The Paradoxes of Ethnoracial Space

The introduction, “The Paradoxes of Ethnoracial Space,” presents the historical and geographic change at the core of I’ll Samba Someplace Else: how two of the most significant neighborhoods to African descendants in São Paulo in the early twentieth century were transformed into “Japanese” and “Italian” ethnic enclaves by the 1970s, and how residents displaced from these neighborhoods created a new “Little Africa” on the city’s periphery. The introduction details the links between this narrative and the book’s central and supporting arguments, which focus on anti-Blackness in São Paulo’s urban re/development, the particular spatial praxis that some African descendants developed while navigating hostile ideological and tumultuous material landscapes, and the significance of state-sponsored campaigns to create “Japanese” and “Italian” ethnic enclaves. The introduction also presents key figures who composed earlier iterations of this history (or parts of it) in other genres, such as theorist Beatriz Nascimento and samba musician Geraldo Filme.