Street corners, alleys, crossroads & noise(s): intersectional aspects of the epistemic production of MCs from Southeastern Brazil

Abstract

This article proposes an ethnographic analysis of peripheral electronic rhythms such as grime, drill, and trap understood as expressions of the hip-hop movement that cross the Atlantic and take root in Brazil as political, epistemic, and ethnographic manifestations. Framed within the perspective of Améfrica Ladina (Gonzalez, 1988/2018), these rhythms operate as languages of connection, absorbing and re-signifying the lived experiences of Black, Latinx, and Caribbean youth in the Brazilian context. At the core of these expressions are Black, female, and gender-dissident bodies that, through musical narratives, articulate experiences traversed by markers such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. In this sense, peripheral rhythms become spaces of epistemic production and agency (Ortner, 2007), where MCs such as Iza Sabino, Sodomita, Irmãs de Pau, Natalhão, and Sé da Rua construct knowledge through their bodies, trajectories, and voices (Collins, 2019). This study seeks to investigate three main axes: (1) the historical and political trajectory of peripheral electronic genres in Brazil; (2) the contributions of Patricia Hill Collins’s Black feminist epistemology and Sil Nascimento’s Black transfeminist epistemology; and (3) the resonance of these epistemologies within the artistic productions of the aforementioned MCs. By understanding grime, drill, and trap as fields of self-definition and subjective reinvention, the article highlights the power of these rhythms as devices of insurgency, through which the body-subject is constituted in resistance and knowledge production.