(The International Journal of the Constructed Environment, 2016) Paula, Leonora Souza
In this article, I discuss how the works produced by authors identified with the twenty-first-century literary movement known as Literatura Periférica respond to and intervene in São Paulo’s excluding pattern of culture distribution. Having lived in the city’s peripheries themselves, these authors have been writing about life on the margins and centering their works on traditionally excluded groups. This work discusses the ways in which Literatura Periférica renders visible a social vision of the world in which the periphery is understood and represented not as a stigmatized culturally impoverished space, but as a legitimate site of enunciation for representing local lived experiences. While recognizing the periphery as a legitimate site of cultural production, I demonstrate how the collaborative peripheral identity contributes to the construction of a new imaginary for the symbolic and material space occupied by the socially excluded and racialized peripheries.