"É nossa, é Do Brasil Inteiro” (It’s Ours, It’s for the Whole of Brazil”): Football, The Yellow Shirt, National Politics, and Conjunctural Contestation

Abstract

From a resonant and highly mythologized symbol of an imagined national coherence in the 1950s, today the iconic yellow Brazilian football (soccer) shirt–the amarelinha–is an emotive site for political contestation and struggle between the forces of the Brazilian right and left. Within a contemporary Brazilian conjuncture fraught by conjoined political, economic, and cultural schisms, the shirt has become what Stuart Hall (p. 354) referred to as a “constant battlefield” upon which warring national political ideologies and imaginaries have fought for ascendancy. In contextually mapping the shifting and increasingly contentious relationship between the amarelinha and the Brazilian national imaginary, we utilize a critical conjuncturalism in critically explicating three indicative moments: 1) the shirt’s historical articulation, and initial relative stasis, as a symbol of a modern Brazilian national unity, pride, and optimism in the period from the 1950s to 2010s; 2) the disarticulation and hijacking of the shirt by an emergent right-wing populist movement during the mid-2010s, vanguarded by future President Jair Bolsonaro, and visibly supported by many popular athletes (i.e. Neymar, Nelson Piquet); and 3) the subsequent rearticulation of the shirt, and indeed the national political imaginary, by the countervailing forces of the Brazilian political left including leading journalists and athletes (i.e. Richarlison, Walter Casagrande). As such, our aim is to contextually examine how the shirt has, in a dialectical sense, become both a product and producer of the ideological and affective schisms responsible for the fraying (yet also potentially rebuilding) of Brazilian national identity and society.