ABSTRACT
Since 2010, Rio de Janeiro’s port district has been the object of a large-scale urban intervention, called Porto Maravilha (Marvelous Port), that aims to transform this derelict post-industrial area into an upscale, mixed-use entertainment district. However, much of the area’s symbolic rebranding as Rio de Janeiro’s new cultural district ignores the port’s rich past as the landing point of the largest number of enslaved human beings in world history, as the site of Brazil’s busiest slave trade and as the cradle of some of the most iconic features of Afro-Brazilian culture, including samba, capoeira and carnival.
This chapter presents that the contemporary reconstruction of Rio’s port area acts as a spatial fiction. Its inventive scenario upholds the dominant national narrative that has long sought to erase slavery from public memory, and carefully reproduces Brazil’s self-representation as a racial democracy, thereby refusing to unearth a difficult past for fear it may upset the status quo in the national fragile hierarchical ecosystem. The chapter thus examines the use of various heritage stratagems of falsification, camouflage and mystification in the construction of a grand masquerade that sustains a hegemonic version of collective identity, through denial, appropriation and erasure. However, the chapter also demonstrates that the manipulation of memory, identity and heritage, the invention of traditions and the stretching of reality were not only instrumentalized to conceal a condemnable past, but were also appropriated as means of resistance against obliteration and silencing.
