Ghosts of empire : an ethnographic novel

This doctoral dissertation is an experimental ethnographic investigation of the political consciousness and radical modes of livelihoods of marginalized "street" populations in a postconial Latin-American city, and of their connections with the transnational flows of capital, goods, peoples, and symbols of Global Capitalism.Beginning in the streets of Salvador da Bahia in this place I call "Global Brazil", this inquiry presents a focal lens through which to examine how the structural and cultural forces of Late-Capitalism (Jameson, 1994) in a globalized world and the legacy of colonialism play out at the level of local and transnational actors' lived experiences (that is, for example, how these forces define, 'value', shape, hurt, confine, and displace bodies; but also how bodies dodge these forces, use these forces, reinvent themselves, or strategically perform their colonizer/colonized identities in a search for agency) and focuses, among other salient aspects, on the connections, dependencies, exploitation, violence, and desire between "street children", subaltern women, transnational prostitutes, (sex)tourists, sexpatriates (Seabrook, 1996) and other foreign men and women constructed as "gringo/as" in the context of Global Brazil.Written as a collage between contemporary social, cultural, and political theory and an experimental ethnographic novel (Hecht, 2006), this project explores, or at best poses certain questions about contemporary forms of domination, survival, and resistance while hoping to shed light on undertheorized aspects of our globalized late-capitalist era by investigating the perspectives of local social actors on the structural, cultural and transnational forces in which their radical livelihoods are embedded.Finally, as a work of political pedagogy, this investigation is also fundamentally preoccupied with the role of grassroots politics, research, ethnography, and global social actors---such as the author and other 'academics'--- who occupy positions of social, economic, political, and symbolic power, in collaborating with other segments of civil societies to work toward equitable alternatives to contemporary social suffering.Intertwined with the many faces, voices and stories of this ethnography, thus, readers will encounter the voice, eyes, body, experience, reflections, interrogations, doubts, pains, fears, desire, violence, hopes, defeats, desperations, and resistance of the author, who, as an individual 'articulated' (Nelson, 1999) as white, male, gringo, intellectual, transcultural, geopolitically mobile, ethnographer, and flaneur in the context of this story, constitutes a character deeply implicated in the global flows and forces that are the object of this study