The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images ― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
The image of Rio de Janeiro as a place of global commerce and investment, vibrant multiculturalism, and erotic play is intimately tied to claims about its value as a venue for the approaching mega-events. Mediated by the spectacular imagery of Olympic advertisements sponsored by the Olympic Public Authority (APO) and municipal, state, and national government, the Olympic brand reaches viewers in Brazil and abroad. The role of imagery as a form of branding and commodification of a specific place has been essential both to the initial win of the Olympic bidding process, and to the construction of Rio as a place worthy of investment in the context of the approaching games.
The criteria for a successful Olympic bid by a city are volatile, and the concomitant voting process is frequently subjected to allegations of corruption. Crucial criteria include the presentation of the city as worthy and capable of the massive infrastructural modifications of Olympic renovation, and convincing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that security, effective transport, and housing will be assured. Olympic-themed advertisements attempt the careful association of these key elements with the city as a
space for capitalist development, as seen in a 2011 advertisement sponsored by the state of Rio de Janeiro (Fig. 2). It juxtaposes the language of “infrastructure, logistics, and effective public administration” with images of industry, commerce, and the unique topography of the city of Rio, suggesting the role of ‘institutional security’ and ‘transparent public administration’ in assuring Rio’s readiness to receive capital investments from the world (
Foreign Policy 2011).
The notion that Rio is a global city, a “key location” for industry and markets, has been essential to constructing its value and viability as an Olympic venue. Portrayed as a new link in the global network of “Olympic villages,” the city’s market value is produced in part through its role as one of many “command points in the organization of the world economy” (Sassen 2006:7). In its efforts to win the Olympic bid by producing itself as one of these “global cities,” the governmental bodies of Rio de Janeiro, including the Olympic Public Authority (APO) and state administration, have emphasized the need for facilitating ‘flows’ of ‘global capital’.
In setting the stage for the mega-event, they have made clear the prioritization of infrastructure to enable access to markets and the creation of opportunities for injection of money into the market through lodging, restaurants, and other activities, in what is regarded by financial planners as a ‘safe environment for capital’ (Schwambach 2011). By asserting its capability to host sporting mega-events, the state-market apparatus tied to the Rio games envisions its advocacy efforts as taking place at the very level of the brand invoked in the image of Rio De Janeiro.
Mazzarella (2003:185) suggests that the formation of the ‘brand’ over time is central in the spread of consumerist ideologies that have trans-regional appeal. He points to the semiotic capacity of a well-executed brand to lend ‘performative credibility’ to a commodity by emphasizing stability and consistency, the capacity to bridge the local and the universal, and through the creation of ‘personalities’. Alongside this understanding of the brand as a temporally mediated phenomenon, Tsing’s (2005) notion of an ‘economy of appearances’ provides a useful model for understanding the ‘value’ of a place for international finance capital.
Produced at the level of image and investor desire, lofty promises form the basis for courting the confidence of the market. Hosting mega-events has thus been described as a means by which a city seeks to “become ‘sticky’, attracting and maintaining capital investments through “the promotion of selective place information (Hall, C.M., 2005; qtd. in Sassen 2006: 59). The growing purchase of Brazil’s foreign debt in exchange for interest is frequently the subject of national branding tactics that court foreign investments.
As part of these tactics, the Olympic brand works as a set of strategic images that emblematize its host city as a site for the linkage of the global and local, and the locus of peaceful, multi-cultural sporting spectacle. The 2016 APO have put great effort into the creation of the Olympic brand. The logo for the games (Fig. 3), the product of a team of dozens of designers and marketing experts (along with an official Olympic font), reflects a particular ideal of Brazil that is consistent with a longstanding trend in Brazilian nationalist imagery, with its roots in colonial slave plantations, that Goldstein (2003) refers to as “color-blind erotic democracy.” As I later explain, the myth of ‘racial democracy’ in Brazil has long stood to mask deep-seated racial inequalities and everyday forms of structural violence. The ‘eroticism’ of the national brand draws upon imagery of sexual playfulness and adventure.
Fig. 2. Accept Rio’s Invitation: Come Invest Here
This advertisement combines distinctive images of the city Rio with imagery of global communication and trade, suggesting its role as a node in a transnational network of cities as centers of industry and commerce. Infrastructure and security are foregrounded as the basis for successful business investment. The fact that the ad is sponsored by the state government, yet features the city and nearby industry, foregrounds the pre-eminence of the city as also a ‘command center’ for the rest of the state (Foreign Policy 2011).
As portrayed during the symbolic torch passing during the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, this nationalized eroticism typically references the barely clad female bodies of carnival. The logo employs the city as an icon for civic and national pride in the ‘carioca culture’ of Rio de Janeiro. Simultaneously, the image strives to emphasize Rio’s place as a node within a global network of cities.
Three figures composed of the colors of the national flag link hands in playful friendship, forming the shape of Rio’s unmistakable sugarloaf mountain. These elements are ingeniously combined into a logo that reflects the iconic national colors, racial co-mingling, and the oft-remarked topographic beauty of Rio as a space of revelry and global camaraderie.
Carioca, originating from the autochthonous Tupi language, is a term used to describe a person born or residing in the city or broader metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro. It is frequently employed as a term of pride or distinction, especially in its association with the origins of famous genres of music and dance including Bossa Nova, Música Popular Brasileira, and Tropicália. Participation in civic events, including the enormous annual Carnival emphasizes what is thought of as the unique character of the city. People of diverse class backgrounds consider participation in the festivities of dance and music practically compulsory.
Notions of the carefree nature of play, of a relaxed carioca attitude, and the value of futebol as a national symbol, are readily employed in the imagery of advertisements. In a video from the official Rio 2016 website, a light-skinned, adolescent girl who introduces herself as Ana offers to show us the Maracaña zone, a newly branded section of the city named for the huge stadium at its center. The camera zooms out to present to us a panoramic view of the stadium’s renovation works. “Everything is changing fast around here!” she tells us with excitement, as the video accelerates to show her walking around the area at warp speed. “And in 2015, it will be ready to receive more cruise ships, which will increase our accommodation capacity.”
Fig. 3. Rio 2016 logo
Designed by a Brazilian company and unveiled in 2010, the logo was organized around four tropes: “contagious energy, harmonious diversity, exuberant nature and Olympic spirit.” The logo suggests the distinctive topography of Rio combined with representations of global linkage and camaraderie (rio2016.org).
She continues, “Already, everything is ready. The only thing we are still missing: YOU!” The advertisement paints an exuberant and child-like image of the games to come, while emphasizing infrastructural developments. The image of Rio is here produced as a utopian space of exuberance, in accordance with President Lula’s promises that the games would be filled with Brazilian ‘passion, energy, and creativity’ (BBC 2009).
The 2016 games are being branded in ways that not only create international appeal, but also play upon local desires that cross-cut barriers of class, race, and position. As an opportunity to showcase idealized aspects of Brazil, and an excuse for undertaking large-scale industrial and public works projects, the games stand as sites of simultaneous and frequently contradictory spaces of civic participation.
On the one hand, the games stand for moradores (residents) as an opportunity for national camaraderie, and a site of civic participation. Residents frequently articulate the belief that the games are a good thing, and a positive development for Brazil, and that is their implementation, not their spirit, that has resulted in disproportionate negative effects for the poor. On the other hand, the Copa and Olympic events simultaneously become sites for resistance against what are understood variously as bureaucratic corruption, hegemonic transnational capitalist interests, and racist exploitation. The outrage of resistors within the favelas is thus framed in ways that do not necessarily object to sporting mega-events as whole, but rather bemoan their exclusion from the games as civic participants and beneficiaries (see Fig. 4).
Fig. 4. “Destroying my Community for the sake of the Copa”
Metrô- Mangueira c. 2012. Street art in Metrô- Mangueira juxtaposing symbolic participation in national sport with imagery of demolition, sadness, and death (rioonwatch.org).
Branding has extended not only to imagery projected internationally through the media, but has also participated at the level of urban restructuring itself. The Porto Maravilha (“marvelous port”), and Bairro Carioca (“carioca neighborhood”) projects, as part of the nationally sponsored infrastructural overhauls of the city, are exemplary of these newly ‘branded’ spaces which first emerged during preparations for the 2007 Pan-American games.
One interpretation of the role of these branded neighborhoods is as a normalizing influence, a propagandistic portrayal of positive development in spaces that are deeply fraught. In this understanding, the images reflect discourses that are bluntly disjunctive with the lived material experience of development. While partially accurate, I suggest that this reading elides the performative element of these brands, as playing upon elements of carioca pride that amount to more than simple deception. Importantly, they reflect shared desires for civic participation, which have not been eradicated but are instead situated as sites for rational capitalist development.
The release of Olympic City themed Monopoly game (Fig. 5) is another, somewhat startling example of a branded product that carries the triumphalist imagery of Olympic sport and infrastructural development as playful and peaceful initiatives. Announced in early 2013, the game brazenly touts the connection of private profits to public projects and the branding of the city’s zones in conjunction with the Olympics. The effect is a reduction of contradictory, violent and long-term processes of spatial restructuring to the realm of the innocuous, the game. In this process, ‘truth’ is not simply displaced by fictional representations. Rather, the very terms of growth and progress are reproduced as commodities. The desire for inclusion in the space of the city is produced as the desire for the commodity form, deeply imbricated with emerging regimes of law and political economy.
Fig. 5. Banco Imobiliário (Olympic Monopoly)
Olympic Monopoly: Infrastructure and pacification projects are included as essential elements, as players race to invest in branded Olympic zones in pursuit of private monopoly over the Olympic City. An actual game card reads: “Your property value has gone up with the pacification of the neighboring community. Receive R$75,000.” The city government has been criticized for its purchase of 20,000 copies of the game for distribution in local schools (Conexão Jornalismo 2013).
As a way of broadly describing a trend that has developed within the institutions of the IMF and World Bank, guided first and most notably by the hand of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the 1970s and ‘80s, the term neoliberalism reflects distinct historical developments of government. Privatization, deregulation and state austerity have appeared as pervasive demands in the spread of these institutions’ policies and practice.
The specificity of the term ‘neoliberalism’ must be emphasized, as it is frequently misused as a catchall for contemporary stereotypes of capitalism, development, and state cronyism. I use the term to describe, specifically, the incorporation and reproduction of ‘free market’ ideologies with state regimes, where government comes to serve as an agent, rather than regulator, of capital.
As the period of intense economic growth under the military dictatorship of 1964—1985 drew to a close and political democracy returned, Brazil’s economic future seemed uncertain. The 1980s in Brazil have been termed ‘the lost decade’ by political economists, as a period of ‘sluggish growth’ and increasing inflation in the context of a “crisis of the import-substitution-industrialization model of development” (Novelli and Galvão 2001:5-6). The antidote to this period of slow growth appeared as Brazil entered into broader processes of political and economic change which Auyero and de Lara (2012), borrowing from Polanyi (1944), have termed the ‘great neoliberal transformation’ in Latin America. This transition to ‘free market ideology’ as an abertura (‘opening up’) to foreign markets was emblematized by the December 1989 election of Fernando Collor de Mello. Mello’s presidential inauguration speech promised a shift towards privatization, state cutbacks, and deregulated markets. He argued, “The state did not merely lose its ability to invest, but what is even more serious, due to its erratic and corrupt conduct, it inhibited domestic and foreign investment. I believe that fundamentally it is up to free initiative - not the state - to create wealth and dynamize the economy…” (Novelli and Galvão 2001: 7).
The abertura occurred in conjunction with of the contemporaneous acceptance by Brazil, and most other states in Latin America, of the “Washington Consensus” (Amann and Baer 2002: 946). This constituted a set of prescriptions designed in Washington D.C., which, with the endorsement of the IMF and World Bank, promoted state policies that promoted trade liberalization, privatization, opening to foreign investment, and austerity measures. These strategies were framed by arguments of the ethical superiority of ‘free markets’ over regulated ones.
During the rule of the Mello’s administration, and the subsequent Cardoso administration of the 1995-2003, these promises would largely be fulfilled. The institution of the plano real (“real plan”) introduced a new currency (the real) and was designed to stabilize inflation. Over the course of the 1990s, Brazil experienced a huge inflow of foreign investment, most of it geared towards privatization connected to bank takeovers and the expansion of ‘production facilities’ (Amann and Baer 2002: 949). For a moment, the ideal of global integration appeared to be achieved, as Brazil’s economy seemed to flourish in its connectivity to the global market, while the state largely retreated from its role of economic governance. However, as the plano real began to fail and massive inflation returned, the Brazilian economy was plunged once again into financial crisis in 1999. Exacerbated by this crisis, Brazil’s economy was seen to reflect another common trope of neoliberalism, in the increasing gap between the material conditions of rich and poor. As noted by Caldeira and Holston (1999) a general increase in urban violence was also observed from 1990 to 1999.
In the early 2000s, the election of president Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva (ironically a former labor organizer and leftist) under the Worker’s Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT), ushered in the next stage in Brazilian neoliberalism. Lula continued to encourage increases in foreign investment, amid promises to fix Brazil’s inflation and expanded foreign debt. He also agreed to continue contracts signed with the IMF by the previous Cardoso administration, which guaranteed privatization of banks in exchange for billions of dollars in development loans (Mollo and Saad-Filho 2004; n.p.). His successor, Dilma Rousseff (also a former leftist) was elected in 2011 and has thus far continued state policies of privatization and austerity, despite her public denunciation of ‘neoliberal’ policies at the World Social Forum (Mellen 2012).
The specificity of the character of the current administration as a neoliberal one, and of the term as a useful analytic, is a point I consider worthy of further interrogation. Ferguson’s (2009) distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism is a good place to begin in identifying the utility of the term. He writes,
[Liberalism] was always about finding the right balance between two spheres understood as properly distinct, if always related: state and market, public and private, the realm of the king and the proper domain of the merchant. Neoliberalism, in contrast, puts governmental mechanisms developed in the private sphere to work within the state itself, so that even core functions of the state are either subcontracted out to private providers, or run (as the saying has it) ‘like a business’ (Ferguson 2009: 172).
Under such conditions, the market appears to administer the state, in direct inversion of the liberal notion of a state-regulated market (Morris 2001: 192).
‘Neoliberalism’ as a set of ideologies must be heuristically separated from its practice as a constitutive regime of government. Ideologically, Harvey (2005:2) understands neoliberalism as suggesting that human well being is best served by ‘liberating’ an ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit. In this understanding, it is through competitions and markets that human liberation is sought. Neoliberalism in actual practice, as privatization, austerity, and deregulation, represents a set of active institutional interventions that function rationally to guarantee the legal rights of corporations, as seen in the formation of its political regimes (Oksala 2011:478).
Contrary to conservative discourse in the US, it does not promote laissez-faire policy, but works positively as an agent for facilitating the growth of markets. Neoliberalism must be understood not only as discourse but also as sets of practices that occur at the level of basic political orientations and the production of social categories. This constitutive political and social role of the state-market nexus may be suggestive of a new ‘neoliberal governmentality’ (Foucault 2008 [1979]), which I investigate further in chapter two.
Cultural practices and political economy comingle in ways that reflect a highly disjunctive relationship between ‘global’ economic trends and regional, national, and local encounters with these trends (Appadurai 1990). In Rio, such an observation perhaps helps to explain the ways in which neoliberalism may be at once decried, as in President Dilma Rousseff’s comment at the 2012 World Social, and simultaneously technically and structurally supported by her administration. It helps us to understand deep disjunctures between regimes of value formation between the residents of slums and capitalists. And further, it enables us to imagine ways in which multi-polar relationships may be formed that do not match a simple dichotomy of global and local. I suggest that all of these elements are in play as forms of state and non-state governance facilitate the growth of private profits in preparations for the 2016 games.
As private contractors in Rio de Janeiro rush to complete construction projects in preparation for the 2014 Soccer World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, international investment firms and state press releases express an intense excitement regarding the influx of foreign capital that will soon be funneled into the city in the form of foreign investments and tourism. Competing for state funds, private contractors vie for the rights to secure the profits associated with these investments. A three-tiered structure of government presides in Brazil at the national, state, and municipal levels, and all three are involved in funding infrastructural upgrades in preparation for the games, largely through private contracts.
The Brazilian national government has approved the expenditure, staggeringly, of more than R$1.5 trillion on its national Programs for Growth Acceleration (PAC), a set of ‘comprehensive’ infrastructural development initiatives. This includes investments of over R$30 billion in Rio de Janeiro alone, much of which will be funneled into private contracts. The first PAC was launched in 2007 by the Lula administration, and has been continued as PAC-2 under the Rousseff administration. A press release for the 2011-2014 PAC-2, which added R$958 billion (US $526 billion) to the existing PAC, gave the following details regarding the allocation of funds:
Just like in the first phase of the program, the plan is focused on investments in the areas of Logistics, Energy and Social-Urban, unfolded into six major fronts: Better City (urban infrastructure), Citizen Community (safety and social inclusion), My House, My Life (housing), Water and Light for All (sanitation and access to electric energy for remote locations), Energy (renewable energy, oil and gas) and Transports (highways, railways, airports, among others) (Brasil.gov.br).
About half of this money will go to energy investment projects, while just under a third (“housing”) will go towards ‘reducing the housing deficit, loans, and urbanization of precarious settlements’. This includes massive changes to Rio’s favelas in the form of infrastructural projects, ranging from street lights to the construction of cable cars. As I later detail, the utility of the projects for residents is far from transparent, while their benefits to private capital appear obvious.
Among the several Olympic zones being constructed is the Olympic Village, a complex intended to house many of the athletes and some of the most heavily attended ceremonies. Massive renovations are under way in the Porto Maravilha (Marvelous Port) zone, including the construction of a new modern art museum, creation of new and broader avenues and massive upgrades to shipping infrastructure. The Maracaña zone, centrally located, is the site of numerous shopping malls and plazas, as well as its namesake, the largest stadium and event venue. Connecting it all is a new bus rapid transit (BRT) system, a key component of transport infrastructure widely touted as part of necessary urban upgrades. The overall estimated costs of the Olympics and its concomitant infrastructural projects in Rio are massive. Expenditures have increased from 2009 estimates of R$23.9 billion to R$41.5 billion today (Olympic Public Authority, 2013).
Several large corporations stand to profit directly and substantially from the upcoming sporting mega-events in 2014 and 2016. Among them, Metrô Rio, Electrobras, and Chemtech industries are named as ‘companies to watch’ in a state sponsored advertising supplement featured in The Economist magazine. These corporations, as instrumental to the implementation of the PACs, have also managed to shape mega-events in ways that position them as powerful administrative actors. Later in this chapter, I detail the specific modes through which private capital comes to occupy a central role in the administration of these mega-events. First, though, I diverge in order to illustrate another, parallel history which, while deeply entangled with trans-regional processes, is frequently overshadowed by the political-economic history of the national and global scales.Continued on Next Page »
“2010 Census: 11.4 million Brazilians (6.0%) live in subnormal agglomerates.” Dec. 21 2011. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. http://www.ibge.gov.br/english/presidencia/noticias/noticia_impressao.php?id_noticia=2057=1.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Albro, Robert. 2005. “ ‘The Water is Ours, Carajo!’ Deep Citizenship in Bolivia’s Water War” In Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader. Blackwell 2005.
Amann, Edmund, and Baer, Werner. 2002. "Neoliberalism and its Consequences in Brazil". Journal of Latin American Studies. 34 (4): 945-959.
Amin, A. 2004. Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place. Geografiska Annaler. B 86, 33–44.
Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. 1991. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Middlesbrough: Theory, Culture and Society.
Aquino, Jessica. and Andereck, Kathleen. Nov 14, 2012. "NGOs and Volunteer Tourism: A Look at Volunteer Tourism in Favela (Slum) Communities of Rio de Janeiro"Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ARNOVA Annual Conference, Hyatt Regency Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p581841_index.html
Arias, Enrique Desmond. 2004. "Faith in Our Neighbors: Networks and Social Order in Three Brazilian Favelas". Latin American Politics &Amp; Society. 46 (1): 1-38.
---. 2006. "The Myth of Personal Security: Criminal Gangs, Dispute Resolution, and Identity in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas". Latin American Politics and Society. 48 (4): 53-81.
Auyero, J. 2010. Visible fists, clandestine kicks, and invisible elbows. Three forms of regulating neoliberal poverty. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 8: 5–26.
Auyero J., and de Lara A.B. 2012. "In harm's way at the urban margins". Ethnography. 13 (4): 531-557.
Bale, John, and Mette Krogh Christensen. 2004. Post-Olympism? questioning sport in the Twenty-first century. Oxford, Eng: Berg. http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=243520.
Bazely, Oliver. August 3 2010. Favela Living: A Vidigal Viewpoint. The Rio Times. http://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-real-estate/favela-living-the-view-from-vidigal/
Benmuri, Leandro D. 2012. Housing Development: Housing Policy, Slums, and Squatter Settlements in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1948-1973. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. University of Maryland.
Camus, Marcel, et al. 1999. Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus). [Irvington, NY]: Criterion Collection.
“Brazil announces phase two of the Growth Acceleration Program” (Press Release). March 29, 2010. Portal Brasil. http://www.brasil.gov.br/para/press/press-releases/march/brazil-announces-phase-two-of-the-growth-acceleration-program/br_model1?set_language=en
Brisolla, Fabio. Transl. by Tatiana Jardim. Feb 21 2013. “Favela resident is ‘super plugged’ into the Internet, research says.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6847
Caldeira, T.P.R. 2000. City of walls: crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Caldeira T.P.R. and Holston J. 1999. Democracy and violence in Brazil. Comparative Studies in Society and History 41(4): 691–729.
Carvalho, F. S. and Benedicto, J.L.L. October 4-6, 2011. Os Jogos Olímpicos e a Copo do Mundo: Impactos nas Favelas do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Powerpoint Presentation. Grupo consolidado de investigación MEDAMERICA, Universitat de Barcelona.
Carvalho, Maria A.R. de et al. 1998. Cultura política e cidadania: uma proposata de metodologia de avaliação do programa Favela-Bairro. Unpublished mss. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro.
Clark, T. J. 1985. The painting of modern life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers. New York: Knopf.
Clarke, Felicity. Jan 7 2013. “Barreira do Vasco Seeks Sanitation Improvements from Morar Carioca.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6478
Collier S. 2005. The Spatial Forms and Social Norms of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”: Toward a Substantive Analytics. International Affairs Working Paper. New York: New School University.
Comaroff J and Comaroff J. 2001. Millennial capitalism: First thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12(2):291–343
Comissão de Moradores Atingidos Pela Transoeste. Dec 17, 2012. O Legado Somos Nós: A História de Francisca. Witness. Video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=02aM4yWyRB4#.
Comite Populario. “A CIDADE É NOSSA! Veja as imagens do ato noMaracanã” March 19, 2013. Comite Populario. http://comitepopulario.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/a-cidade-e-nossa-veja-as-imagens-do-ato-no-maracana/
Cosentino, Renato. Transl. by Rachel Fox et al. Feb 26, 2013. “Largo do Tanque: One More Summary Removal for the Rio Olympics.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6980.
Davis, Mike. 2004. Planet of slums. New Left Review 26: 5–34.
Davis, Mike, and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds. 2007. Evil paradises: dreamworlds of neoliberalism. New York: New Press.
DOW Chemical Company. October 2012. Rio Sustainable City Project. Video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ny6WRzGq1A
Duncan, Nancy. 1996. “Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in Public and Private Spaces,” in Nancy Duncan, (Ed.), Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality. New York: Routledge.
Egozi, Arie. 9 Dec 2010. “Brazil selects Elbit's Hermes 450 UAV.” Flightglobal.com. http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/brazil-selects-elbits-hermes-450-uav-350793/
Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of dispossession: NGOs, economic development, and the state in Cairo. Durham: Duke University Press. Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, James.1994. The anti-politics machine: "development," depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
---. 2010. "The Uses of Neoliberalism". Antipode. 41 (Supplement): 166-184.
---. 2012. “Structures of Responsibility” Ethnography. vol. 13 no. 4.
"Finance". February 16, 2009. Rio de Janeiro 2016 Candidate File. Brazilian Olympic Committee. Accessed March 10, 2013. http://urutau.prodrj.gov.br
Fischer, Brodwyn M. 2008. A poverty of rights: citizenship and inequality in twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel, and Michel Senellart. 2008. The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan.
Freire-Medeiros, B. 2009. "The favela and its touristic transits". Geoforum. 40 (4): 580-588.
Friedman, Thomas L. 2005. The world is flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gaffney, Christopher. 2010. "Mega-events and socio-spatial dynamics in Rio de Janeiro, 1919-2016". Journal of Latin American Geography. 9 (1): 7-29.
Goldstein, Donna M. 2003. Laughter out of place : race, class, violence, and sexuality in a Rio Shantytown University of California Press.
Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave.
Greene, S. J. 2003. 'Staged cities: mega-events, slum clearance, and global capital', Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal 6: 161–187.
Hall, C. Michael. 2006. "Urban entrepreneurship, corporate interests and sports mega‐events: the thin policies of competitiveness within the hard outcomes of neoliberalism." The Sociological Review 54, no. s2: 59-70.
Harvey D.1985. The urbanization of capital: studies in the history and theory of capitalist urbanization. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.
---. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
---. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53.
Haussmann, Georges Eugène, Françoise Choay, Bernard Landau, and Vincent Sainte Marie Gauthier. 2000. Mémoires. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Holston, James.1989. The modernist city: an anthropological critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
---. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Horne, John, and Wolfram Manzenreiter. 2006. “An Introduction to the sociology of sports mega-events.” In Sports mega-events: social scientific analyses of a global phenomenon. Horne J., and Manzenreiter,W. ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub./Sociological Review.
Huggins, Martha. 1998. Political Policing: The United States and Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jackson, Michael. 1996. They don't care about us. New York: Epic.
Jeter, Jon. 2003 “Death squads feed terror in Rio slums.” Seattle Times, October 27.
Joyce, P. 2003. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso.
Kaiser, Anna.“ Feb 7 2013. ‘The most important fight in our community is being recognized as normal people’ — an interview with Iara Oliveira of City of God.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6768
Keane, Webb. 2003. "Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Geneology," CSSH.
Klein, Naomi. 2007. The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.
Kumar, Ashok. April 12, 2012. “Want to cleanse your city of its poor? Host the Olympics.” Ceasefire. http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/olympics-opportunity-cleanse-city/
Latour, B. 1988. How to write The Prince for machines as well as machinations. In B. Elliott (ed.), Technology and social process, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The production of space. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell.
Pirez, P. 2002. Buenos Aires: Fragmentation and privatization of the metropolitan city. Environment and Urbanization 14(1): 145–158.
Maciel, Fernanda. February 2013. “White Flow.” http://www.fernandamaciel.es/en/white-flow/
MacKay, Duncan. Dec 6, 2010. “Wikileaks document expose US fears for Rio 2016 Olympics.” Inside the Games. http://www.insidethegames.biz/olympics/summer-olympics/2016/11270-wikileaks-document-shows-us-fears-for-rio-2016
Marinho, G. and Flor, K. 2013. “The Favela Today is the Soul of Business.” Rio on watch. Accessed March 10, 2013. .
Marinho, Roberto. Transl. Rachel Fox. Dec. 4, 2012. “The Story of a Family From Morro da Providência.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6104
Mazzarella, William. 2003. Shoveling smoke: advertising and globalization in contemporary India. Durham: Duke University Press. McFarlane C and Rutherford J (2008) Political infrastructures: Governing and experiencing the fabric of the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(2).
Mellen, Tom. “Rousseff slams 'failed' neoliberal doctrines.” Jan. 21 2012. http://morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/114697
Mendes, Wilson. June 25, 2012. “Moradores do conjunto habitacional Bairro Carioca, em Triagem, terão transporte na porta de casa.” Globo. http://extra.globo.com/noticias/rio/moradores-do-conjunto-habitacional-bairro-carioca-em-triagem-terao-transporte-na-porta-de-casa-5306411.html
Merrifield A. 2002. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. New York: Routledge.
Mier, Brian. 2013. Rio Militarises Its Favela Slums in Preparation for the 2014 World Cup. Vice Magazine (online). Accessed March 8, 2013. http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/rio-militarizes-its-favela-slums-in-preparation-for-the-2014-world-cup
Mollo Maria L.R., and Saad-Filho, Alfredo. 2004. “The Neoliberal Decade: Reviewing the Brazilian Economic Transition.” http://actuelmarx.u-paris10.fr/m4mollo.htm#_edn1
Morris, Rosalind C. 2001. “Modernity’s Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand.” In Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. Millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. [Durham, N.C]: Duke University Press.
Neri, Pricila. August 13, 2012. The Debating Chamber - Brazil residents face evictions ahead of 2016 Olympics. Witness. http://www.trust.org/alertnet/blogs/the-debating-chamber/brazil-residents-face-evictions-ahead-of-2016-olympics-witness/
Novelli, J.M.N., Galvão A. 2001. "The Political Economy of Neoliberalism in Brazil in the 1990s". International Journal of Political Economy. 31 (4): 3-52.
Nuijten, Monique. 2013. “The perversity of the ‘Citizenship Game’: Slum-upgrading in the urban periphery of Recife, Brazil.” Critique of Anthropology vol. 33 no. 1 8-25.
Oksala, J. 2011. Violence and Neoliberal Governmentality. Constellations, 18:474–486. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8675.2011.00646.x
Oliveira, Ney dos Santos.1997. Race, class and the political mobilization of the poor: ghettos in New York and favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholoars.
---. 2002 “Direito dos negros: distribuição racial, pobreza e moradia na região metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro,” in Anais XXI Encontro e VI Congresso Arquisur. Salvador: Faculdade de Arquitetura, Universidade Federal da Bahia.
Padilha, José, et al. 2008. Tropa de elite (Elite squad). [New York, N.Y.]: Weinstein Co. Home Entertainment.
Perlman, Janice E. 2010. Favela: four decades of living on the edge in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ponce, Leonel. July 10, 2011. “Cable Car System Crowns Urban Revitalization Project in Rio de Janeiro's Alemão Favelas” Inhabit. http://inhabitat.com/cable-car-system-crowns-urban-revitalization-project-in-rio-de-janeiros-alemao-favela-complex/pac-alemao-rio-de-janeiro-infrastructure-01/#sthash.ui6naw9N.dpuf
Pun, Ngai. 2005. Made in China: women factory workers in a global workplace. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press.
‘Relatório da União acusa operação policial no Rio de "execução sumária"” Folha Online, January 11 2007. Relatório da União acusa operação policial no Rio de "execução sumária" http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/cotidiano/ult95u341949.shtml
‘Rio de Janeiro: Gearing up for the Games.” (Advertising Supplement) 2011. Foreign Policy. Peninsula Press. www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_images/brazilnew.pdf
Rio Lei Organica do Município. [Lei Orgânica (1990)] 2010. Rio Lei Orgânica do Município. - 2. ed. rev. e ampl. - Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Estudos da Procuradoria-Geral do Município.
Rio Prefeitura. “Today, Tomorrow, and Forever.” Cidade Olímpica. Accessed March 5, 2013. http://www.cidadeolimpica.com.br/en/today-tomorrow-and-forever/
“Rio to Stage 2016 Olympic Games.” October 2 2009. BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympic_games/8282518.stm
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press.
Roche, M. 2000. Mega Events and Modernity. London: Routledge.
Rodgers D. 2012. "Haussmannization in the tropics: Abject urbanism and infrastructural violence in Nicaragua". Ethnography. 13 (4): 413-438.
Salles, Walter, et al. 2003. Cidade de Deus (City of God). [São Paulo, Brazil]: O2 Filmes.
Sassen, Saskia.1991. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
---. 2000. Cities in a world economy. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Pine Forge Press.
Scheper-Hughes N and Bourgois P (eds). 2004. Violence in War and Peace. Malden, MA:
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
---. 1995. "The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology". Current Anthropology. 36 (3): 409-440.
Schwambach, Karin. 2011. Mega-events in Rio de Janeiro and Their Influence on the City Planning. 15th International Planning History Conference.
Steiker-Ginsberg, Kate. March 22 2013. “Vila Autódromo Under Pressure from City to Accept Resettlement Housing.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=7832
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: an ethnography of global connection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Twine, France Winddance. 1998. Racism in a racial democracy: the maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
“UPPs do Jacarezinho e de Manguinhos serão inauguradas nesta quarta-feira.” Jan 15 2013. O Dia. http://odia.ig.com.br/portal/rio/upps-do-jacarezinho-e-de-manguinhos-ser%C3%A3o-inauguradas-nesta-quarta-feira-1.535901
Vanwynsberghe, R., Surborg, B., and Wyly, E. 2012. When the Games Come to Town: Neoliberalism, Mega-Events and Social Inclusion in the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01105.x
Vargas, João. 2006. "When a Favela Dared to Become a Gated Condominium". Latin American Perspectives. 33 (4): 49-81.
---. 2012. "Gendered antiblackness and the impossible Brazilian project: Emerging critical black Brazilian studies". Cultural Dynamics. 24 (1): 3-11.
Walker, Lucy, et al. 2011. Waste land. [London]: Almega Projects.
Zaluar, Alba and Marcos Alvito (eds.). 1999. Um século de favela. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getúlio Vargas
Endnotes
- I.e., Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus; [1959]); Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad; 2007); Cidade de Deus (City of God; 2002)
- I.e. Waste Land (2011), a look at a favela in Rio built by catadores (trashpickers)
- I.e.,“Rio Sustainable City Project” (2012). The video was produced by DOW Chemical Company, a major sponsor of the 2012 London Games and a contractor for present infrastructural development projects in Rio.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a popular console video game, features a sequence in which players raid a favela, shooting ‘terrorists’ and arms dealers.
- I.e., Michael Jackson’s controversial music video “They Don’t Care About Us.”
- I.e., Arias 2004, 2006; Caldeira 2000; Carvalho 2011; Fischer 2008; Freire-Medeiros 2009; Gaffney 2010; Holston 1989, 2008; Goldstein 2003; Nuijten 2013; Oliveira 1997, 2002; Perlman 2010; Scheper-Hughes 1992, 1995; Schwambach 2011; Twine 1998; Vargas 2006, 2012; Zaluar 1999
- The role of the Olympic bid as mode of jockeying for geopolitical status of Rio as a city, and Brazil as a nation, are apparent in a leaked memo from Lisa Kubiske,Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States Mission in Brazil. Rio’s status is here produced not only by concrete economic forces, but also through the production of its reputation and perceptions of ‘primacy’ (Mackay 2010). Citing then president Lula’s remark that Brazil has ended its ‘street dog complex’, newly assured of its status as an important country, the memo remarks on the importance of IOC recognition of a city and a nation for perceptions of its ability to ‘deal with the global financial crisis’ and to compete with North American, European, and Asian cities who lost the Olympic bidding process, itself a long and cost-intensive process for the competing nations.
- As I later illustrate, the APO is made up of a group of businessmen and politicians, appointed by the IOC to oversee the entirety of the Olympic process. This includes the distribution of national and municipal funds, marketing of the events, and coordination with state-controlled military police securitization.
- The consistent use of female images as the font of Brazilian eroticism portrays part of a broader culture of patriarchy machismo, in which the interests and sexual preferences of heterosexual males are seen to take political precedence.
- A woman working as a live-in maid at my hosts’ house in São Paulo explained her carioca origins as the source of her distinct mannerisms, appearance, and accent, as compared to paulistanos. A degree of related civic chauvinism was apparent on the part of my middle-class hosts. Once when I had difficulty understanding the maid, mainly due to my poor Portuguese, their daughter interjected, “She’s carioca;, of course no one can understand!” This comment in fact probably had much more to do with class, and this woman’s origin in Rio’s favelas, than it did the intelligibility of carioca accents in general, as much of the national news and media is based in Rio and bears its vernacular and accent.
- Related videos feature children of varying ethnic backgrounds and gender, iconizing Brazilian nationalist discourse of ‘racial democracy’.
- Mazzarella (2003) suggests that the rise of global communications technology in the twentieth century has been key to the production of novel forms of branded commodities, designed to iconize specific places of origin within a universal circulation of goods and images. The effect of Olympic events as branded entities has also been coincident with the rise of ‘Olympic TV’ as a ‘sharable global community experience’ that includes a sense of ‘simultaneous co-presence’ (Roche 2006:34).
- Collier (2005:35), in his analysis of post-Soviet engagements with capitalist markets in the early 1990s, points to the importance of distinguishing ‘neoliberal technical mechanisms’ from a broader political-economic project, which takes the form of structural transformations (‘marketization’) or the ‘political orientations and goals of key actors’. The post-socialist context presents a compelling comparative locus for studying the diversity of cultures of capitalism.
- The term morador means in Portuguese ‘resident’, or ‘dweller’. It is a term those living in favelas frequently employ to describe themselves.
- According to Ney dos Santos Oliveira’s studies of a favela in Niteroi, just outside of Rio de Janeiro, whereas Niterói has about 70 percent white and 30 percent black residents (“including self-denominated blacks and browns”), the favela has about 70 percent black and 30 percent white residents (Oliveira 2002; in Vargas 2006).
- This exclusive focus might seem to suggest that favelas are the only zones experiencing securitization, gentrification, and violent upheavals based in the conflicting motives and goals of powerful elites with those of the urban poor. However, it is not my goal to marginalize the experiences of the urban poor that do not reside in favelas. I find the term useful as a common identifier of the neighborhoods I study, and a marker for the specificity of particular localities that I wish to foreground in this thesis.
- The term ‘favela’ is also considered in some contexts to be a pejorative term. The the use of “morro (hill), communidade popular (popular community), or simply communidade” are common alternate terms used for the favelas by those who live within them (Perlman 2010).
- Perlman (2010) argues that the meaning of ‘becoming gente’ is fluid, and an indicator of urban status relations that beyond simple differences in economic earnings. It is used as a term of respect in diverse contexts (i.e. ‘gente boa’; a good person). She suggests, “Being gente is not a static state. It is a relational condition that may vary for a single person over time…It is part of the urban condition of the underclass, a way the affluent distance themselves from those less fortunate and reinforce their sense of being above the rules” (2010: 319)
- If organized by a group such the Landless Workers Movement (MST), as has often occurred in other cities, it may be termed an ocupação or invasão - occupation or invasion.
- Mega-events in the neo-liberal era have entailed urban displacements of astonishing scale. A report by the center on housing rights and evictions (COHRE.org) claims that prior to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, 720,000 urban poor were forcibly relocated in connection with the events; they place the number of peripheral residents in Beijing displaced in connection with the 2008 Olympics at around 1.25 million.
- While photos from these investigative journalists’ reports are strategically framed to tell a certain story, I include them here as (situated) tokens of the material conditions of evictions and demolition.
- The film portrays her life after the forced removal, where she is shown as taking on extra work (including 18 hour days) in order to make up for the loss of the home. The precise nature of the city’s compensation of her home is not treated – we as the viewers are left to surmise that whatever the promises made, they have not prevented her from having to undergo hardship including the loss of their family’s downstairs carpentry business. She and her husband, after living with family for three months, have since built a new home together in Fontela, in a different area of the city.
- Friedman’s innovations were first tested under the rule of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, leading to sweeping free market reforms that had devastating economic effects on millions of Chilean poor (Klein 2007:7), alongside the despotic use of state violence.
- Harvey (2001:285) emphasizes the necessity of getting beyond the use of space as merely a ‘metaphor’ employed to describe the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ of a globalized world, critiquing Shapiro (1998) as guilty of a kind of banal reduction of the importance of actively produced geographies.
- This marked the beginning of a long streak of violence that included the bombing of a shopping center as well as the 2009 downing of a police helicopter.
- In recent weeks, the privatization of the Maracaña has been placed under increased doubt under public pressure and allegations of corrupt bidding processes. Its fate is currently uncertain (May 2013).
- A classic challenge to the universality of formal economics occurred in the post WWII formalist-substantivist debate. This debate pitted classical economic theory against Polanyi’s conception of markets as ‘embedded’ within locally specific social forms (see Graeber 2001).
- These discourses were also in play in the 2007 Pan-American games, and occurred in many ways in contradiction to empirical evidence of event practices. Gaffney(2006: 24) writes, “Ironically, the majority of the facilities built for the Pan 2007 were constructed on wetlands in Barra de Tijuca. The majority of the housing and sporting infrastructures were built on concrete pylons that had to be sunk 45 meters into the subsoil. Additionally, the highway and subway projects envisioned for the Olympics will pass through existing neighborhoods and under park space, lessening water quality and disturbing natural habitat. The majority of Rio’s Olympic installations will be built on the wetlands of Barra de Tijuca.”
- Vargas (2006:70) also points to the potential fruitfulness of transnational, diasporic alliances formed through social media, in this case with former U.S. Black Panther militants in which contact “has had a transcendental quality that has generated optimism and confirmed the Afro-Brazilians’ will to endure the struggle” (2006:70).
