Fine-tuning differences upon arrival in the city: sensorial repertoires of international migrants in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21669/tomo.v45.24595Keywords:
urban inequality, migration, intersectionality, performativity, critical phenomenologyAbstract
International migrants arriving in the unequal city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, encounter ethno-racial, class, and gender differences and hierarchies that shape the urban landscape and the bodies that circulate within it. This ethnography with Senegalese and Spanish migrants who arrived in the 2010s analyzes how they engaged differently with the affective atmospheres and collective aesthetics own to urban spaces and their inhabitants. Within a critical phenomenology, visual registers are conceived as part of sensory repertoires. By analyzing the sensory repertoires emerging from the local and transnational trajectories of newly arrived migrants, the article reveals how newcomers tune into dense urban landscapes and the contradictions and contingencies between experiences and sensibilities, arising from privilege and racism, fear and curiosity. The heterogeneity of migrants' repertoires reflects and co-constitutes this dense, multifaceted, and challenging urban world.
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