Arte e estética

As máscaras são acessórios fundamentais no visual dos homens e das mulheres das mais distintas culturas e épocas. Elas são usadas em rituais religiosos e sociais, bem como em festas e manifestações folclóricas. Seu sentido é diverso, podendo servir de mediadoras durante os rituais religiosos, assim como para lazer nos eventos festivos. A palavra máscara tem origem no latim mascus ou masca = fantasma , ou no árabe maskharah = palhaço , homem disfarçado . Nas festas populares, entre elas a Folia de Reis, as máscaras são os acessórios principais dos marungos, bastiões ou palhaços. Elas servem não só para o folião incorporar o personagem como também para produzir uma catarse entre os espectadores. Este trabalho irá analisar as máscaras de duas Companhias de Folia de Reis: uma é a Companhia Santa Cecília, em São Caetano do Sul (SP), e a outra é a Companhia da Serraria, de São Thomé das Letras (MG). Serão tratados temas como a confecção, os materiais, os rituais e o personagem que usa a máscara.

The dissertation explores the negotiation of culture and identity from the literary production of Korean immigrants in Brazil. The dissertation also explores how Korean immigrants begin a process of diasporic narrative as a way to construct an alternative space and a Korean Brazilian identity. By following the status of Self through the writings of Cultura Tropical , a Korean Brazilian identity evolves through three stages of negotiation. The Korean community of 50, 000 is a small minority group but rapidly growing in socioeconomic sectors of Brazil. Their narratives and cultural discourse convey experiences of tension and cultural affiliation. They create a literary space to debate and contemplate how Korea or Brazil is a sanctuary to mix languages, literary genres, voices and reflections related to the Brazilian immigrant life. The study of this dissertation presents the search and the trace of new Asian voices in Brazil for further understanding of how they view themselves within Brazilian culture and what it means for them to claim “Brazilian” as part of their identity. The focus of this piece will concentrate on Korean immigration in Brazil and thus far the only existent literary journal by the community known as Cultura Tropical. Finding themselves, quickly building a business and social space in São Paulo, their experiences are embodied as short stories, poems and essays in which they manifest a new and contemporary relationship between the Korean and Brazilian cultures. Can the notion of Asian ethnicity pose to be included or excluded in Brazilian society and literary culture? From this, we will be able to further identify if Korean immigrant discourses can be part of the current framework of Brazilian foundational literature and cultural studies.

This dissertation explores how the Centro Cultural Orùnmilá [Orùnmilá Cultural Center] struggles for the substantive valuing of Afro-Brazilian culture and knowledge as a means to address contemporary racial inequality. Located in the city of Ribeirão Preto, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, the Orùnmilá Center’s cultural work and politics mobilizes a critical historical perspective and Afro-Brazilian forms of embodied knowledge and learning as key sites and sources for the struggle to decolonize social relations and achieve racial equality. In this process, they claim representation in the spheres of education, institutional politics, and culture to push the substance and practice of citizenship beyond the circumscribed inclusion afforded through Brazilian racial democracy, ideologies of miscegenation (i.e. racial and cultural mixture), and contemporary apolitical multiculturalisms. Orùnmilá members strive to transcend addressing inequality through access to and inclusion into an already defined system—educational, economic, political, and cultural. Instead, they reclaim the importance of culture in struggle to challenge and transform the unequal histories of power and race that structure dominant understandings of what knowledge counts in the making of modernity and development. Their work addresses how capitalist development and the colonial legacy re-articulate racial hierarchies and rule in ways that continue to marginalize and exclude Afro-descendant peoples. The Orùnmilá Center engages in a range of efforts including cultural workshops, lectures and presentations, anti-racist activism, and policy-advocacy. The chapters of this study look in detail at the philosophy and action underlying Orùnmilá’s work, especially how they mobilize ancestralidade, or ancestral knowledge/wisdom and lived experience to construct the Afro-descendant past as a project for contemporary social transformation. The chapters also analyze their struggle to construct and implement a municipal education project and their use of the Afro-Brazilian cultural form of Afoxé as a means of protest and anti-racist advocacy in the annual carnaval parade. In these efforts, Orùnmilá members politicize black culture and difference as sites of epistemological critique that shape other ways of understanding history, progress, value, and collectivity.

O Ateneu by Raul Pompéia, O mulato and Casa de pensão by Aluísio Azevedo, Bom-Crioulo by Adolfo Caminha and O urso: romance de costumes paulistas by Antônio de Oliveira are examples of coming-of-age Brazilian novels. Bisexuals, homosexuals, mulatos, malandros in the early stage of their careers, fragile and neurotic adolescents – these are the outsider inhabitants of the 19th Century coming of age novel. The comparison of these five works allows us to see common elements in the trajectories of the main characters, youngsters characterized by a singular personality or by a mysterious and dramatic past and caught in the act of transitioning from a rural environment to an urban one (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, São Luís do Maranhão). This passage from a safe but small and limiting milieu to a diverse multifaceted city informs the adolescent's freedom of choice. The collapse of illusions (echoing the Lost Illusion of Balzac) is achieved through a gradual familiarization with intrigues and prejudices and through the revelation of hidden truths from the past. The authors of these novels, published episodically in local newspapers of Rio and São Paulo, were asking their contemporary readers to see Brazilian society from the point of view of a marginalized and troubled outsider. This study is divided into three chapters: the first reviews the critical debate on the Bildungsroman genre in European, North American and Brazilian criticism. The second analyses through a structuralist perspective the elements of continuity and difference between the European Bildungsromane and the Brazilian narratives of coming-of-age. In particular, I focus on the complex relationship between the main protagonist and the father figure. The third chapter proposes to interpret the concept of "formation" as ethical reflection in the Brazilian coming-of-age novels.

This dissertation examines the role of new visual reproduction technologies in forging public cultures of sensationalized violence in two rapidly modernizing nations on the periphery of industrial capitalism. I trace parallel developments in the production and reception of silent crime and adventure film in Brazil's First Republic and in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico, at a moment when industrialization and urbanization were reshaping daily experience without eliminating profound social inequalities. Re-evaluating critical frameworks premised on cinema's relationship to the experience of modernity in the industrialized U.S. and Western Europe, I argue that these early twentieth-century cultures of popular sensationalism signal the degree to which public life in Mexico and Brazil has been conditioned by violence and social exclusion linked to legacies of neo-colonial power. In the first half of the dissertation, I examine cinematic re-enactments of real-life crimes filmed in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Mexico City between 1908 and 1919. Combining an emphasis on location shooting with melodramatic tropes inherited from popular literature and theater, these true-crime films grapple with representational problems at the heart of the cinematic medium: its potential for both documentation and dramatization and its indeterminate relationship to topical events. Incorporating analysis of locally produced crime serials, I focus on the dynamics of unequal cultural exchange between Mexico and Brazil and industrialized nations, particularly France and the United States, which acted as exporters of cultural products. Addressing the economic polarization of metropolitan centers and rural areas, the latter half of the dissertation analyzes fiction features produced outside the two countries' principal cities in the 1920s, where economic development lagged behind that of urban centers. These productions drew on the conventions of imported serial films and westerns (particularly location shooting and dynamic action sequences) to display local landscapes even as they asserted mastery over cinematic technology's viscerally thrilling effects. In constructing violence and risk as markers of local modernity, early Mexican and Brazilian crime and adventure films rendered spectacularly visible the social tensions of national modernization projects.

After World War I, with a growing middle class exerting a decisive force, Brazil's early modernists deliberately began to move away from the conservative art academies steeped in European tradition and to search for cultural self-definition in terms of their Indian and African roots. Included in this search was the desire to incorporate the uniqueness of their native land and their country's reaction to cultural influences from the United States and Europe. It was this desire which eventually led to the Semana de Arte Moderna--a visual arts exhibition and series of dance spectacles, literary readings, and concerts hosted and attended by painters, poets, novelists, critics, and musicians, held in Sao Paulo between February 13-17 of 1922. Thus, the central purpose of this investigation is not only to give a factual accounting of the Semana de Arte Moderna but to examine the definition of Brazilian Modernism in the context of its paradoxical relationship with Europe.

Comprehensive work on the urban and social transformation that took place over the four centuries of São Paulo’s existence. The author points to the crucial moment of local urban growth, the 19th century, between two literary (or cultural) movements in the history of São Paulo: Romanticism and Modernism.

My dissertation examines the representation of Afro-Brazilians within the contemporary culture production of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, specifically in three novels, rap music, and the hip-hop community. The novels form a diverse corpus of works. Two were published during the 1990s by middle-class canonical writers, Subúrbio (1994) by Fernando Bonassi and Cidade de Deus (1997) by Paulo Lins. Bonassi offers a homogenous vision of the margins while Lins presents them as diverse. Yet, both draw on a materialist approach that leads the protagonists toward an apocalyptic conclusion. The third novel was published by a resident of a favela in the outskirts of São Paulo, Graduado em Marginalidade (2004) by Sacolinha. This novel presents a complex and at times contradicting view of favela life. Graduado offers the possibility for social advancement as the novel seeks to redefine race within Brazil. Rap music and the hip-hop community present a critical view of Brazilian culture and history. Through lyrics, musical form, and activism hip-hoppers look to contest, question, and alter established ideas of race in Brazil. Much like Sacolinha’s novel, hip-hoppers redefine race in order to rewrite their future and in the process break from the cycle of violence and drugs that threatens the well-being of Brazil’s most marginalized. Utilizing materialist and postcolonial theories this study explores how these cultural forms contribute toward understanding representations of race within Brazilian urban culture.

Esta pesquisa analisa a produção de Cornélio Pires, enfatizando as gravações por ele organizadas, que contavam com músicas e narrativas, num total de 52 discos de 78 rotações (1929 e 1930), possibilitando o registro e a audição das sonoridades caipiras no meio urbano. Para tanto, busca-se recuperar as transformações na cidade de São Paulo, onde foram feitas as gravações dos discos e sua divulgação. No final da década de 20 e durante os anos 30, essa cidade encontrava-se em expansão, sendo um polo de atração para migrantes e imigrantes que desejavam melhores condições de vida e realização de sonhos. Entre os novos elementos de modernidade , surgiu e se difundiu o rádio, no qual foram divulgadas as sonoridades caipiras, entre muitas outras. Na Série Caipira Cornélio Pires representava-se o mundo rural, o caipira e sua cultura, muitas vezes, em contraste com as experiências urbanas. O crescimento intenso de São Paulo gerava sentimentos de nostalgia, emergindo as representações da vida no campo como idílica e harmoniosa, retomando a cultura caipira suas referências à religiosidade, as práticas cotidianas, o trabalho, a festa e o lazer (mutirão, no qual se trabalhava, cantava, comia e enamorava), as relações entre os gêneros masculino e feminino e as relações afetivas e amorosas. Dessa forma, o caipira e a cultura caipira representados por Cornélio Pires encontram-se envoltos em um processo de hibridismo cultural, numa construção em constante relação entre campo e cidade por meio da sonoridade, das representações cotidianas e dos projetos que ele deixava transparecer na sua produção.

Tendo em vista a carência de estudos historiográficos sobre o Varejo de Moda, setor dos mais competitivos e de importância crescente na economia brasileira e reconhecendo os expressivos avanços no poder aquisitivo das classes de menor renda nos últimos anos, o crescente potencial de consumo das classes emergentes tem sustentado a expansão econômica no Brasil , este estudo tem por objetivo evidenciar que historicamente o varejo não ficou imune ao potencial de consumo da população de baixa renda e seja pela ampliação das áreas comerciais, seja pela alteração dos formatos varejistas, seja pela oferta de novos produtos com preços mais acessíveis, procurou atender a essa crescente demanda. Por meio dos grandes varejistas de moda, dos polos comerciais de ruas e dos centros comerciais planejados, como os shopping centers, pretende refletir sobre a oferta mais democrática da moda, particularmente os produtos de vestuário feminino, revelando as políticas e estratégias varejistas que vão ao encontro de camadas mais amplas da população. Assim, a segunda metade do século XX mereceu destaque na pesquisa. Igualmente, examinando os formatos varejistas, as técnicas de vendas, os produtos comercializados, os pontos de venda, as campanhas publicitárias propõem desvelar que o varejo visualizou a desigualdade social inerente ao desenvolvimento do País e encontrou meios de atender à sucessiva demanda dos consumidores de baixa renda. Nesse sentido, são indagações intrínsecas a este estudo: Como a população de baixo poder aquisitivo teve acesso aos produtos de moda? A inserção do consumo de baixa renda deu-se por meio de políticas de vendas? De opções de financiamento? De que forma os preços se tornaram mais acessíveis? Que alterações foram promovidas nos produtos e nos pontos de venda? Há uma estética popular? Qual a participação da publicidade no incentivo ao consumo da moda? É possível perceber que a democratização da moda em São Paulo traduz as singularidades da vida econômica e social dos paulistanos.