Narratives of violence: the white imagiNation and the making of black masculinity in City of God

Abstract

The article explores the regimes of representation of young Black men in the film City of God. The main argument is that the movie deploys pathological scripts of Black men as criminal and deviant to disseminate meanings over black masculinity in Brazil. The author suggests that the controlling image of Black men bodies as a source of danger and impurity sustains Brazilian racial hegemony; ultimately, the narratives of violence makes explicit the ways the Brazilian nation is imagined through racial underpinning. The dual bind through which the nation is ambiguously imagined is made explicit also in the consumption of Blackness as exotic at the same time that it represents a threat to the national harmony. The nation is then written and re-imaginedas a racial paradise even/and mostly by inscribing death to the black body.