Becoming mangrove crab: from man in mud to a satellited cast

Abstract

The conceptual links between the crab and the people who lived on the banks of the mangrove swamp in the city of Recife were pointed out by Josué de Castro (1960), and were highlighted in his novel “Homens e Caranguejos” (Men and Crabs), in which the author uses poetic and autobiographical writing about the boy João Paulo to highlight the socio-geographical issues that were gaining momentum with the modernization of the capital of Pernambuco, highlighting the way in which the riverside populations were plagued by hunger and misery as the city expanded. Later, in the mid-1990s, the manguebit  movement returned to Josué de Castro and broke with the notion of the crab destined for death. This article seeks to discuss the shift from Josué de Castro's necessary denunciation, with the crab man doomed to misery and death, to the position of Chico Science's mangueboy whose insurgent impetus produces another experience of the city. operated by the manguebit movement, mapping the transition from the crab identity as one destined for death to the place of the crab as co-author of the city. To analyze this process, we use the concept of becoming in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to situate the ethical-aesthetic-political character of the mangrove movement as an intensifier of the power of the margins on the coast of Pernambuco.