ABSTRACT
Rio de Janeiro’s urbanization history has been marked for over a century by the removal of the black population from desirable or visible areas of the city - not through a gradual process of gentrification, but through violent eradications. Several scholars have described the seminal moment of early 20th century urbanization in Rio as a way of disciplining the city and its poor population. However the early Republican state and the municipal authorities of Rio had little interest in disciplining black bodies for their entry into the labor market. The black population was simply considered incapable of adapting to modernity. This is an idea that prevails in public discourse until at least the late 1940s, when race discourse effectively vanished from the public sphere. In this paper I explore the notion of the incompatibility of blackness with modernity in the context of Brazil’s first “mega-event”, an International Exposition to mark its centenary of independence in 1922. I dialogue with earlier discussions by Gilroy (1993) and Iton (2008) about how blackness haunts the dreams of modernity. An analysis of the mini-city constructed to showcase the progressive nation reveals how the ordering of space marks or entrenches racial differences and racial hierarchies. I discuss how this idealized space imagined a whiter Brazil in the speeches proffered by dignitaries, in official Centennial publications and events, and in the architecture and displays of the pavilions. When mentioned at all, the black population was firmly consigned to the past. The Exposition City was, therefore, a curious space of neocolonial dominion that disavowed the presence of the dominated.
