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This essay argues that Paulo Lins's Cidade de Deus represents a major landmark in recent Brazilian fiction.1 Through its massive inclusion of a multi'vocal and subjective experience of the favela, the novel minutely examines the race and class dynamics of chronic discrimination and poverty. I first situate the novel within contemporary literary criticism and discuss how this criticism constructs Lins's authority as an author of fiction and as a reliable witness of the reality of the favela. I then turn toward Vanessa Fitzgibbon's essay, "O ressentimento racial brasileiro e a identidade marginal a partir da 'História de Inferninho' em Cidade de Deus, de Paulo Lins." In contrast to her approach, which argues that racial resentment is to blame for the current wave of urban violence in Brazil, I argue that Cidade de Deus maps racial consciousness in relation to literary and historical notions of social exclusion.
Referenced by literature, the mass media, and Afro-Brazilian culture, social banditry emerges in Rio de Janeiro in the figure of the malandro, and in Brazil's arid Northeast in the figure of the cangaceiro.2 Eric Hobsbawm's (1965) vision of social banditry suggests that outlaws represent emerging political consciousness and an oppositional stance towards oppressive conditions. I first explore Cidade de Deus's reference to the cangaceiro in José Lins do Rego's Fogo morto (1967). I then examine the novel's elaboration of malandragem as a conceptual framework for understanding racial discrimination, violence, extreme poverty, and sexism.
Violence and Social Critique
Though ostensibly a novel about gangsters, Cidade de Deus is also a social critique that highlights racial discrimination and the impunity of white privilege. The novel documents individual acts of racially motivated violence, the race consciousness of the gangsters who view themselves as vigilantes, structural racism by the police and local businesses, and other instances of discrimination based on gender, social class, and residing in a favela. In addition, the novel portrays the limitations of malandragem even at its most celebrated moments as a reliable critical framework for understanding the world. In numerous instances, the gangsters' code simply fails to account for random acts of violence, misogyny, or homophobia.
Paulo Lins's background as a resident of the favela, his university studies in literature at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, his work...