Rise Up or Die!

Andréia Beatriz Silva dos Santos is a cofounder and main organizers of Reja ou Será Morto/Reaja ou Será Morta (Rise Up or Die!). She is trained as a medical doctor.Hamilton Borges dos Santos is a cofounder and main organizers of Reja ou Será Morto/Reaja ou Será Morta (Rise Up or Die!); Hamilton is a poet, writer, amateur gardener.João H. Costa Vargas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside and the author of The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering.

“Rise Up or Die! is a fundamental work for understanding the multiple layers of the ongoing Black genocide in Brazil. But the book goes beyond denunciation—it offers a political project of reinvention, guided by the power of ancestry and by the refusal to accept death as destiny. Through an unflinching analysis of structures of power, while simultaneously sowing the seeds of a quilombist future, Andreia and Hamilton present us with a disturbing mirror for the global debate on the fight against racism. This book must be read and studied with the urgency that our time demands.” —Djamila Ribeiro

• INTRODUCTION by João Costa Vargas  31. BEGINNINGS 12 (How Andréia and Hamilton’s personal and community experiences prepared them for the formation of Rise Up in 2005, from their childhood to the consolidation of their political perspective.)Intimacy with Death  12Theater and “Os Maloqueiros”  14Belo Horizonte  19Growing Up Black in Porto Alegre, and Going to Medical School  24The Mark of Blackness  32Provocation Wednesdays  35Prisons, Carcerality, and Communitarian Cultural Action  40Grounding in Black Communities  462. PHASES  58 (The distinct phases of Rise Up, including its expansions, retractions. A description of the ways in which Rise Up went from a campaign against the genocide of Black people to a political organization.)The Cabula Massacre: Evaluating the Collective Trajectory and Moving Forward  583. FUNDAMENTALS  66(The key concepts informing the development of Rise Up, as well as the analytical perspectives that emerged out of Rise Up’s trajectory of struggle.)Creative Hatred  66A Deep Black Sadness  72A Collective Armor  75Black Transnational Love  80Vital Command  84Sequela  854. FUTURITY  90 (Rooted in yet modifying Abdias do Nascimento and Beatriz Nascimento’s concepts of Quilombismo, this final chapter focuses on Rise Up’s perspective on a desired future that is autonomous and Black affirming.)Quilombismo  90Land  95Futuristic Ancestrality  98