In March of 2026 Duke University Press published my first book, I’ll Samba Someplace Else: A Spatial History of Race, Ethnicity, and Displacement in São Paulo, The project draws on more than a decade of research and creative collaborations in the frenetic, magnetic city of São Paulo, Brazil. The pre-colon title of this book references “Vou Samba N’outro Lugar,” a song by São Paulo samba composer and musician Geraldo Filme about the destruction of the Largo da Banana in São Paulo.
Book Abstract
Despite its position as the provincial capital of one of formal slavery’s final frontiers in the Americas, the city of São Paulo has long been represented as a non-Black, ethnically-immigrant metropolis, distinct from the supposed true urban centers of Africa in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and Salvador in Bahia). In I’ll Samba Someplace Else, Andrew G. Britt locates the concretization of this myth in the mid-twentieth century and through the interwoven histories of three of the city’s most iconic ethnoracialized neighborhoods, popularly known as “African” Brasilândia, “Japanese” Liberdade, and “Italian” Bixiga. These ethnoracialized neighborhoods did not accrue naturally through palimpsestic urban change; nor did they emerge organically as a result of immigrant settlement patterns in former slave societies. Instead, Britt shows, they were planned, produced, and contested by an array of individuals in varied institutions, from powerful urbanist-politicians and neighborhood businessowners to celebrated samba composers and historic preservationists.
Britt follows these figures over four decades through inventive methods of spatial history, granular archival research in municipal urban planning institutions, and sustained engagement with African descendant cultural organizations in São Paulo. These approaches inform the book’s core argument: the construction of ethnoracial neighborhoods in mid-twentieth-century São Paulo served, paradoxically, to reproduce racialized inequities and bolster discourses of multicultural harmony. By interrogating the paradoxes of ethnoracial space in Brazil’s most populous, ethnoracially-diverse, and unequal city, I’ll Samba Someplace Else elucidates how popular ideologies of multiculturalism endure despite superlative levels of racialized inequity and anti-Black violence in Brazil and beyond.
Seeking Displacement Interactive Map
In parallel to the monograph, I programmed (with custom JavaScript logic) an interactive map that presents some of the histories chronicled within I’ll Samba Someplace Else. View a beta version of this map here: “Seeking Displacement: Remapping São Paulo’s Geographies of African Descent.”