The Spectacular Favela by Erika Robb Larkins
For the last 3 years I've been on what I like to call a 'violence diet,' a strict regime of no gratuitous violence, especially against women, online and on TV. Gone are the days of Law & Order SVU, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead--in fact it might be hard to imagine what's left to consume if we want to wean ourselves off an obsession with stylized violence.
These days especially the news is bleak, violence succeeding more violence, some sort of moral pressure to keep watching it, to force myself to confront it. Because it's the water we're swimming in, it's not only hard to avoid but also surprisingly hard to sift through all the iterations of it. On the train, in an ad for Century 21 department stores--'killer heels, killer deals,’ the pumps in a glossy red, a bright red sheen all over it. TV show ads burst with blood splatters, something gruesome, the more guts the merrier. I couldn't imagine a worldview more teeming with repetitions of violence until I read Erika Robb Larkins's The Spectacular Favela, out now from University of California Press.
In this monograph Larkins studies violence in modern Brazil, specifically at the site of the Rocinha favela. A favela is the zone of a major city known as a slum, so far at the outskirts as to operate like its own separate or parallel city. Within these permeable but defined borders, narco-trafficker violence is the norm, from stray bullets to revenge killing, as it intersects with larger questions of race and social class in Brazil. But the book is nuanced in its approach to exported violence outside its borders too, the kind of violence commoditized in video games, graphic films and documentaries, international restaurants, dorm blankets, and even poverty tourism, or 'poorism.' Larkins suggests, and has witnessed firsthand, the way these representations of the favela actually perpetuate and reify entrenched hierarchies, even if they bring tourism for the purposes of charity or 'solidarity.' Larkins asserts these are instances of violence in themselves, and I'm inclined to agree, as they promote stereotypes, objectify favela bodies, and even expect the kind of violent public spectacles the favela has become famous for internationally.
Larkins is also especially adept at setting the stage for state v. narco-trafficker war, which she shows is mostly theatrics but with deadly effects. Traffickers get warning of impending busts, they run to the hills, the squads can helicopter pounds of drugs cleaned up and packaged for all the cameras. In this performance former soldiers turn into trafficker henchmen, and current officers take bribes from drug bosses, one faction bleeding into the next and doubling in on itself. If I were a reader of Artaud I'd say this is the doubling of the theater, the ideal Theater of Cruelty. But it's hard to ascend to abstraction when so many bodies are hung out to dry every day, used as props by lovers of regime, drugs, money, power, even fame, just on account of being born into a favela.
In another moment of doubling, Larkins explores the shepherds of a new era of pacification, otherwise known as more active police surveillance, of the favela, the B.O.P.E., or 'elite squad' for those familiar with the film. With a skull as their emblem and hoods over their heads, these specialized soldiers unironically see themselves as "the death of death." Larkins writes,
[T]hey are no longer men but warriors who bring death to death itself. According to the lyrics of their anthem, under the cover of darkness they now shape-shift into 'dogs of war,' 'beings unlike others,' the 'messengers of death,' who 'spread violence and terror.'
If this doesn't sound like it inspires peace and security among the citizens it's because it's not supposed to. The point of the police, in the favela as well as parts of the US many are familiar with by now, is to protect the elite, their interests, and even the economic status quo of narco-traffic itself.
I read The Spectacular Favela as a foreshadowing, a realized product of racist policy and demonization of poverty. But as an American citizen who's never been to Brazil, I couldn't help but read it as a perpetuation of the same spectacle that both brings in tourists and keeps them out. Larkins was sure to insist that, despite the focus of her book, it's important to remember that most citizens in the favela try to lead lives and find work and avoid violence from legal and extralegal sources. She also devotes space in the introduction and epilogue to interrogate her place in these systems of violence, as a woman, an American, and an academic free to bear witness to suffering then move out of the favela once the book is done. I couldn't help but take her cues to mine my own assumptions and prejudices here--should I be afraid of visiting Brazil on account of my white skin, my gender, my citizenship? How can I, as a reader outside the experiences of a favela, engage with this text ethically, not as dystopia for the betterment of the states, but on its own terms, in its own right? Is it actually unethical to purposefully shy away from violent media because of my privileged living conditions today? Or if we consume these accounts of violence, do we perpetuate it too? Do we commodify what we can't understand, or consume in order to?
