Observers of recent events in Brazil – such as the emergence of waves of protests against the 2014 World Cup, the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the imprisonment of her predecessor in the Planalto Luis Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva, the rise of a new, authoritarian national-populism, which propelled the hard-line Jair Bolsonaro to the Presidency in 2018 – will find the importance of new media in the political landscape hard to deny. For those with a closer proximity to, or interest in, Brazilian civil society, the importance of digital and social media will be even clearer. Digital media have become embedded in the routine organisational practices through which Brazilian civil society organisations interact, grow and change. News and mundane notices are exchanged, and gatherings and protests are organised, through Facebook and Twitter, and WhatsApp and other, closed platforms when privacy is required. For disadvantaged communities, new media have lent greater visibility and immediacy to their struggles. It behoves scholars or those who are not specialists in media (such as this commentator) to pay greater attention to these developments, and ideally to integrate media-based activism into their theoretical approaches.
Favela Media Activism, by Leonardo Custódio, is thus a timely contribution to the literature and contributes to a growing understanding of the role of media to the manifold ‘lutas’ of low-income communities in Brazil, and indeed the larger political terrain in which they unfold. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, it contributes to our already rich knowledge of activism in Rio de Janeiro. However, this is an ethnography which is written by a ‘local outsider’ who hails from nearby Magé, and thus enables some insights (and forthcoming personal reflections) on the stigmatisation of favelas from a near-local of Rio de Janeiro.
The book is made up of nine chapters, but the general structure can best be described as an attempt to historicise favela media activism, provide a theoretical framework for its analysis, contextualise the emergence of favela media organisations and then map out the trajectory and motivations of individual activists (p. 193). Favela media activism in Rio de Janeiro is first placed within a larger historical context that runs back to the late-nineteenth century struggles against abolitionism, the workers’ counterpublics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and then the post-war anti-dictatorship and favela counterpublics – the lattermost often arising out of defensive measures against police violence, human rights violations and the stigmatisation of poor communities. The reader is then introduced to an array of NGOs and citizen initiatives which allow for the examination of differences between funded-NGO-based activism and the media initiatives carried off on the initiative of favela-based media activists. The tensions and ambiguities between these different kinds of organisation, the former more enduring if less freely politicised than the latter, form the backdrop to more in-depth examinations of individual trajectories in the latter two chapters. In so doing, the book seeks to respond to several practical questions about why those involved in media activism become engaged in it, what influences their continued involvement, and more generally the difference that media activism makes. In broad terms the book is successful in providing answers to these questions and gives a nuanced sense of how media activism figures within a larger landscape of community activism and localised, individual structures of motivation.
My critical comments on the work largely have to do with its structure. I thought that some of the methodology chapter (chapter two) could have been excised without a significant impact on the rest of the book. A slimmed-down version could have been enough and added to a more extensive introduction. Further, the variety of theories in the book could have been integrated more harmoniously. In several of the chapters, new theories are introduced: in the introduction, communication for development and social change (ICT4D); in the methodology chapter, interactionism and postcolonial ethnography; in chapter three, the resignification of discourses and identities (by favela communities); in chapter four, an elaboration of ‘favela media activism’. And then in chapter five, the reader is given an overview of public sphere theory, Warner’s theorisation of publics and a history of counterpublics in Brazil; chapter six is more empirical, but then chapter seven is a chapter dedicated to a theoretical framework, drawing on interactionism and practice theory, which frames the development of structural-agential schemas employed in chapter eight. This is not necessarily problematic. However, the disparate theorisations raise questions. For example, there are sections on ‘demanding the right to the city’ (p. 36), ‘reacting to violence’ (p. 41), ‘contesting discrimination’ (p. 46), and ‘resignifying discourses and identities’ (p. 50) in chapter three, before a chapter on the meanings and interpretations of favela activism in Brazil in chapter four, and all this prior to an introduction to counterpublics in chapter five. It would in my view have been better to locate counterpublics as part of a larger, more integrated and comprehensive theoretical framework, which preceded and shaped these analyses. To dedicate a whole chapter (chapter seven) to a theoretical framework for a rather slim chapter eight seemed excessive. Again, this could have been brought forward in the book, as part of a more comprehensive theoretical framework, possibly reducing the number of chapters.
In addition, what is termed the ‘main public sphere’ in the book could have played a larger role in the work. The political cataclysms that have taken place since 2013 have reshaped the relations between the main public sphere and counterpublics in Brazil. The ‘marginal’ – the stigmatised figure in mainstream depictions of Brazil’s low-income communities – has figured under various guises in the rhetoric generated by a new wave of authoritarian national-populism. Given the time that it takes to write a book, edit it for publication and reach the shelves, not to include the latest changes to the public sphere is understandable. However, the book would still have been enriched by more systematically integrating dimensions from the main public sphere (through television coverage, depictions of favelas in the news, the campaign to unseat Dilma Rousseff, and so on).
Still, Favela Media Activism is an important contribution to our understanding of activism in Rio and the role of media in it, skilfully covers a number of theoretical literatures, and engages well with the Portuguese-language scholarship – which is not always the case in English language books. It is recommended for graduate students of media, activism and civil society, and academics with interests in media activism in Latin America and beyond.