Article written by 2009 DPDF State Violence Fellow Jaime Amparo Alves, featured in Sociedade e cultura, Volume 12, No. 2:

The article explores the regimes of representation of young Black men in the film
City of God. The main argument is that the movie deploys pathological scripts of
Black men as criminal and deviant to disseminate meanings over black masculinity in
Brazil. The author suggests that the controlling image of Black men bodies as a source
of danger and impurity sustains Brazilian racial hegemony; ultimately, the narratives
of violence makes explicit the ways the Brazilian nation is imagined through racial
underpinning. The dual bind through which the nation is ambiguously imagined is
made explicit also in the consumption of Blackness as exotic at the same time that it
represents a threat to the national harmony. The nation is then written and re-imagined
as a racial paradise even/and mostly by inscribing death to the black body.