Espectaculares y especulares: Las celebraciones del fin de la esclavitud brasileña en la capital argentina

The article deals with the celebrations of the abolition of Brazilian slavery in Buenos Aires. The intersection of the modernization of communications, the rapprochement between Brazil and Argentina, and political disputes within Argentina, created a feverish activity of transnational cultural mediation through the press of Buenos Aires and Río de Janeiro, intimately interconnected and imbricated with events in the cities’ public spaces. The volume of the festive events and the warmer rhetoric indicates its spectacularity compared with the festivities in other parts of the world, in addition to its specularity. This two-months long and extraordinarily intense inter-urban dialogue, signified the emergence of a regional public sphere, paving the way to new relations between Argentines and Brazilians, and to an imaginary reconfiguration of their place in the global communication order.