Rio de Janeiro

city · earth

The Brazilian port and former imperial capital that received both ends of this Journey's Atlantic mechanism: it was among the largest disembarkation points in the entire transatlantic trade, and it was the destination of the internal migration from Bahia that carried Afro-Brazilian religious and musical practice south in the decades after abolition in 1888. The two facts compound. A city with a very large population of African descent, an urban geography of hillside and central tenement districts, and a state apparatus that criminalised Afro-Brazilian religion and capoeira while promoting Carnival, produced in Little Africa and the neighbourhoods around Praça Onze the conditions in which samba formed. By the 1930s the same state had inverted its position and was presenting samba as the national music of Brazil, a reversal that a Journey about cultural consequence should not smooth over: the music was made illegal and then made emblematic within the working lifetime of the people who made it.