Struggling with the Other: Embodied Styles as Tourist Articulation

Abstract

This chapter examines the Handover Ceremony to Rio (2016) as a marketable revision of Brazil’s colonial history that leads to the artistic display of ideal types and ethnic characters for global audiences. The backgrounds of Brazilian political revolt and oppression contributed to repetitions of culturally situated patterns of work as mere consumable narratives. Rio’s artistic narrative was based on exotic marginalities (black ‘racial types’) that correspond to Brazil’s vulnerable or uncouth lifestyles and characters (samba dancers, capoeira and Candomblé performers, ‘bad men and glamorous white women). The ceremony’s articulation enmeshed all these types and styles into Rio’s self-presentation as a tourist ‘topos’ that was born out of past mobilities of humans, customs and embodied narratives of labour.