ABSTRACT

This chapter departs from a de-colonial approach, centring ‘Southern theories’ to understand the potential of arts and culture as a means to analyse urban peripheries in Rio de Janeiro as a space of power including in addressing intersectional inequalities. Southern theories have articulately expressed cultures of inequality embedded in coloniality. For example, Frantz Fanon (1967: 8) states that all colonised people have suffered a ‘death and burial’ of their local culture as they find themselves ‘face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country’. For Gloria Anzaldua (2007: 43) inequalities embedded within coloniality of power are not solely between a colonised people and the colonisers, but also within colonised cultures. More recently, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010), in his Epistemologies of the South, challenges the centrality of the hegemonic Eurocentric framework, broadening the production and understanding of knowledge to include perspectives of artists and activists in the transformation of colonial epistemological dominance.