In Culture is Our Weapon, Damian Platt and Patrick Neate provide an inside look into violent communities within Brazil, and the growing social movements that are helping the residents reclaim their culture.
The favelas, or shantytowns within Brazil’s major city Rio de Janeiro, are swarming with warlords who instigate an ongoing drug war that has severe consequences for all the favelas‘ inhabitants. In addition, corrupt local police do little to enforce laws, and cater to the ongoing practice of corruption and the community’s poverty.
Rather than seeing these residents as passive bystanders in Culture is Our Weapon, we see how the communities are fighting back and protecting their youth from being tangled up into the dangerous lives of drug traffickers.
Grupo Cultural Afroreggae is a musical group and a grassroots organization that inspires and empowers young people in the favela through music, and works to prevent them from getting involved into the destructive system that was once their only option.
Afroreggae was formed after a police massacre of 21 people within the community that were thought to be drug traffickers. Now, the group, a majority ex-traffickers themselves, work to rehabilitate a corrupt system by using music as a creative outlet.
Platt was first introduced to Afroreggae from hearing their first album through a friend while on a research trip for Amnesty International. After meeting Junior, the coordinator of Afroreggae, the author began working with him in 2005.
Neate is the winner of the National Books Critics Circle award for criticism in 2005, and the author of four novels, including At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet.
Afroreggae isn’t just changing life within the favelas, but also the perception from the outside. Organizations like the Ford Foundation, UNESCO, Amnesty International, and the Barbican Centre, are taking notice and supporting the group’s efforts in Brazil. Their expansion has also lead to tours, films and television programs that are improving the negative representation of people in the favelas.
Platt is currently working with a French artist, JR, and Mauricio Hora, a photographer from the community, to construct a cultural center in the first favela in Brazil. The center will be an example of just one of the ways that favelas are being redefined for and by the people of the community.
Culture is Our Weapon is an important piece that provides insight on the ways that troubled communities are taking a stand against negative practices engrained into their neighborhoods.
As the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games of 2016 take place in Rio de Janiero, Platt and Neate ask people internationally to think about the images and stories we hear about Brazil, not just the poverty and oppression, but the stories that are often hidden beneath the surface.
Those stories are of the social revolutions that the people of these communities are creating, and the ways they are finding success.
Culture is Our Weapon will be released today, and Damian Platt will be visiting for an open discussion at Powell’s on Hawthorne at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, March 22.