Directed migrations supported the Luso-Brazilian government’s efforts to navigate the geopolitical challenges of the post-Napoleonic world. In order to correct the perceived dearth of population in the new seat of an exiled Portuguese Court, government officials went to great lengths to jumpstart migratory flows to Brazil. Peopling served many purposes, allowing the prince regent to cement royal authority through subsidies and concessions while responding to pressures to curtail slavery. Yet, as various groups made their way to Brazil, they lay bare the challenges in long-distance migrant conveyance as well as the diplomatic liabilities involved in directed migrations. The Luso-Brazilian government thus began to defer migration drives to private, mostly German, individuals gearing for profits. This chapter traces the emergence of a strategic exchange between the Joanine government in Rio and foreign petitioners who began to shape peopling as a profitable business sphere, which allowed the Luso-Brazilian administration to quell pressures stemming from Vienna and London, but opened the way for numerous unforeseen consequences.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital from 1763 to 1960, went through significant changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the country abolished slavery in 1888 and transitioned from an empire to a republic in 1889. Tens of thousands of former slaves poured into the capital. Equal numbers of European immigrants sought out Rio as a site for new economic opportunities. The new federal government invested in both urban removal and urban renewal, pushing poor and working-class people out of the downtown area and into surrounding hillsides and distant suburbs in an effort to improve public health and remake the centre in the image of a European capital. Female prostitution was corralled into a specific zone, and the police closely monitored same-sex public sociability and sexuality. Annual Carnival celebrations became a unique moment in the city’s yearly calendar where residents could play with the rigid social restrictions placed on gender and sexuality. This chapter traces the changes that took place in gender performance and sexual behavior over the course of the twentieth century, as women and queer men expanded their access to public space and Rio’s Carnival became an international site for audacious expressions of licentiousness and eroticism.

In the Conclusion, we outline a series of methodological and ethical considerations for scholars interested in researching the intersections of language and hope, particularly as they are practiced and manifested among marginalized and disenfranchised communities. Faveladas/os reveal a great deal of awareness of the extractivist tendencies of field research and their critical stance in advancing an agenda for sociolinguistic scholarship that is reflexive to more responsible, sustainable, and dialogic practices vis-à-vis interlocutors’ agendas and ethical concerns. Further, because we attend to knowledge about language produced by everyday people, we emphasize the need to be mindful of alternative and unconventional forms of knowledge production toward an ongoing understanding of the ways in which language can lead to hopeful futures. In short, insofar that hope demands that we reorient our view of the future and temporality more broadly, an understanding of language as hope demands that we reorient our assumptions of what counts as producing legitimate knowledge about language.

This chapter investigates scaling in the work of hope. We foreground how hope is not merely an abstract aspiration but a principled, time-oriented praxis by showcasing how hope can be meaningfully pursued when scaled through pedagogical work. Our cases include the central NGOS/activist groups in our ethnography, namely Instituto Raízes em Movimento, Instituto Marielle Franco, and Coletivo Papo Reto. We examine, for instance, the case of how Raízes em Movimento appropriates and rescales the trope of “circulando,” a policing practice premised on the criminalization of faveladas/os. We afterwards examine the case of artistic and organizational responses to the historical and contemporary silencing of Blacks in Brazil, examining the case of Favela Não Se Cala alongside the activist work of the Instituto Marielle Franco. We then look to the work of Coletivo Papo Reto who perform pedagogical work representing the transformative ethos of papo reto activist register. This collective work highlights the teachable–scalable–dimensions of hope through sociolinguistic action, by which hope comes to be rescaled from mere abstraction toward a form of social change.

The Introduction describes the fundamental objective of the book, which is to discuss what language can teach us about the practice of hope into the 21st century. Hope has always been critical to human survival, but the surge of right-wing populism, racism and ethnocentrism around the world spells hopelessness for many communities, including those whose backgrounds are subject to increased discrimination and precarization. Meanwhile, those in periphery contexts have lived in perpetual conditions of seeming hopelessness. Yet, they have not merely succumbed to despair but found creative ways of surviving material inequities. One key resource that faveladas/os have relied upon to hope is imagining language, temporality, digital technologies, and cooperation toward challenging past inequities and establishing socially equitable futures. They have also been very critical about the dynamics of knowledge production, including extractivist practices of academic scholars. These instances point to the importance of subjects’ reflexivity and practical work in producing conditions of hope.

This chapter outlines a theorization of language as hope. We begin with an understanding of language not merely as a fixed language system to communicate reality as such, but as an inherently flexible and negotiable practice that can reconstitute realities, in the sense of “languaging” (see Li, 2018). We approach languaging in relation to various conceptualizations of hope, beginning with Ernst Bloch’s (1986) pioneering account of hope as both an affect and a principle of explanation. As an affect, “Hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them” (p. 3). Temporally, hope orients people to the “Not-Yet-Being,” towards expansion and potentiality. This view of hope is complemented with various treatments within the social sciences and in sociolinguistics more specifically. In so doing, we propose that those who must grapple with enveloping challenges predicated on regimes of violence and economic dispossession do not merely succumb to hopelessness but instead have found ways to recast temporality, engage in tactical cooperation, and reimagine sociolinguistic resources in and through their everyday languaging toward the production of hope.

This chapter focuses on how hope demands an ever-shifting reorientation to time. We engage more fully with the case of Marielle Franco, a Black lesbian councilwoman from a favela who was brutally assassinated in 2018. Her spectral presence became an icon of hope for the dispossessed. We trace her “presence” in the range of protests and demonstrations that erupted following her death. We additionally analyze ethnographic accounts of women who were influenced by Marielle, online archives of their speeches, and news articles and social media material that circulated in the months following her murder. Additionally, we show how hope in Marielle’s communicative practice had an important pedagogic dimension in that she led others in the cultivation of adequate virtues, affects, and ideologies for surviving historical inequities and formations of violence. We thus illustrate how hope demands a reorientation to time–a disruption of the teleological time of progress, inverting taken-for-granted relations of causality. Temporality, in this sense, is “metaleptic” in that the past may belatedly inform the present, thereby not necessarily relying on chronology, linearity, or progress.

The purpose of this chapter is to advance the introduction and provide sociohistorical context necessary to understand the complexities of language and hope in Brazil. While Brazil is one of the world’s wealthiest nations it is simultaneously notorious for having one of the largest and rapidly increasing rates of class and income inequality in the world (Loureiro, 2000). In addition, while it is known for having the largest population of peoples of the African diaspora (Parra et al., 2003), it is also known for its longstanding history of anti-Black violence (Afolabi, 2009; Butler, 1998; Twine, 1997). Nowhere are the stratifications along social, economic, and racial lines more concentrated than in the favelas across the state. While the favelas, from this perspective, are spaces of seeming hopelessness, they are also locations of intense cultural production, everyday creativity, and most crucially, survival and hope. Critically, as we will demonstrate, the ways in which faveladas/os practice language and enact hope offer important lessons on the feasibility of hope into the 21st century.

This chapter presents a treatment of hope via an engagement with the complex interrelationship between communicative resources and their emergent indexical values. Hope, in other words, as a language practice, is presented here as an entailment of sociolinguistic enregisterment. Though meanings and values associated with various registers are productions of language ideological stances, our empirical cases point to the importance of reflexive practices in calibrating language and semiosis as hope. We offer an extended discussion of the papo reto (straight talk) activist register, an emergent translational activist register from the favelas that has been instrumental in recasting convoluted bureaucratic language in a manner that is legible to those who have not had access to extensive formal education and acculturation to mainstream political communicative conventions. We outline some of the formal and discursive features that have come to be associated with papo reto and analyze instances in which Marielle and other favelada/o activists have located spaces for papo reto in their activist work, disrupting the exclusionary language ideologies and normative regimes in Brazil.

The escape of the Portuguese royal family to Rio de Janeiro in 1807-8 proved a decisive step towards Brazilian political emancipation. The encounter of the Portuguese court and state with the wealthy slave elite residing in the capital of the colony was a turning point for all players. In the following thirteen years, the Portuguese court would define both the course of liberalism in Portugal and the political independence of Brazil, proclaimed soon after the return of the King of Portugal to Europe in 1821. The relationship between the court and Rio de Janeiro’s aristocracy, which financed the former, occurred through the strict observance of a social etiquette that was indifferent to the conditions of the new tropical setting. The history of both Portugal and independent Brazil throughout the nineteenth century was established there.

This chapter explains why Rio de Janeiro endured a nearly uninterrupted confrontation between drug gangs and the state’s Military Police since redemocratization in the 1980s. High fragmentation withered multiple initiatives to professionalize the police while recurrent political turnover generated successive police reform cycles. The dispersal of political power also decentralized rents from police corruption. Police thus regulated drug trafficking through splintered corruption deals and rampant violence, reinforcing criminal retaliation, gang invasions and successional struggles. The Pacification program that began in 2008 briefly disrupted this pattern, ushering a temporary coexistence arrangement that significantly decreased both police and criminal violence. However, the state’s fiscal and political crises and the end of the international events that promoted Pacification not only sparked a return to grim normalcy but increased police violence to unprecedented heights in the ensuing decade.

The abolition of slavery contributed to a population explosion in Rio de Janeiro over the 1890s and early 1900s which, combined with a severe economic crisis, resulted in a drastic shortage of housing. The urban poor, left to fend for themselves, began to build informal settlements on the city’s empty hillsides. The best known among them was called Morro da Favela, a toponym that mushroomed into a typology, by the 1920s, as more and more communities sprang up based on the favela model. The chapter examines the early representation of favelas in paintings, photographs, illustrations and cartoons, piecing together how the visual record of these communities morphed into convention and stereotype. Favelas quickly came to be pitted as the backdrop of archaism and backwardness against which ideas of modernity were counterposed. They were routinely linked to notions of blackness, Africanness and the wild frontier of Brazil’s hinterland (sertão). However, they also developed a distinct identity as objects of artistic interest and sites of cultural resistance. Attempts by municipal government to raze them eventually met with strong opposition not only from dwellers themselves but also from artists and intellectuals. The visit of futurist leader F.T. Marinetti to Morro da Favela, in 1926, is discussed for its symbolic import.

The rise of modern carnival in Rio de Janeiro, over the early twentieth century, provided an outlet for defusing the enormous social and cultural tensions of the modernizing metropolis. The so-called Great Societies of carnival, which have been little researched, functioned as zones of contact between popular culture and fine art practitioners, some of whom developed pioneering careers as carnival scenographers (carnavalescos). Contrary to received wisdom, exchanges and encounters between the worlds of art and carnival were numerous and varied. The 1913 Salon of the National School of Fine Arts marks a watershed moment, in which the restricted milieu of fine art openly embraced the urban culture of carnival, particularly in the work of painters Rodolpho Chambelland and Arthur Timotheo da Costa. These and other artists laid the groundwork for challenges to the prevailing institutional order, especially after 1916. Even earlier, over the early 1900s, a rebellious milieu of artistic bohemianism, revolving around painter Helios Seelinger, graphic artists Raul and K. Lixto, among others, sought to modernize artistic production in Rio by forging connections with music, dance, theatre, performance and carnival. Previously overlooked, their combined efforts represent an early modernizing current attuned to the adversarial attitudes of German Secessionism, from which they drew inspiration.

The second chapter traces the Brazilian reaction to the developments across the border in Argentina, which led federal politicians and local park boosters to establish a protected area of their own, the Iguaçu National Park in 1939. The Brazilian government created Iguaçu in the context of the “March to the West,” the 1940s federal campaign to occupy Brazil’s hinterland as a solution for an underdeveloped frontier. But the park’s creation also reveals the crucial role of local politicians and other intermediary agents in pushing for policies of territorial development. Park proponents, including state governors and local politicians, were aware of the national park being established in Argentina and used it as leverage for pushing for a national park on the Brazilian side of the Iguazu Falls. Their activism proved decisive in the establishment of the park in Brazil. The dialogue between local actors and the seat of power in Rio de Janeiro shows how territorial control is never exclusively a top-down process.

From the time of their premieres, Carmen was an immediate success both in Portugal (Lisbon, 1885, in Italian) and, before this, in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1881, in French). By 1915, thanks to travelling companies, principally Italian and French, the opera was widely known and popular throughout both countries, reaching not only principal cities on the coast or up river, but also in the interior, accessible through the increasing railway networks, particularly striking in the hinterland of São Paulo. Performance conditions were very variable, with difficulties often experienced in relation to the orchestra and choruses. Audiences in Lisbon had very high expectations, which were rarely met, while in Brazil reception was much more spontaneous and appreciative. Parodies of Carmen, imported and locally produced, were a feature in both countries. In 1911 a travelling children’s company in Rio, São Paulo and the south of Brazil raised questions in the local press about working conditions and particularly child labour.

Carmen made its debut in the Spanish Americas when the local networks of opera were at their apex, with a constant stream of singers from Europe and a desire for new repertoires outside the main staples of Italian opera. In this chapter, considering sources from across the region, we discuss four layers of Carmen’s reception in the Americas. First, the reception of the opera beyond the stage, in the form of vocal scores, arrangements for military bands and isolated numbers. Second, the perception of Carmen as a French opera, and the way it served as a vehicle for French opera companies in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Third, the idea of Carmen as Spanish, and how different countries considered that hispanicity as part of their own culture and theatrical expectations. Finally, we discuss how the habanera in Carmen was perceived as part of a larger contemporary debate on the transatlantic popularity of the habanera as a musical genre, its origins, ethnicity and its moral and musical character.