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Paper short abstract

In Brazil, responses to floods reproduce racialized risk rather than solve it. Technofixes and faith in science operate as supremacist cosmotechnics, reinforcing inequalities and erasing Quilombo counter-histories, while Black and marginalized communities resist and contest these mechanisms.

Paper long abstract

In the Anthropology of Disasters, technofixes have been widely discussed and problematized. During my fieldwork in a flood-prone city in southern Brazil, I found that discourses and actions that align with this mode of disaster governance are perceived, enacted, and contested in a different way in the Global South. Carrying the terror of colonialism into the present, in a rhizomatic mixture of the multiple forms it has taken through local and global transformations, my fieldwork revealed that technologies implemented under the justification of addressing floods are: (1) operated within a precarious network of continuous, overlapping disasters that perpetuate the precarization of specific lives; (2) experienced by state agents and thus by the state itself; and (3) grounded in supremacist ideologies, erasing epistemes and cosmologies that escape the logic of whiteness, while being concealed by a discourse of neutrality and efficiency.

This paper focuses on these three points, emerging from my fieldwork in Encantado, Rio Grande do Sul, after the mapping of high flood-risk areas was used to justify the removal of residents from the city’s most impoverished and Black neighborhood. This occurs in an urban context where the Italian identity of late-nineteenth-century migrants remains symbolically and structurally present. After contextualizing this epistemo-ontological arrangement, I discuss how residents of the Navegantes neighborhood refuse to leave the place where they have lived and propose, through an understanding of body-territory as articulated by quilombola thinker Nêgo Bispo (Santos 2015), alternative ways to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) in the Anthropo/Capitallo/Plantationo/Technocene.