Bossa mundo: Brazilian popular music's global transformations (1938-2008)

This dissertation is about how Brazilian music represented Brazil to the English-speaking world and subsequently became transformed through that process between 1938 and 2008. Through three case studies, this dissertation investigates the consequences of global exchange and late capitalism on how Brazil is understood by anglophone cultures. Since the music in this study often accompanies audiovisual media, it is also in conversation with media studies. I encourage the study of transnational musical cultures beyond the framework of uni-directional influence to a more expansive view of development, transformation and change. I employ a variety of research methods, specifically musical analysis and audiovisual media analysis. I also perform archival research and a ten-month ethnography of the music industry in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil. Through a case study model, the dissertation focuses on moments when Brazilian music broke through to unexpected popularity and when musicians involved changed their approach to music as a result. The first chapter focuses on the popularity of Carmen Miranda in Hollywood and her influence on fashion, cartoons and advertising in the period leading up to World War II. The second chapter examines the popularity of bossa nova in 1960s United States and how American jazz artists and teenage social dance culture transformed that style. The final case study discusses how the Brazilian music industry and musicians contend with their responsibility to represent their country to the rest of the world. It takes up two chapters: one detailing ethnographic findings from Brazil, the other discussing how prominent musicians represent Brazil to the rest of the world in terms of Baudrillard's notion of the hyperreal. This dissertation shows how the process of performing and selling Brazilian music abroad often reveals as much about the class aspirations of the performers and record label personnel as it does about the audiences who listen to it. It opens up new directions for studying the promotion and sale of music in international markets during a period when the prospect of selling recorded music is uncertain.