In I’ll Samba Someplace Else, Andrew G. Britt maps the interwoven histories of three of the city of São Paulo’s most iconic ethnoracialized neighborhoods, popularly known as “African” Brasilândia, “Japanese” Liberdade, and “Italian” Bexiga. Following these spaces over the mid-twentieth century through inventive methods of spatial history, archival research, and sustained engagement with African-descendent cultural organizations, Britt shows that these ethnoracialized neighborhoods did not accrue naturally over time. Instead, they were planned, produced, and contested by an array of individuals, from powerful urbanist-politicians and neighborhood businessowners to celebrated samba composers and historic preservationists. The ethnoracialization of these neighborhoods, Britt argues, served paradoxical ends: it reproduced consequential racialized inequities while, simultaneously, bolstering discourses of multicultural harmony. By untangling the paradoxes of ethnoracial space in Brazil’s most populous, diverse, and unequal city, I’ll Samba Someplace Else elucidates how popular ideologies of multiculturalism endure despite persistently high levels of racialized inequity and anti-Black violence in both Brazil and beyond.

Andrew G. Britt is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas.

“I’ll Samba Someplace Else is an outstanding book that offers a fresh perspective on the ways in which race and ethnicity have been inscribed into the urban geography, shaping vast inequalities in São Paulo over the past century.”
-- Bryan McCann, author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. The Paradoxes of Ethnoracial Space  1
1. Avenues and the Afterlives of Slavery  34
2. Spatial Projects of Forgetting  81
3. Neighborhoods of Mixture and Massacre  148
4. Belonging-as-Being: Brasilândia as “Little Africa”  199
5. Producing Ethnoracial Infrastructures: Making “Japanese” Liberdade and “Italian” Bexiga  241
Epilogue. Early 1970s: “Asphalt Has Today Covered Our Ground”  288
Notes  299
Bibliography  349
Index  377