AFRC3811 - Archiving Urban Dispossession in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

The course will focus on the city of Salvador, located in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. Popularly known as the “Black Mecca,” the city has the largest concentration of African descendants in the world, second only to Lagos, Nigeria. Salvador was the country’s first capital, and as one of the most important slave ports in the Americas, it holds special significance for the country’s connection to Africa and the broader Black Atlantic. While the city is celebrated as a place where Afro-Brazilian culture has flourished, Black people continue to suffer from widespread marginalization and racial violence.
Salvador, like other cities across Brazil, Latin America, and the Global South, is undergoing rapid redevelopment aimed at modernizing public spaces (markets, streets, sidewalks) and heritage sites (old mansions, forts, parks) for domestic and international tourism. Over the past three decades, the City Center (popularly known as the Pelourinho [whipping post] located in the central square) has been targeted for restoration of its historic mansions that have existed since the colonial period. This process has involved the violent displacement of sex workers, street vendors, and residents who have occupied the buildings for over a century. This has impacted the surrounding areas in the city-center such as the coastal fishing community of Gamboa de Baixo that now leads a resistance movement against these removals. The course will explore the relationship between urbanization and dispossession and how race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect to reinforce spaces of domination as well as to create spaces of resistance.
Keisha-Khan Perry has authored a book about Salvador as part of a global circuit of dispossession that threatens Black and poor residents in the city and has been a longtime collaborator of Gamboa de Baixo activists who are mostly poor Black women. Anne-Marie Veillette has completed a dissertation focused on Rio de Janeiro, another Brazilian city with a long history of resistance to removals. We have both observed in our work on Brazilian cities that the preservation of collective memory of Black spaces, culture and people represents a key issue in these urban struggles. Thus, the course will explore the myriad ways in which Black urban communities in Salvador have resisted dispossession and its interconnected forms of violence (policing, inadequate public health, and poor schooling). More importantly, we will work in collaboration with activists in Salvador to archive the rich history of political activism around housing and land rights from a grassroots perspective.
Throughout the semester, we will use a digital classroom to meet weekly with Bahian activists, to discuss key concepts, and to share media. During the Spring Break, we will travel to Salvador for one week to tour the city, to work with activists in person, and to present our ongoing work to community members.
Overall, the course will provide Penn students with theoretical and methodological training for research and engaged work in urban studies. We hope to attract both humanists and design/planning undergraduate and graduate students interested in integrating theoretical rigor, ethnographic fieldwork, archiving, and cartography in their work on cities. More importantly, students will gain practical experience in collaborative methodologies, which will necessarily encourage us to grapple with critical questions of transnational solidarity, political ethics, and the relationship between universities and social movements.