Corporate fake news, lawfare against leftist leaders, police delinquency. What can we learn from Brazil's current configurations of power? What moral and ethical values define Brazil's regime of (il)legality? What is exceptional, if anything, about the ‘jeitinho brasileiro’ (‘the Brazilian way of doing things’)? How do Brazilians negotiate tensions between institutionalised and mundane practices of rule? What kind of social agreement is established by agents of the state and ordinary citizens to navigate the unpredictability of social life in Brazil's troubling urban geographies? In this edited volume, Brazilian and Brazilianist scholars bring into sharp focus some of these questions by looking into apparently disparate cultural artefacts and social practices from night walking to illegalised migration, from street vending to literature and protest art. They also look into the uses of law as a medium for state delinquency. The diverse scope of analysis and approaches generates a rich interpretation of the economies of (il)legalities – their practices, narratives and institutionalisation – that seem to be foundational to Brazil.
In the book's introduction, editors Sara Brandellero, Derek Pardue and Georg Wink present the core argument that permeates the 11 chapters. They argue that legality and illegality should be understood as a continuum of ‘socio-political productions’ that generates particular forms of subjectivities, socialities and spatialities. Legality and illegality are politically defined and socially lived, and thus the morals and ethics that emerge from these productive frictions mirror society and sustain relations of domination. The contributors to this volume all deal with these tensions, albeit in different ways and to varying degrees. For instance, drawing on current political turmoil in Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil, Stephanie Dennison, Jean Wyllys and Márcia Tiburi present a powerful critique of democracy as a political project founded on the intersections of mundane forms of authoritarian and legalised despotism. Tiburi's gendered critique of the nation as a heteropatriarchal project is an essential contribution to advance such critique of the Brazilian regime of citizenship. She argues that under Bolsonaro's eschatological democracy, ‘sex’ has become ‘a medium by which the State seeks to destroy that which is more dangerous: gender and democracy’ (p. 72). Likewise, Wyllys demystifies mainstream media and civil society's scandal over Bolsonaro's ‘fake news’ by suggesting – as Tiburi does with her critique of ‘fake theory’ – that Brazil's current political formation relies on a heteropatriarchal contract between evangelical groups, the military state and mainstream media which aims to de-gender/de-sexualise/purify the nation. The chapter by Dennison presents an engaging analysis of Maria Augusta Ramos’ documentary O processo (The Trial) to make a similar point. This author situates the uses of ‘lawfare’ against presidents Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as a part of the changing-same game of power that sustains Brazil's fragile democracy. This nomos may explain the ‘Kafkaesque process of replacing a president with the most wafer-thin veneer of legitimacy imaginable’ (p. 120) to open the way to a full-frontal assault on the country's assets in the name of fiscal responsibility.
These discussions set up the chapters addressing how ‘illegality’ and ‘legal normalisation’ are lived in the urban margins of contemporary Brazil. The chapters by Daniel Hirata, Gabriel Feltran, Alexander Dent, and Igor Machado and Pardue all deal with what one of the authors deems as the ‘legal-political territory’ of the city. Hirata's analysis fleshes out the ways urban neoliberalism attempts to discipline informality while producing urban precariousness in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The regulation of street vending is part of a much broader practice of neoliberal governance that relies on police violence to control public space and the city's means of production. Feltran also expands on the spatialities produced by violence through his analysis of the ‘world of crime’, a political territory inhabited by marginalised youth in São Paulo's periphery. Following a scholarly tradition that has explored the tensions between ‘workers’ and ‘bandits’ to understand the precarious world of citizenship, Feltran suggests that these are socio-political categories that help residents of São Paulo's favelas to make sense of their experience with violence and marginalisation. Hip-hop group Racionais MCs’ fictional representation of two individuals – a former bandit, who has been converted to Pentecostalism, and a law-abiding, hard-working friend – who manage to ‘survive’ in São Paulo's geography of police violence, poverty and residential segregation, drives the point home. Dent's innovative analysis of punk goes further to locate some agency (at times tragic) in the cultural practices of individuals interpellated by the police as undisciplined or ungovernable. Whether embracing informality, positioning oneself as a ‘worker’ or using violence as a contestatory project, as the counter-cultural punk movement does, illegality is a process of normalisation as much as it is a strategy of resistance embraced by those placed outside the realms of respectability and governability.
Perhaps biased by my own academic interest, I read Brandellero's chapter on night walkers through the lens of spatial agency. The author explores the transgressive ‘chronotope of nightlife’ in Recife as represented in Kleber Mendonça Filho's film O som ao redor (Neighbouring Sounds) to analyse the legal and political materiality of nightscape. This chapter could also be read in conjunction with Claire Williams’ analysis of Brazilian migration to Lisbon, and Machado and Pardue's work on Haitian and African migrants in São Paulo. The ‘fractured temporalities’ that Brandellero locates in the night-time of Recife find resonance in the impossible temporalities lived by ‘illegalised’ immigrants in São Paulo and Lisbon. Mobile individuals become trespassers/illegals because of everyday border-making practices from policing to daily humiliations in precarious occupations. Williams’ analysis of Brazilian ‘clandestinos’ is a much-needed addition to border and migration studies. The author shows how brazucas (a gendered derogatory term for Brazilian immigrants) negotiate their precarious status of being illegalised immigrants in Europe. Navigating the feelings of ‘alienation and impotence’, women like Rita appear as economic refugees struggling to find a seat in the first class of the global economy. Here also, the brazuca is a fractured subject in a permanent diasporic condition. Machado and Pardue's ethnographic account zooms in on the antiblack ideology that permeates Brazilian immigration policies. That the spectre of Haiti – the first independent Black nation in the continent – informs such antiblackness in Brazil and beyond was made manifest, for instance, in the moral panic regarding Haitian immigration in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. As Machado and Pardue demonstrate, the change in the Brazilian immigration policies to restrict the influx of Haitians seems to confirm this fear. Haitians may apply for a humanitarian visa only before entering the national territory and they may not exceed a quota. At the same time, other immigrants are allowed to enter Brazil and then apply for asylum while living in the country. Machado and Pardue's critical ethnography goes beyond these anti-Haitian policies to show how racism (I would say antiblackness) renders Africans, Haitians and even Afro-Brazilians anti-national subjects. The racial alterity of these groups places them in the category of ‘foreign negritude’. While the nation is closed to Blacks, immigrants perceived as light-skinned, such as Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians, are regarded as nationals. Their perceived Whiteness saves them, even if temporarily.
The book's last chapter, by Lúcia Sá and Felipe Milanez Pereira, also touches upon the question of racism by looking into the predatory practice of White academia and society in general against the Indigenous Baniwa people. Art protests by Indigenous artists Denilson Baniwa and Jaider Esbell are regarded (as they should be) as art theory against the epistemicide and ongoing genocide of Indigenous people. The message that transpires from their interventions is that the ‘racist logic of Brazilian society’ (p. 163) is enforced by law, by the Church, by academia and by ordinary citizens such as the group of upper-class White teenagers whose crime against political activist Galdino Pataxó – burned alive in his sleep – remains unpunished. The message is that racism against Indigenous people is a socially shared practice. The chapter could not be more timely when Indigenous groups are filing petitions against Bolsonaro's genocidal policies in the Haia International Penal Trial.
Last but not least, Wink demystifies ‘jetinho brazileiro’, a term reified by Brazilian scholars (see his critique of Roberto da Matta) invested in an essentialist reading of Brazilianness as an exceptional identity. Wink is able to not only provincialise jetinho but also convincingly argue that tricking the system in favour of one's interest is something far from unique to Brazilians and that this discursive formation serves the purpose of ‘relativising and distracting’ (p. 67) from a system of domination that works precisely by rendering collective (thus no one can be held accountable) individual practices that benefit those in power. The jeitinho narrative serves the purpose of pacifying an unequal society by selling the narrative that ‘here we are all corrupt’ when, in fact, it is the ‘folkloric popularisation of an instrument of power’ (p. 70) by the perverse Brazilian elites. Full stop.
While Living (Il)legalities in Brazil is a welcome contribution to the studies of power and domination in Brazil, there are some aspects that are underdeveloped. For instance, regimes of legality/illegality are predicated upon violence. Yet, there are very few considerations of how violence sustains ‘legal normalisation’, even in chapters that directly deal with the violent peripheries of Brazil. One cannot help but ask, for instance, what is the work of state terror in producing illegal subjectivities in the urban periphery of São Paulo, a landscape marked by levels of police brutality incompatible with democracy? At times some authors take democracy as a dystopic project (see Wyllys’ critique), and yet there is an implicit idealisation of the pre-coup against President Rousseff as if the criminal group that took power in 2016 was an exception in the Brazilian democratic regime of rights. If we consider Bolsonaro as a genuine product of Brazil, would such a critique still be valid? Also, the focus on resistance is not given enough attention. Dent rightfully calls attention to the ‘wild power’ of the Brazilian state, always present against outlawed populations. As the author points out, such wildness is ‘frequently the result of a decision made by law enforcement about the distinction between the obnoxious and the illegal’ (pp. 93–4). I wish the author(s) had further explored ‘wild power’ as a political category to also understand the agency of those embracing illegality. Finally, the attentive reader will notice that I have grouped together chapters that are not necessarily in the sequential order of the book. Indeed, while the volume brings together an extraordinary group of scholars, its order does not do justice to the richness of themes and misses the opportunity to explore points of convergence among them. Other than that, Living (Il)legalities in Brazil stands as an important contribution that must be read by anyone interested in understanding the origins of Brazil's dystopic democracy and what may lie ahead.
