The enchanted body of the streets

" Chronicles by Luiz Antonio Simas on Brazilian popular culture.

The streets , as seen by Luiz Antonio Simas in The Enchanted Body of the Streets , embody movement. They are a place of unlikely encounters, the territory of Exu, who manifests himself in the alterity of speech and the affluence of crossroads . From downtown to the suburbs , the textures of Rio's streets intertwine with its writing.

If João do Rio was the chronicler of the enchanted soul of early 20th-century Rio de Janeiro, Luiz Antonio Simas emerges, one hundred years later, as the historian of Rio de Janeiro's body pierced by the arrows of global cultural and financial capital. Therefore, against the barbarity of civilization , sighs and swindles emerge from the bags of Saint Cosmas and Damian, the charm of Saint Blaise to keep from choking, the conversations at the market, the daily routine of the grocery store and the corner bar.

The enchanted body of the streets reclaims the richness of knowledge, practices, ways of life, and worldviews of cultures that cannot be tamed by canonical standards. It gives official historiography a wide berth. Here, drums and books are contiguous technologies. Shanghai Park is as important as Christ the Redeemer. Bach is a genius like Pixinguinha. The National Museum, a sacred territory, accumulated the axé music provided by ancestors to the community.

This isn't a book about resistance. It's about re-existing. Reinventing affections, learning the grammar of drums, shaking up life so that cracks emerge. So that loving bodies, bodies of celebration and struggle, can launch into movement and never stop occupying the streets.