Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The author attempts to get at much of Rio's past through the ways in which “writers, artists, and urban dwellers … perceive, remember, manipulate, and imagine” the city (p. xii). He focuses on the area called the Cidade Nova to do this. He emphasizes class and race relations as well as cultural expression over time, particularly in the era from the mid-nineteenth century through to the Estado Novo (1937–1945). It is pioneering, ambitious work, but, in terms of history, its successes are often problematic.The Cidade Nova was a new extension of Rio, built up in the early nineteenth century to facilitate travel between the monarch's country seat and the old port city, which stretched from its origins along the eastern and northern shores to the west and the south, between the hills and over the wetlands characterizing the geography. The author sees the Cidade Nova as a metaphor for the cultural and social linkages as well as the social fear and tension between the old city, center and seat of the elite and literary culture, and the masses, often Afro-Brazilian or poor white immigrants from Europe, many of whom came to make the Cidade Nova their home. While the author is successful in conveying something of these aspects of Rio's past, the informed reader may be distracted by errors and contradictions. The author's credibility is strained by his uneven management of the chronology and nature of Rio's urban expansion, his confusion between the impact and intent of policy, and his comments on Brazil's political history. More troubling still, his treatment of the Cidade Nova is surprisingly disappointing at times. Let us leave aside his determination to label the area a “Jewish neighbourhood” (p. 2 and chap. 4, passim) in the early twentieth century; that is simply untenable by his own evidence and unnecessary for the main thrust of his analysis. However, there are more dubious claims. In trying to suggest the Cidade Nova's mid-nineteenth-century political centrality, for example, he notes its proximity to the Senate, the Town Hall, the military, the mint, and a museum at the Campo da Aclamação. This is something of a strain; it simply erases the significant distinction between the campo, traditionally the limit of the old city, and the Cidade Nova. More important, it misses the obvious and greater political power associated with the Chamber of Deputies and the monarch's city palace, both in the old city's established center at the Largo do Paço and the oldest stretch of the city's port. To give another example, in trying to jam the origins of Afro-Brazilian cultural practice and impact into the Cidade Nova, he basically ignores or distorts the chronology and shifts in Afro-Brazilian urban and cultural history in the old city, the northern portside area, and the favelas by subordinating and incorporating them into the Cidade Nova's trajectory. The most egregious example is his occasional conflation of that trajectory with the history of “Little Africa” (an area that stretched from the old city and northern portside areas to the eastern beginning of the Cidade Nova, the celebrated Praça Onze).To be fair, the author was trained in literary criticism. Thus, despite the “history” in the title, one might forgive the absence of the specificity and many of the practices or concerns of historians (however often one remains impressed with the author's sampling and syntheses of historians' work). For example, his analysis of Rio's slavery, its poverty, or its working-class organization and resistance should not be compared to the now classic works — see the survey and references in June E. Hahner's Poverty and Politics: The Urban Poor in Brazil, 1870–1920 (1986) — or to newer studies on these subjects, such as Brodwyn Fischer's A Poverty of Rights (2008) or Marcelo Badaró Mattos's Escravizados e livres (2008). Nor should his study of popular cultural history be compared to, say, Martha Abreu's O império do divino (1999) or Bryan McCann's Hello, Hello Brazil (2004).Still, the author's interest in recovering the past is evident and serious. He has studied published primary sources, interviewed period survivors, consulted certain archives, and quoted primary sources from the secondary literature (indeed, the bibliography is an enviable and useful one). It is often an evocative, engaging work, reminding us, again, of the possibilities of cultural artifacts and this city's particularly rich and complex past for a variety of research. More, the book will interest and challenge specialists on Rio, of whatever discipline.