ABSTRACT
Over the centuries, Brazil has attracted a polyglot collection of foreign visitors responsible for creating a multitude of narratives about its peoples and landscapes. If, right up to the first decades of the 19th century, these travellers came mostly from Europe to survey and measure fauna, flora, and indigenous populations almost virgin to the “Scientific Eye” of the Enlightenment, from the second half on, the European interpretations began to be disputed as travellers from the United States “discovered” their “best neighbour from the south”. In this chapter, and in dialogue with the mobilities paradigm, I aim to examine how the cityscape of Rio, framed for both viewing and visiting, was presented as a space which was travelled yet ready for further travelling. In order to examine this imbrication between the imaginative and corporeal mobilities, I focus on two narratives that exemplify the launching of Rio de Janeiro as a cinematic tourist destination, the first Hollywood film which portrayed the city in a positive light, and Hugh Gibson’s Rio, the first travel book about Brazil’s one-time capital ever written by a US citizen. While previous discourses about Brazil either focused on the country as nothing more than a collection of exotic vegetation and animals or as a conglomeration of dusty villages with few buildings and many sombreros, both RKO’s musical and Hugh Gibson’s travel guide introduced the large US public, through Rio, to a different side of Brazil.
