Arte e estética

Following a brief history of activist and political theater in Brazil with a focus on São Paulo, this dissertation sets out to evaluate the current status of activist theater in that city. It has become a commonplace to affirm that theater in general is a powerful vehicle for social change and it is generally agreed that an engaged, creative theater existed in Brazil during the military dictatorship. However, it is widely held by academics and observers of Brazilian theater that meaningful sociopolitically engaged dramatic production ceased with the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. This dissertation contends that recent years have seen significant growth in dynamic, engagé theater in São Paulo. Brazil occupies a special place with regard to "activist" theater due to the presence of Augusto Boal, who is probably second only to Bertolt Brecht in terms of his recognition as a leader in popular, engaged theater. In chapter one of this dissertation, following a theoretical discussion of activist theater with a focus on Brazil, I take a detailed look at how Boal and Brecht interact and how their efforts fit into the broader context of theater history. Chapters two and three each take a detailed look at one particular activist theater troupe. The focus of chapter two is Folias d'Arte and its production of Shakespeare's Othello. Folias is a fairly new theatrical group, yet it has developed significant interactions with other theater practitioners in São Paulo and has been instrumental in the organization and promotion of activist theater citywide. Chapter three deals with Teatro União e Olho Vivo (TUOV) and its staging of its own historically based play, João Cândido. TUOV is a much older and more established group, working in the poor, peripheral areas in the northern part of the city. Chapter four offers a more panoramic view of the current state of the overall contemporary activist theater scene in São Paulo, clearly showing that sociopolitically engaged theater is alive and well in that city.

This dissertation examines musical events in the public auditory spaces of São Paulo, Brazil. Drawing upon seventeen months of ethnographic and archival research conducted in the city of São Paulo during 2009-2013, I interrogate the public musical event as a specific mode of musical practice constitutive of the city’s contemporary urban condition. I develop the concept of listening heuristics—instruments of public policy that, in the broadest sense, facilitate an encounter between audiences and some sonic activity—as an analytic with which to understand these events as a nexus of social processes that unfold in the realms of cultural finance, the musical labor market, urban leisure, and urban spatial management. I use listening heuristics to explain how musical practices have become essential components of social and political projects of late capitalism in large urban agglomerations like São Paulo. Embedded within highly contentious debates about cultural policy, urbanism, citizenship, and economics, such events both characterize the social processes of music making in São Paulo and highlight the particularly fraught negotiations of aesthetics and power in the city’s aural public sphere. The dissertation addresses the role of musical events in Brazil’s recent, uneven economic growth through an examination of the alternately divergent and complementary logics of social inclusion and economic accumulation that are implicated in many cultural initiatives, contributing to an emerging area of musical scholarship that deals with neoliberal policy reforms and musical production. Furthermore, I position the ways in which musical actors experience the spatial and symbolic aspects of urbanity as a central research question, providing ethnographic accounts of economically segregated urban spaces in early twenty-first-century Brazil and employing the concept of urban imaginaries, which understands the physical and symbolic aspects of urban social life as mutually constitutive, as a way of interrogating the ways in which sonic practices participate in the construction of the city’s contemporary modernity.

The behaviors and interactions that enact specific gender identities are assumed by many Brazilians to be "natural." Within the context of samba schools, the distribution of specific performance roles has always been informed by the assumption that there are natural feminine and masculine spaces. Thus, samba school members have well defined performance roles that are hierarchically structured. In this dissertation, I argue that gendered identities are constructed and articulated in the process of cultivating specific performance roles within samba schools. I am particularly interested in highlighting the ways in which specific femininities and masculinities came to be taught, learned and naturalized in the lives of samba school members, as they engage in strategies of social- and self-discipline while preparing for the carnaval parade each year. Central to my argument is the idea that dance/musical competence is intertwined with notions about the physical body and the nurturing of particular character dispositions. By analyzing specific historical moments, discourses and samba schools' micro-practices and disciplinary methods, I show how performance roles are determined and defined by perceptions regarding gender as well as age, body type, skin color, behavior and bodily deportment. Furthermore, I demonstrate how the act of dancing and/or playing music in distinctive ways has become, at once, critical markers of specific femininities and masculinities, and also the way through which one learns how to be feminine or masculine. Finally, I explore how some samba school members have been able to construct alternative capacities for themselves by examining the circumstances that have allowed these participants to operate differently despite the given assumptions about the division of gendered identities.

This dissertation analyses how dress mediates identification processes in Candomblé religious houses in São Paulo and Salvador, Bahia. Dress is the primary thread that weaves notions of gender, race, and class with the discussion of authenticity and heritage in the development of Candomblé. This work draws from a variety of perspectives including, design techniques and procedures; performance studies and interdisciplinary approaches to theories of gender and racial melancholia; new interpretations of ethnographic models; and the historical developments of Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil. Religious contemporary dress worn in Candomblé retains traces of a hybrid colonial style that incorporated elements from Europe, Brazil, and Africa. Through its attachment to the past, dress helps Candomblé practitioners perform choreographies that reenact orixás'mythological stories and telegraph meaning to practitioners and the audience. As in many other religions, Afro-Brazilian religious dress has particular significance as a form of non-verbal communication through the way in which it identifies seniority, rank, and religious association. This research argues that black women's bodies dressed in their typical Baiana costume and working on the streets of Salvador serve to preserve the memory of the working women that have inhabited that space since the colonial times. Their bodies exposed on the street and their images used as objects for consumption, black women perform a memory that mimics Brazilian colonial models that appropriated women's bodies as commodity. As the “living” memory of a Brazilian past Baianas working in Salvador's historical sites are conflated with architectural buildings. In this open-air museum Baianas and their costume perform blackness and are perceived as if providing a sense of “authenticity” and legitimization to encounters with tourists who seek African traditions and a connection with Afro-Brazilian culture. The analysis of Candomblé religious dress as performance contributes to the discussion of how practitioners negotiate gender representation during religious ceremonies and how they wear dress to conform or transgress codes of heteronormativity. It is in the context of rituals, religious and secular festivals that this dissertation understands dress as a mediator for the expression of faith and pleasure.

Between 1930 and 1955 São Paulo, Brazil experienced a period of accelerated growth as the population nearly quadrupled from 550,000 to two million. In response, the municipal government undertook an aggressive public works program and commercial building boomed. Photographic representations of the cityscape were essential in directing modern São Paulo's physical evolution because they reflected both the real—a chaotically growing megacity—and the ideal—a literally new, modernized space. This dissertation centers on four case studies of artists practicing different photographic modalities in order to analyze the symbiotic relationship between São Paulo's urban development and its photographic representation. Construction sites, scaffolding, and building materials were ubiquitous in modern Paulistano visual culture. Chapter one discusses photography's incorporation of construction materials and processes through the fine art photography of Geraldo de Barros, arguing that these elements framed the way the city was seen and interpreted, offered new viewpoints, and shaped the city's identity as a space continually in-process. Chapter two builds on this foundation, explaining how photographs of skyscrapers (both those already built and those still under-construction) by early Brazilian photojournalist Hildegarde Rosenthal fueled ufanista, or patriotic, rhetoric that promoted São Paulo as an icon of national progress and located its modernity in its vertical rise. This chapter also examines the relationship between words and photographs in the popular press, suggesting that the city itself transformed into a text to be read as it was navigated. Evaluating the role of São Paulo's citizens in determining the shape of their city, chapter three analyzes photographs published in albums heralding the city's four hundredth anniversary in 1954. The books overwhelmingly linked regional modernism to a European legacy that excluded many Paulistanos on the basis of race, class, or gender. I argue that marginalizing these groups also marginalized their civic interests, altering the urban landscape. Documentary photographer Alice Brill's production is an exception to this rule and demonstrates a rare example of the "social documentary" mode operating in Brazil. Finally, the fourth chapter traces the development of São Paulo's advertising industry via the commercial photography of Hans Gunter Flieg, explaining how the broad definition of the term "propaganda" in Portuguese serves to link the country's public and private sectors. Here, my analysis focuses on advertising photographs that exploited urban imagery and embellished public space.

This dissertation analyzes literary representations of Brazilian public works to explore questions about power and narrative. It tracks how Brazil's major public works projects and the fiction surrounding them mark a twofold construction of the nation: the functional construction of the country's public infrastructure and the symbolic construction of nationhood.

How does a city become a city? This dissertation offers an answer by explaining São Paulo’s rapid transition from village to metropolis. More precisely, it examines the Brazilian city’s theaters between 1854 and 1924 to elucidate how Paulistanos adapted to their nascent mass society. As hundreds of thousands of immigrants and migrants poured into São Paulo, residents from across the social spectrum turned to theaters for entertainment, community, and social uplift. It was inside São Paulo’s theaters, the dissertation argues, that different groups began to articulate and realize their own vision for an urban public, that is, a social body fit for the crowds and visibility of city life. To understand what this social body entailed, I analyze three groups of theater producers: government officials, associational leaders, and businessmen. I show that, while no single notion of an urban public spanned all of the producers examined, most agreed on the need for the orderly juxtaposition of individuals through a shared understanding of “culture.” Theaters in this manner offered Paulistanos the possibility of rethinking social transformation: not only could culture be learned by all Paulistanos, meaning that men and women of every age and background took part in the urban public, but it could also be learned and defined outside the church and home. In other words, by taking advantage of São Paulo’s minimally regulated growth to erect their own mass spaces, theater producers situated social transformation in the secular public arena and within reach of most Paulistanos. In explaining the mechanisms by which theater producers did so, this dissertation illuminates how Paulistanos shaped on a mass scale the social categories and norms of the inchoate metropolis.

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.

In this research project I address two main issues of meaning-making among Brazilian hip-hoppers: (1) the processes and technologies by which practitioners perform and produce hip-hop (design), and (2) the articulations hip-hoppers make between hip-hop and society (mediation). My analysis is based on over four years of fieldwork in São Paulo, Brazil. I argue that Brazilian hip-hop, as developed by shantytown youth, constructs arenas for citizenship debates, educational discussions, economic development, and practices of community through the narratives it performs, the ideologies and meanings it produces, and the networks it mobilizes. I describe these hip-hop developments and demonstrate how persons “work” hip-hop culture and articulate it to a Brazilian national formation that is challenged by global processes. I delineate how Brazilian hip-hop, while influenced by the United States' version of this cultural form, significantly differs from it. It has transformed the values of the U.S. urban variant and this rearrangement has differing social effects.

This social and cultural history of homosexuality in twentieth-century Brazil examines the development of a subculture in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo and the appropriation, use, and expansion of urban space for same-sex erotic sociability. The image of uninhibited and licentious Brazilian homosexuals, expressing sensuality, sexuality, and camp during Carnival festivities, has come to be equated with an alleged cultural and social toleration for homosexuality or bisexuality in Brazil. Apparent permissiveness during Carnival, so the stereotype goes, symbolizes a sexual and social regime that unabashedly accepts fluid sexual identity, including male-to-male sexuality. By widening the perspective beyond the gender transgressions which take place during Carnival, this study examines the broader social and cultural realities of male homosexuality. Using police and medical records, newspapers, literature, homecrafted newsletters, and oral interviews, this project recreates the lives of men coping with arrests and street violence, negotiating around family restrictions, developing alternative support networks, having sexual adventures, and maintaining relationships. The first two chapters examine the formation of same-sex subcultures in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in the early twentieth century. This is followed by an analysis of the medicalization of homosexuality in the 1920s and '30s and the means by which medical and legal professionals attempted to control, contain, and cure this "deviant" behavior. A fifth chapter maps the expansion of urban spaces, both public and private, in the post-World War II period. The final section explores the emergence of new gay identities in the 1960s and the first stages of politicalization of activists in the late 1970s. By this time, I argue, a new social and political situation among Brazilian gay men led to the development of a social movement that mobilized its members against discrimination, social stereotypes, and the marginal status of Brazilian homosexuals in everyday life. This study of men who have crossed sexual boundaries, in turn, reflects back on the overall framework of Brazilian social values and rules of acceptable behavior and as such reveals much about normative definitions of masculinity and femininity.