Amazonian Sound Systems, Cyborg Indians, and the Future of the Future, Or, the Renewed Search for El Dorado under Late Capitalism

Abstract

In Belem do Para, a city of 1.5 million located in the eastern Brazilian Amazon, a vibrant electronic music scene has consolidated itself around the city’s enormous sound system enterprises. At the national level, Brazilian media, policy-makers, and intellectuals have enthusiastically hailed this largely informal economy as a model for both the future of the culture industry on the one hand and a more inclusive form of participatory cultural citizenship on the other. This article seeks to situate such claims historically and culturally, assessing first why forms of digital cultural production from the national periphery have helped to breathe new life into old myths about a redemptive future and, second, what the implications of this development might be for the livelihoods and citizenship claims of populations long aware that “the myth of the Future” frequently serves to rationalize the injustices of the present. Ultimately, the article makes the case that academic scholarship on emergent cultural trends of the Global South must hold open a critical space in which the rush to revive “the Future”—or chase a new El Dorado—may be suspended so as to better understand whose interests such futures are invoked to serve.