A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro After 1889: Glorious Decadence by Tom Winterbottom (review)

Tom Winterbottom's A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro Afer 1889 takes the reader on a "gloriously decadent" journey through Rio de Janeiro. I say this not just because I am obviously alluding to the paradox of the book's subtitle, but also because what at first might give the impression of being a dense, overly theoretical study actually turns out to be a pleasant, informative and engagingly written book. Winterbottom pulls readers in and allows them to feel the pulse of Rio de Janeiro's beating heart.

Winterbottom sees in Rio de Janeiro a "complex temporality that is at once 'in construction' and 'in ruin'" (5). From this unique temporality he constructs a cultural history of Rio de Janeiro relying on works of architecture and literature that span from 1889—the year of revolution in Brazil, when the country became a republic—to the eve of the 2016 Olympics. The author uses the feature of decadence—not as a synonym for "decay" or "ruin"—but as an aesthetic feature and result referring abstractly to "a condition in which 'unpresentness' becomes acutely apparent as a result of specific temporal sensibility" (27). In Rio, the landscape—defined in simple terms as a constant interaction between natural and urban, people and place, creating the urban environment—joins with time to form an interaction and sense of a present "that is somehow outdated or incomplete" (5). As Winterbottom states: "Rather than this being an abnormal aspect of the national identity, however, it is an important and dynamic part of it now and in its post-1889 history. Most pertinently, in Rio, the touted magnificence of the city lies in the present that is seemingly on the brink, dislocated, remote, and outdated, defined by a constant and evolving nostalgia" (40).

A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro After 1889 focuses on three specific moments of the city's (and country's) history—the 1900s, the 1950s and the 2010s—during which the impulse for progress and a concomitant saudade for the past can best be observed in the historic continuum of Rio. The author explores and contextualizes urban projects such as Hotel Glória, Copacabana Palace, the Ministry Building and Maracanã stadium, and literary works by Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Elizabeth Bishop, J. P. Cuenca and Tatiana Salem Levy. His analyses demonstrate the various ways in which these projects embody the push and pull of Rio's different relationship with time and convey its specific sensation of incompleteness in the present.

From the first page to the last, we can feel the author's empathy and, I dare to say, love for the city. The intermingling of his personal history—"I take my first look at the city again from the air, on my way to the Tom Jobim International Airport, named after one of Brazil's most famous musicians" (1)—with the history of the city and the country makes A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro After 1889 a different kind of academic book. This is a welcome shift within the institutionalized separation between books written for academic specialists and non-specialists, a binary much like the ones found in Rio de Janeiro: the formal and informal, the intellectuals and the others, and so on. Winterbottom had the courage to surpass one of those binaries by making A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro accessible to every reader at the same time as offering an important contribution to academic researchers. The author elegantly achieves his goal of establishing "a novel way of approaching the cultural history of Rio according to its rhythm of life and experience of time" (197).

As I write this review, expecting a hurricane soon to devastate Florida, my thoughts turn to Rio de Janeiro—a city that also had an inexplicable impact on me in the past. After reading Winterbottom's cultural history of Rio, I can now make...