacher during my master’s and a member of my group also during my master’s. Her works have inspired me to understand cultural actions, like the one discussed here, as survival practices, but also as hopeful ones.
In this occasion, I discussed with her postgraduate students at the Institut dês Hautes Études de l’Amérique Latine, at Sorbonne, in Paris, at her course «La périphérie, c’est de la périphérie n’importe où», and discovered the expression Les Lucioles: Art, Culture te espoir dens lês péripheries urbaines de Rio et de Paris. The article read in her course, and the one I commenet, is called: «Memórias de um sarau periférico: sobrevivência e esperança dos fazeres culturais e de pesquisa na Baixada Fluminense» (Memórias de um sarau periférico: survival and hope of cultural activities and reseach in the Baixada Fluminense). Text written along my dear orientator Adriana Carvalho Lopes, researcher in Contemporary Literacy. This work is about encounters.
Encounters in the street and in college, between a university professor and a student/activist, encounters between practice and theory, which is precisely the proposal and the movement that has been carried out in public Brazilian colleges, within a transperiferic agenda, in which we stop being subjects of research and become researcher subjects, authors of our own texts. Thinking about the terrain where this writing is born, I thought about the title of this presentation: «Studies of a periphery time and new ways to make research».
Coming from the idea that us, peripheric researchers, speak from a very specific place, I began presenting myself, from where I am speaking from and who I am. In this stay here in Madrid, along with professor Luisa Rojo, I introduced myself to the people pointing out that my name is indigenous, a name that, as the city I was born into, Nova Iguaçu, has water on its meaning and its soul, and that to me means movement. Nova Iguaçu is a municipality of almost 900,000 habitants, located in Baixada Fluminense, a metropolitan region in Rio de Janeiro, a territory shaped by the lack of public policies, climatic extremes and high violence rates. But it is also the place for a big cultural effervescence, with green areas, nature an a big creative potential.
In this city, my grandma, coming from Bahía, in the Brazilian Northeast, raised her 6 children, and my mother raised 3 daughters. I am the daughter of sewers: my mother, she sewed her whole life; my father, Paulo, was a cloth-cutter and worked his whole life in textile until the end of his days.
I grew up in a peripheric neighborhood. I used to play a lot on the streets, but I also loved playing at schools, with the dolls, and spent a lot of summers in the Brazilian Northeast. I always say poetry saved me in various moments of my life. I was a militant student, first in my family to get in public, superior education institutions, I worked as a cultural producer and engaged in travels and social projects in the Northern Sertao and in Rio favelas.
All these experiences have made me a researcher, and have brought me here.
Our article, result of our work in the Rio de Janeiro periphery, are divided in three sections. In the first one, we discuss a bit about our understanding of youth and survival, and of youth as a linguistic construction and historically situated. The scope of our work is understanding how youth is perceived in the public debate, without reaching the established definition of these territories as spaces of violence and absence; on the very contrary, we dialogue with the way the youngsters of these places (re)create their everyday life in terms of art and literacy, coming from the reality which is presented to them.
In the book Nó em Pingo D’água, organized by Adriana Facina, Adriana Carvalho and Daniel Silva, these forms of reinvention and resistance of young people are called «literacy of survival».
Culture and survival abilities that characterize the everyday life of this subalternized young people are not considered to be rudimentary practices but, on the contrary, powerful practices that go far beyond life and death, or even cultural and literacy tactics that “reinvent life from what life itself denies” (Lópes et al., 2019, p.42).
In the second section, we highlight the reinventions of the suburbs called Baixada Fluminense. To do so, and to develop a bit more on the literacy of survival, we focus on the work of the peripheric intellectuals Tiaranju D’Andrea and Erica Nascimento, both from São Paulo. The movement we try to prove here is the transition and change in which we stop being subjects of a study and we move to be subjects and researchers. «The periphery population questioned the role of being subjects of research, which they have been left to, moving on to produce knowledge» (D’Andrea, 2020, p.31).
And, lastly, we present the Sarau «V» as one of these evidences of reinvention of the peripheric territory. Carried out by young people and lead by me, when I was still young. The «V» was the first big street-art movement lead by a woman in the region. In this section, we explain a bit about how this developed in the public square, called Praça dos Direitos Humanos, and after how it arrived to state schools. It began in the squares with the motto «You can breathe poetry in the streets», aiming at promoting a grassroots work with political debates and to minimize violence, reaching the schools trying to become cultural centers.
2013: The year that didn’t end
We are now back to 2013, where the so called «June Days» took place, where a lot of people took it to the streets in Brazil. These protests had been channeled by the increasing bus prices, and had extended nationally as a way to protest against public institutions, a sort of a «leaderless protest», that, later on, was enriched by adding other issues to the streets.
And, in that very same period, I was still at Sarau APAfunk, organized by a group of funkeiros and black, favela militants, algo with Adriana Facina and Adriana Lopes. Our paths crossed there, in Cinelândia, downtown Rio, and, from our friendship with the leader of the Sarau APAfunk, I understood that it would be interesting to engage in a political, artistic movement in my city.
At that time, I began my Undergrad Studies in Languages at Universidade Federal Rural de Río de Janeiro, in the first federal college campus of Baixada Fluminense, and began to see the changes in the profiles of university students, grasping that I would come from a different place—and that place was called periphery.
Sarau “V” (Viral): A Young Movement
The Sarau «V» was a poetic, political action that began in the public squares and then took it to three state schools at Nova Iguaçu. We did 25 rounds in the squares, and developed 8 months of workshops and saraus in the schools. In these spaces, the motto was «If we imagine it, we see it», based on the idea of «dreaming possible dreams», a hope that, as Paulo Ferreira recalls, does not mean to wait, but to fight for better life conditions.
Hope would always be cheered by non-conformism and by the denial to accept suffering as an eternal, universal condition of human existence. The tendency of day-dreaming is even stronger among those who suffer deprivations, since the wish to see how things get better does not sleep (Facina, 2022, p.16).
And in these contexts, a peripheral identity of Baixada Flumiense appeared under the term «baixadense», created by a regional writer during the military dictatorship, which made us systematize a modus operandi to build culture in the Baixada Fluminense:
- Affection and territorial belonging;
- Solidarity-based, collaborative practices;
- A symbolic fight for other narratives;
- The feminine body as a creative, disruptive force;
- Inspiration and articulation of other local practices.
During 2 years in the squares, the Sarau «V» strengthened the production and consumption of culture on its own territory and connected peoples from different places. It also inspired other groups of Baixada Fluminense, creating a transperipheric movement of cultural occupation of public spaces, and those fluxes ended up recontextualizing that space (Blommaert, 2015). We see these actions as multisemiotic, narrative performances that projected a new chronotope for the square (Bakhtin, 1981). The chronotope, here, is the way people build meanings for the time-space, something produced in social practices.
Chronotopes created by local youngsters challenged the discourses that stigmatize the Baixada Fluminense. The territory ceases to be conceived as a place of absence and violence and begins to be lived as n space of abundance, identity, culture and literacy.
This way, when approaching a self-ethnography, being research of a collective us, compromised with that intersection between the self and the collective, I think that:
The University I believe in and that I help build is that in which not only do we speak, but also hears us; is that that researches with people, and not on people, with which it builds cities, writes life and inserts in it. With the condemned, the remanent and those who live on the insides (subsolo) of the Earth. That is where I come from.
REFERENCES
BAKHTIN, M. M. The dialogic imagination. Austin: Univ. Tex. Press, 1981. 480 p.
BLOMMAERT, J. Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. Annual Review of Anthropology, Stanford, v. 44, p. 105-116, 2015.
D’ANDREA, T. P. Contribuições para a definição dos conceitos periferia e sujeitas e sujeitos periféricos. Novos Estudos – CEBRAP, São Paulo, v. 39, n. 1, p. 19-36, 2020.
FACINA, A. Sujeitos de sorte: narrativas de esperança em produções artísticas no Brasil recente. Rev. antropol., São Paulo, v. 65, n. 2, e195924, 2022. 34 p.
FREIRE, P. Pedagogia da esperança: um reencontro com a pedagogia do oprimido. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1992. 127 p.
LOPES, A. C.; FACINA, A.; SILVA, D. N. Nó em pingo d’água: sobrevivência, cultura e linguagem. Rio de Janeiro: Mórula; Florianópolis: Insular, 2019. 333 p.
NASCIMENTO, E. É tudo nosso! A produção periférica na periferia paulistana. 2011. 213 f. Tese (Doutorado em Antropologia Social) – Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2011.
