The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics (The Latin America Readers) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822360063 ISBN 13: 9780822360063

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2016

Synopsis

Spanning a period of over 450 years, The Rio de Janeiro Reader traces the history, culture, and politics of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, through the voices, images, and experiences of those who have made the city's history. It outlines Rio's transformation from a hardscrabble colonial outpost and strategic port into an economic, cultural, and entertainment capital of the modern world. The volume contains a wealth of primary sources, many of which appear here in English for the first time. A mix of government documents, lyrics, journalism, speeches, ephemera, poems, maps, engravings, photographs, and other sources capture everything from the fantastical impressions of the first European arrivals to the complaints about roving capoeira gangs, and from sobering eyewitness accounts of slavery's brutality to the glitz of Copacabana. The definitive English-language resource on the city, The Rio de Janeiro Reader presents the "Marvelous City" in all its complexity, importance, and intrigue.

 

About this title

About the Author

Daryle Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland and the author of Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–1945, also published by Duke University Press.

Amy Chazkel is Associate Professor of History at the City University of New York, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil's Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life, also published by Duke University Press.

Paulo Knauss is Professor of History at Universidade Federal Fluminense (Niterói, Brazil) and the author of Rio de Janeiro da pacificação: Franceses e portugueses na disputa colonial.

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Rio de Janeiro Reader

History, Culture, Politics

By Daryle Williams, Amy Chazkel, Paulo Knauss

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6006-3

Contents

A Note on Translations, Spelling, and Monetary Units, 
Place-Names and Way-Finding, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: The Marvelous City, 
I Colonial Rio, 
II Imperial Rio, 
III Republican Rio, 
IV Recent Rio, 
Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing, 
Acknowledgment of Copyrights and Sources, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Colonial Rio

The history of Rio de Janeiro as a European colonial city begins in the sixteenth century. A human history of the region, however, begins earlier. A variety of allied Tupi-speaking clans, living in small villages situated among subtropical forests and wetlands, settled the region of southeastern Brazil that would give rise to a world metropolis that the Portuguese named São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro (Saint Sebastian of Rio de Janeiro). Numbering more than fifteen thousand at the turn of the sixteenth century, the Tamoios lived on the shores and islands of Guanabara Bay. These native peoples hunted, fished, and cultivated manioc, beans, and peanuts in cleared woodlands. Their human footprint produced substantial secondary-growth forests.

Although indigenous Rio was not physically or spiritually "conquered" along the lines of Aztec Tenochtitlán and Inca Cuzco, Portuguese mariners and clerics, alongside other Europeans, aspired to dominate and Christianize the natives and their lands. The outsiders' demands for brazilwood exacted a heavy toll on the landscape and its indigenous peoples. War and epidemic disease caused substantial disruption to Tamoio lifeways. In the hinterlands, thousands of Indian or other ethnic groups were forcibly settled in villages (aldeamentos), where they could be more easily overseen and converted to Catholicism. Many were periodically drafted into Rio's early colonial labor market.

The large bay that Europeans initially mistook for the mouth of a great river gave the future city its curious name, Rio de Janeiro (River of January). That name stuck as an artifact of the misapprehension typical of the colonial enterprise in the Americas. Significantly, a variant of Tupian terms for "sea" also stuck, and the European settlers adopted the word "Guanabara" for a bay surrounded by impressive topographic features, many named after Catholic saints. A river that ran from the Tijuca forests into the bay acquired the toponym "Carioca," understood by many linguists to be Tupi for "white man's house." Rio's spectacular "natural" landscape was born from this combination of indigenous local knowledge, the aspirations of early modern Europeans, and the expansion of the Christian faith.

Portuguese sailors are believed to have first entered Guanabara Bay in 1502, two years after the first contact with Amerindians residing near present-day Porto Seguro, Bahia. Although precious metals were not found anywhere near the bay, the width and depth of the body of water, its multitude of small islands and inlets, and the bounty of nearby forested lands made it attractive for colonial enterprise. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese experimented with various largely unsuccessful modes of indirect dominion over lands between the Atlantic Ocean and the line of demarcation drawn in 1494 between Castile and Portugal. In 1549 the Portuguese Crown assumed direct control of all Brazil under a form of royal administration that paralleled

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822360063
• ISBN 13: 9780822360063
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 408
• Editor: Williams Daryle, Chazkel Amy, Knauss De Mendonça Paulo