The rhythms of the port: Black cultures, Atlantic dances and citizenship in Rio de Janeiro (1889-1913)

Abstract

Throughout the second half of the 19th century, the port region of Rio de Janeiro became one of the privileged living spaces for the city's low-income workers. In a country marked until 1888 by African slavery, this meant that the region would come to be characterized by a large concentration of workers of African descent, with their own cultural practices. As a result, in the early years of the 20th century, the port area was described by the press as a marginal space of the city, a decadent and degraded area, which would remain on the margins of the urban modernization effort that marked Rio de Janeiro in the early years of the 20th century – in a kind of image often reinforced by historiography about the urban world of the city, which has often treated the cultural practices of these subjects as mere survivals or resistances that would oppose the urban modernization project that was asserting itself. Conversely, this article aims to show how the inhabitants of the region were active subjects in the process of Rio de Janeiro's cultural modernization from which they are often considered excluded. Attentive to the new Atlantic fashions, they gave shape to modern dances with a strong black base that would transform the national identity itself, in a process that had its main matrix in the city's port area.