The Water that Washes the Past: New Urban Configurations in Post-Colonial Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which officially sanctioned colonial heritage is being moved, removed, reinvented, reinterpreted and reused by official heritage authorities, by social movements, agents and sectors of civil society, in two historically and culturally entangled cities: Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. The cities are entangled in a process framed by their imperial–colonial relationship: because of the trafficking of enslaved Africans at their ports, for both cities being national capitals, and until the nineteenth century, the imperial nature of both cities. The inherent tensions in this process reveal the porosity of the authorized heritage discourse concerning local practices that transform meanings, and that act as openings for the reinvention of a heritage that transitions from colonial to decolonial.