Abstract

I discuss the staged performances in the London 2012 handover to Rio de Janeiro as marketable revisions of Brazil’s colonial history that lead to the artistic display of ideal types and ethnic characters for global audiences. Rio 2016’s project was placed in the hands of privileged urban natives (artistic directors) but based upon the aesthetic of socio-cultural marginality (black ‘racial types’, samba dancers, capoeira and Candomblé performers, ‘bad men’). Communicating metropolitan Brazil’s attachment to European artistic narratives, the ceremony enmeshed all these types and styles into Rio’s self-presentation as a tourist ‘topos’ that was born out of past global mobilities of humans, customs and labor.