Quilombo Portness / Quilombismo Portuário: Living Memory and the Porousness of Racial Capitalism in Rio de Janeiro

Despite popular perception, racial capitalism and indentured labor fail to create a neatly closed or coherent system. Rio’s portside areas have been at the center of privately led renovation projects since 2011. Paralleling these efforts, Afro-Brazilian memorialization processes involving the ruins of the Valongo, the hemisphere’s most significant slave trade wharf, have contrasted with and challenged this urban intervention. Established as a slave trade shore in the eighteenth century, this section of Rio de Janeiro’s bayside area consolidated as an important Afro-Brazilian zone in the nineteenth century. This chapter, drawing from sources of Rio’s historically global port area, juxtaposes the concepts of porosity and quilombismo in order to propose the concept of portness. As a place of movement, culture, death, life, and resistance, Rio’s port area constitutes an analytical unit that allows for a better understanding of grassroots developments taking place at the global stage.