Brazilian Popular Culture Research Articles

Urbanism(s) and informality(ies) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This article examines urbanisms and informalities intertwined with Brazilian popular culture, in the light of a theoretical and empirical study of two examples from the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The primary conclusions underscore a tension between formal urbanism, which attempts to propagate a uniform way of urban existence, and the exuberance of life in the urbe. This highlights that urbanism is inherently multifaceted and requires the incorporation of multiple urban existences within global south cities while considering their distinctions.

O dívce, co spatřila ďábla. Reprezentace genderu v brazilském cordelu

This article focuses on the cordel as an idiosyncratic manifestation of Brazilian popular culture. It sets the results of original research on cordel gender representations within the specific social, cultural, and political contexts in which they originated/emerged. The article is based on research grounded in cultural studies and this discipline’s insistence on the critical importance of race, gender, and religion. The author argues that cordels – poems printed in cheap booklets with an illustrated cover and marketed to the mass public – offer important insights into existing social and gender norms in Brazil. Whereas in the past the genre was dominated by men authors and upheld conservative Catholic values, nowadays it has creatively adapted to the changing social realities. A comparative analysis of specific titles written in rural Brazil in the second half of the 20th century and titles written in the early 21st century by emerging women authors in an urban setting reveals starkly different patterns of gender representation. Contemporary authors – many of them women – are well aware of the cordel’s importance as a tool in the socialisation and apprehension of cultural meanings of gender. They represent gender through the cordel in ways that are subversive and serve to undermine the existing patriarchal norm. The cordel today continues to develop into a genre which is open and pluralistic in its multiple gender representations that reflect Brazil’s diverse social realities.

Pride and Prejudice in Brazil’s Popular Culture: A Photonovel and a Soap Opera

Soap operas are an integral part of Brazilian popular culture and the daily lives of Brazil’s people. In 2018, the biggest TV channel in the country, Globo, broadcast a six-month-long soap opera called ‘Pride and Passion’, centered on the story of the Benedito family and their five unmarried daughters, who live in the small village of ‘Vale do Café’ (‘Coffee Valley’) around the 1910s, surrounded by the rural aristocracy and its coffee plantations. The obvious inspiration is Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and its choice is an indication of Austen’s growing popularity outside English-speaking countries. This adaptation, which incorporates characters from her other novels as well, is the quintessential amalgamation of cultures and media, combining a canonical author of the English language with a Brazilian TV genre commonly seen as ‘lowbrow’. It was not, however, Austen’s first incursion in Brazil’s popular culture. During the 1960s and 1970s, photonovels were an extremely popular genre there, usually translated into Portuguese from Italian productions, as was the case of the 1965 Pride and Prejudice photonovel, sold as a literary supplement to a widely circulated women’s magazine. This essay analyses both cases of different, although connected, adaptations of Austen, arguing that Austen’s presence in Brazil was always mediated by the expectations and appropriation of new media, while showing that the dialogue with popular culture can only enhance our understanding of the ‘global Austen’ phenomenon and her appeal across time and cultures.

The Bumba-Meu-Boi rei da boiada festival: Reflections on a cultural tourist attraction of the city of Parnaíba – Piauí

The Bumba-meu-boi is a traditional festival that takes place in the Northeast of Brazil, and is one of the most important festivals in Brazilian popular culture. In Parnaíba, in the state of Piauí, there is Rei da Boiada cultural group that carries high symbolic value for those who take part in the ritual. This group is part of the cultural heritage of the city that is home to the participants, who invest a great deal of love, dedication and effort to the art, dance and local culture. Based on a case study of the Rei da Boiada Group, this qualitative research study investigates whether the Bumba-meu-boi Rei da Boiada cultural festival can be considered a tourist attraction. The methods used in this research included a bibliographic review, field study and interviews. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and field observations from 2015 to 2019. The descriptive and explanatory method was used for the data analysis. It was concluded that the group is culturally rich and can be considered a tourist attraction, as it is part of the “Festa de Juninha” – the June festival that attracts tourists. But there has been little research on the Bumba-meu-boi itself, despite its great potential to contribute to the development of cultural tourism in the city.

“Medieval” Islands on the Amazonian Coast: Medieval Remains in the Amazonian Popular Culture and Culturally Interlarded Myths

In which sense could we possibly catch a glimpse of “Medieval Islands” on the Amazonian coast? This paper aims at unravelling and explaining how some old medieval Portuguese mythical matter and mythemes do still exist and thrive in terms of popular culture on the “Island of Maranhão”, i.e. <i>Upaon Açu</i> or the “Isle of São Luís” until the present time, in comparison to some mythical elements to be found on the Island of Marajó, in Pará. Both Pará and Maranhão are Amazonian federal states of Brazil and this paper emphasizes the historical permanence of medieval mythemes, of course combined with other very complex and cross-cultural heritages pertaining to nowaday population of Maranhão, to which the Island of Marajó shall be a term of historical and archaeological comparison. We expect to arouse scholars’ interest to our subject in a Global History perspective, which takes into account the links and unexpected cultural traits of Middle Ages still thriving in Brazilian popular culture as the upshot of a long-term and complex cross-cultural process that has been taking place in American countries since the late 15th. century. Little attention has been paid to the role of medieval mythemes along this complex process and I should like to endeavour to fill this historiographic gap by proposing the present paper. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to highlight and discuss the evidence of a medieval past transposed to the Portuguese Amazon, whose legacy is up to our days a very plentiful popular culture in terms of medieval references, such as the phantom barks and “Mothers of Creeks”, as we pimpoint along the text. This essay is keen to address this polemic topic by drawing on some authors and theorists who, in our view, must be brought back to the proscenium of scientific discussion concerning Social Sciences. The first and main one is Luís da Câmara Cascudo, a major folklorist and researcher whom we should like to introduce to international academic readers. Hence, this little essay aims at wreaking new academic discussion on the formation and colonization of the Amazon in cross-cultural terms.

Maria Martins: Singular and Plural

This article analyses two approaches to the work of Brazilian artist Maria Martins on the basis of texts by Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa and French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret dealing specifically with her production. The context of this two different approaches is the artist’s return to Brazil and her first exhibitions in the country in the early 1950s. While Pedrosa, from a reading based on the conceptions of modernism at the time, takes a critical stance towards Maria Martins, Péret defends surrealist principles, adopting a stance favorable to the artist’s work. The analysis of this two different approaches points out the relationship of the artist with Brazilian popular culture and the artistic avant-gardes of the first half of the 20th century, especially Martins’ approach to the surrealist movement.&#x0D; Article received: April 24, 2021; Article accepted: July 30, 2021; Published online: October 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper&#x0D; How to cite this article: Hussak, Pedro &amp; Marta D'Angelo. "Maria Martins: Singular and Plural." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 26 (October 2021): 21-29. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i26.466

On the Urgency of a Cunning Politics

On the Urgency of a Cunning Politics

Doing embelêco in musical education: what the embelêco can teach us about a rural musical education

The Embelêco is an artistic and cultural expression, of oral tradition, which takes place in the municipality of Moita Bonita – Sergipe, especially at the Capunga village. In this text, we intend to reflect, based on Decolonial Education and the principles of Rural Education, about the cracks opened by this expression (the Embelêco) in the structures of Musical Education. In order to keep the movement alive, the griot masters teach and the young people learn how to make music. In this process, beyond the musical knowledge, other knowledges are intertwined, which contributes to the musical performance itself. These knowledges are essential for people to construct self-consciousness and to develop awareness for the community. This way, we understand that the artistic and cultural expressions of Brazilian popular culture can be one of the ways to think about a decolonial musical education, acting in the cracks of the modern, scholar, eurocentered, and conservative logic of musical teaching.

A RELIGIÃO COMO FONTE DE SENTIDO NAS POESIAS DE "SEU FREITAS"

A proposta deste artigo é analisar excertos extraídos do livro Poesias, de Joaquim José Oliveira Freitas – conhecido simplesmente por Seu Freitas – com enfoque nos aspectos ligados ao seu simbolismo, ressaltando características essenciais para a compreensão da religião como fornecedora de sentido e, sobretudo, como forma de expressão de uma experiência fundamental – quiçá, a experiência religiosa. Para tanto, procura-se identificar e extrair do conjunto das 208 poesias fragmentos que permitam uma articulação com o aspecto religioso, seja explicitamente posto ou, mesmo, tangencialmente presente. Na primeira parte do texto a discussão sobre o sentido é auxiliada por autores do campo da antropologia da religião e da teologia. Em seguida, após contextualizar autor e obra, as categorias conceituais conquistadas são revisitadas à luz do material de Seu Freitas. Enfim, assumindo uma posição liminar entre discussão científica e tributo, o texto também pretende contribuir na ampliação do alcance do legado de um autor da cultura popular brasileira cuja expressão artística ainda permanece relativamente ignorada.

Folkcomunicação nas transformações tecnológicas e midiáticas contemporâneas

A emergência e a afirmação da folkcomunicação como perspectiva teórica na pesquisa em Comunicação atenta para reinvenção de práticas midiáticas e comunicacionais no âmbito das manifestações tradicionais e da cultura popular brasileira. A singularidade da folkcomunicação é sua configuração teórica numa insistente situação de tática das manifestações tradicionais e populares hoje enredadas pelas transformações tecnológicas e midiáticas. Esta condição difusa promovida pelas convergências do popular com o tecnológico equivale, na experiência da vida urbana, às aproximações entre as insistentes precariedades da vida social e o consumo de novas tecnologias. No plano metodológico, o artigo se desenvolve com base em pesquisa bibliográfica, na perspectiva maior da comunicação como cultura, num diálogo com as ciências sociais.

Des peuples et de leurs mains : Lina Bo Bardi, Benjamin Péret et la culture populaire brésilienne

L’objectif de cette étude est de mettre en évidence le réseau de relations artistiques et poétiques qui s’est formé autour de l’art populaire brésilien et de décrire son développement depuis le modernisme. Dans ce but, j’analyse l’exposition « A mão do povo brasileiro » [La main du peuple brésilien] organisée par Lina Bo Bardi en 1969 et le livre Les Arts primitifs et populaires du Brésil, paru en 2017, qui publie à titre posthume des textes et des photographies inédites de Benjamin Péret. J’essaie de montrer que « le » peuple est exposé à travers sa singularité artistique et que « les » peuples le sont à travers leurs caractéristiques matérielle, sociale et spirituelle, suggérant ainsi que le peuple et les peuples inventent perpétuellement leurs propres traditions.

How Brazilian areQuicumbis?

Abstract My goal in this article is to show how the emphasis on mestiçagem (ethnic/racial/cultural mixture) in the formation of Brazilian popular culture may have obscured our understanding of performance traditions deemed to be “typically Brazilian.” I focus on the quicumbi and begin the article with an analysis of the earliest references to this performance, followed by theories on its origin and meaning. I then contribute to this discussion by adding references to festive traditions in Angola. By showing that certain aspects of the performance traditionally assumed to have been shaped by mestiçagem, such as the “African Indians,” may in actuality have been African in nature, I challenge the interpretation of the quicumbi as an essentially Brazilian tradition. I conclude with a reflection on the importance of the findings presented in this article for our general understanding of cultural identity formation in Brazil.

A estética carnavalesca e o impeachment de Dilma Roussef nas manifestações de rua da cidade de São Paulo (2015-2016)

In 2015 and 2016 the demonstrations that occupied the streets of the city of São Paulo gathered different social movements around the impeachment of President Dilma Roussef. The mobilized groups, on the right and left of the political-ideological spectrum, triggered a profusion of signs belonging to the traditional festival of Brazilian popular culture, Carnival, crossing references and re-updating meanings. Mapping and analyzing, from the sounds and images captured by independent journalism - specifically the Free Journalists media - the appropriation of musical rhythms and poetics by the different groups gathered in these public manifestations and relating them to their political affiliations, constitutes the purpose of this presentation.

Citrus essential oils inhalation by mice: Behavioral testing, GCMS plasma analysis, corticosterone, and melatonin levels evaluation.

The use of orange essential oils (EOs) as a complementary treatment is very common in Brazilian popular culture. The levels of melatonin (MEL) and corticosterone (CORT) hormones were investigated simultaneously, by the Luminex™ immunoassay system in mice plasma, after Citrus aurantium and Citrus sinensis EOs inhalation for 30min. The plasma was analyzed by headspace through gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry for investigation of the EO components. Mice were submitted to behavioral testing to research anxiolytic-like, sedative, and antidepressant-like effects. The inhalation of atmosphere obtained from vaporization of 10% solution of this Citrus EO separately did not affect MEL or CORT plasma levels; that is, the MEL and CORT levels did not present variation in function of the EO in the schedule used. On the other hand, the imipramine positive control used altered the level of MEL as expected. The EO constituents were detected in plasma at different ratios that is present in inhaled EO. Behavioral tests showed that the inhalation of 10% C.sinensis EO presents an anxiolytic-like and sedative effect. Thus, C.sinensis EO can be a valuable tool for treatment of the anxiety disturbs, apparently without interference with MEL and CORT physiological levels.

Del basurero a la pantalla: La representación y la agencia del recolector informal brasileño en los documentales Boca de Lixo y Waste Land

Waste-pickers have been, and continue to be, marginalised in Brazilian society, due to their poverty and daily contact with rubbish. They are so marginalised throughout Latin America that their presence in fiction (novels, short stories, feature films) and non-fiction (documentary film) is minimal, except in Brazil, where four documentary films that focus on waste-pickers, known there as catadores de materiais recicláveis or simply catadores have been produced in the past 25 years. In this article, two of these documentaries are studied and compared, Boca de Lixo (Brazil, 1992) and Waste Land (UK, Brazil 2010). They not only represent but also give voice to these marginalised people. Despite raising some moral questions, the documentaries allow waste-pickers to finally assume their rightful place in Brazilian popular culture.

...E a etnologia fez os cineastas sonharem: olhar etnológico e alteridade no cinema brasileiro entre 1970 e 1980

Este artigo caracteriza a emergência de um olhar etnológico como padrão interpretativo teórico e prático nos filmes e nas discussões do campo cinematográfico brasileiro entre 1970 e 1980. Demonstra-se que o cinema era uma forma visual que constituiu uma 'etnovisão', a qual sofreu uma inflexão com a problematização da cultura popular brasileira no campo cinematográfico dos anos 1960. No final dessa década, na recuperação do choque provocado pelo golpe civil-militar de 1964, o campo cinematográfico reagiu, reconhecendo a alteridade do povo brasileiro. Voltando-se a um registro etnovisual da cultura local, empreendeu o reconhecimento visual de sua diversidade para desenvolver interpretações etnológicas da brasilidade. A análise de textos e imagens fílmicas, a partir da abordagem iconológica, evidenciou de que maneira uma nova concepção de alteridade se formou no Brasil.

Mário de Andrade: o sequestro do desejo e a música popular em versos

In Remate de males (1930), the fourth modernist book of Mario de Andrade, the first poem of the group Tempo da Maria - Moda do corajoso - has a lyrical voice that wavers between the consciousness of the absurdity of his love for a married woman and, at the same time, the awareness of been overwhelmed by it. As a reader of Freud, Mario de Andrade is concerned of the process of sublimation and repression - the so called sequestration of the absent lady - found by him in Brazilian popular culture and also present is his verses. Moreover, there is in the poem the reinvention of the popular Brazilian musicality. The careful study of the verses of Moda do corajoso shows, therefore, the sublimation of desire for a prohibited lady, as well as the influence of music in Mario de Andrade's thought, constant concern that can be found in his verses.

Carmen Miranda and Brasilidade: Hollywood glamour and exoticism reinterpreted

Abstract This article examines the role leading twentieth-century Brazilian popular culture figure, Carmen Miranda, had in shaping modern ideas of brasilidade/Brazilianness. I show that she became a popular film and radio star in 1930s Brazil not only because she was an adept performer, but also because she crafted a public image inspired by Hollywood glamour. Unlike the World War II-era Latin American caricature she became in the United States, from 1929 to 1939 Carmen Miranda was a culturally influential and modern star in Brazil. Inspired by the Hollywood styles that she observed in imported films and that were featured in domestic magazines, Carmen Miranda became one of Brazil’s first film stars, the nation’s international ‘Ambassador of Samba’ and an important influence on modern understandings of brasilidade.

Narrativa sobre arte popular: estudo de caso sobre tesauro e exposições permanentes elaboradas pelo Centro Nacional de Folclore e Cultura Popular

Este artigo visa apresentar um estudo das narrativas relacionadas à arte popular elaboradas pelo Centro Nacional de Folclore e Cultura Popular (CNFCP), tendo como objetos de estudo o Tesauro de Folclore e Cultura Popular Brasileira, as exposições permanentes de 1980, 1984 e 1994 e as obras de Boaventura da Silva Filho, componentes dessas três exposições. O Tesauro e as exposições permanentes são aqui considerados como ações de documentação e de difusão vinculadas às políticas públicas, desenvolvidas pelo governo federal, para valorização e salvaguarda das referências culturais populares. Investigar as diretrizes, as categorias privilegiadas e suas (re)conceituações como suportes conceituais que determinam tais ações, assim como o uso de termos relacionados à arte popular como instrumento de representações socioculturais que marcaram a trajetória dos estudos de folclore e de cultura popular, foi o caminho escolhido para analisar os contextos e specíficos da organização institucional do período dos folcloristas, até 1980, e dos antropólogos e museólogos, a partir de 1982. Com base nessa problematização, pautada na análise das mudanças conceituais e de políticas institucionais do CNFCP, buscou-se estabelecer uma abordagem inter-relacional entre tesauro e exposições permanentes dentro de um "sistema arte-cultura".

Look, blackness in Brazil!: Disrupting the grotesquerie of racial representation in Brazilian visual culture

This article experiments with collage to explore the visual representation of black people in Brazilian media, popular culture and politics, examining how these representations constitute statements regarding dynamics of racial domination. The work proposes that the introduction of disruptive elements into the very images that objectify the black body could create the necessary conditions for a valuable criticism of how blackness is disposed within the nation’s formation. The articulation with black studies in visual culture and performance, black feminism, African diaspora and post-colonial theories intends to develop analytical frames to examine the interconnection between the representational process of ‘stereotyping’, symbolic violence and anti-black ideologies in the context of the national formation narratives. Methodologically, the articulation of these fields of inquiry intends to provide tools able to highlight and disrupt the regimes of racial representation circulating in Brazilian popular culture.