Urban Erasure and the Making of Informal Activism: Rio de Janeiro through the Morro do Castelo
2021; University of Texas Press; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/lag.0.0165
ISSN1548-5811
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies
ResumoThe history of the extinction of Morro do Castelo in Rio de Janeiro has sparked renewed interest in view of the 2016 Olympic Games and recent archeological discoveries of the largest slave cemetery in Latin America. Shaped by national narratives, 1922 was the year of the Morro’s demolition and of São Paulo’s Modern Art Week, based on which Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto” would outline the foundations of a modernism inspired by indigeneity and avowing a national identity against European determinisms. The demolition of Morro do Castelo, the ground zero of Rio de Janeiro and its earliest slum tenements, epitomized spatial transformation from colony to modernity. Knocked down for the International Exhibition of the Centenary of Independence of Brazil, the morro accrues to a contingent history of colonial continuities, landscape manipulation of Rio’s iconography, and the creation of an “urban regeneration myth.” This paper looks at this symbolic erasure as the embodiment of national and social cleansing narratives applied to urban space, memory, and conceptions of landscape. Moreover, by investigating one of the earliest historical accounts of Rio’s slum tenements, I hope to shed light on this insurgent typology that might most efficiently epitomize de Andrade’s anthropophagic practice.
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