Colonial Delusions

There can scarcely be a city anywhere on the planet steeped in the history of empire and harbouring delusions of economic and political grandeur, which doesn’t boast an array of grand neoclassical buildings: Law courts, banks, stock exchanges, town halls, ministries, national museums, and opera houses, institutions that are key to the legitimation of capital accumulation and the bourgeois conquest of state power. Dressed in the architectural language of classical antiquity, such buildings confer the idea of order, authority and timelessness, a pretence that is instrumental in camouflaging their origins in the ruthless exploitation and subjugation of the labouring poor. Rio de Janeiro is no exception and a short walk through the historic centre will take you past a catalogue of buildings that could seamlessly merge into the streetscape of any European or colonial city. This is to be expected.  The sumptuous municipal theatre in Cinelândia that opened in 1905, a mere seven years after the formal abolition of slavery, was modelled on Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House, the blueprint  for the home of Mozart and Verdi that was replicated the world over. Similarly universal, is the imposing Palacio de Tiradentes, the former home of the Brazilian congress inaugurated in 1926. With its hallmark portico, grand staircase, Corinthian columns, and sculptural feminisation of justice and politics, a grotesque irony in a society that only granted women the vote in 1932, it could easily find a home in London, Berlin or Brussels. As for the monumental Ministério do Fazenda, Ministry of Finance,  it too echoes across time and space. Commissioned in 1937 as a symbol of the Estado Novo by the fascist sympathiser and authoritarian populist Getúlio Vargas, the towering edifice is the perfect embodiment of the repressive dictatorial imagination and could effortlessly take its place in Albert Speer’s  New Germania.