Artes

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.

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 dissertation analyzes the physical expression of modernity through two overlapping narratives: the emergence of women in public spaces of leisure in Brazil, and the history of movie-going in its largest city, São Paulo. In the early and mid-twentieth century, both cinemas and movie-going women were powerful symbols of what was modern in Brazil. Cinemas screened the latest Hollywood films and imported advanced projection technologies. The presence of women in cinemas, streets, and shops signaled Brazil's entry into a cosmopolitan culture that was represented in glamorized images of Paris and New York. The focus on movie-going rather than movie-making reveals how modernity was physically constructed in the built space of cinemas, in the slender bodies of fashionable women, in the "photogenic" gestures of actors, and in the practices of everyday moviegoers. It also emphasizes the transnational dimensions of local film culture as Brazilian movie fans wrote letters to their favorite stars and interpreted the images of Hollywood. The geographic, material, and social accessibility of movie-going offers the opportunity to analyze how people of various class and racial backgrounds came together within cinemas, simultaneously sharing spaces and creating difference. An investigation of class in cinemas reveals the history of middle-class culture in Brazil, and how it was constructed through rituals of dating and images of romance. Through the close analysis of diverse sources such as photographs, blueprints, oral history, and literature, this dissertation examines how modern girls and cinema kings, Catholic women's societies and shopgirls, municipal officials and everyday moviegoers, constructed modernity in Brazil through their interaction with cinema.

A dissertação investiga a contribuição do grupo teatral "Nós no Morro" na vida dos seus integrantes e da comunidade do Vidigal. Trata-se de uma das mais importantes iniciativas no âmbito de trabalhos artísticos e sociais desenvolvidos em favelas do Rio de Janeiro e do Brasil. A primeira parte do estudo dedica-se ao seu histórico, procurando destacar os aspectos que garantiram a continuidade de sua ação dentro de sua comunidade-mãe, a favela do Vidigal, bem como a sua projeção e reconhecimento fora dela. Além disso, a pesquisa de campo realizada no ano de 2003, nos permitiu fazer uma reflexão sobre a prática do grupo em dois campos de ação: o da sala de aula (ensinando teatro a crianças e adolescentes do Vidigal) e o da companhia profissional de atores, através do acompanhamento da montagem do espetáculo "Burro sem Rabo". O estudo mostra que o grupo através do diálogo com seus indivíduos e com a sua comunidade, fortaleceu sua identidade, tornando-se capaz de desafiar a fronteira que separa o morro do "asfalto". Atualmente o "Nós do Morro" representa um movimento artístico e social que extravasa os limites do Vidigal.

Casa-Tela “Origem e História” é um circuito que representa as histórias e memórias das comunidades do Pavão, Pavãozinho e Cantagalo através de murais de grafite localizados entre os becos e vielas daquelas comunidades. Esta dissertação procura compreender esse roteiro como uma produção cultural desenvolvida em um contexto sociocultural específico que envolve distintos atores sociais com diferentes significados acerca desse objeto. A produção do circuito é relevante no sentido de valorizar e dignificar aqueles locais através do resgate e representação das memórias dos moradores mais antigos, além de contribuir para a construção e fortalecimento da “memória coletiva” da região.

Compreender as relações entre memória e graffiti no Museu de Favela (MUF), um museu comunitário e de território, um Ponto de Memória que pauta seu trabalho na Museologia Social, é o objetivo desta pesquisa. O MUF localiza-se nas favelas Pavão, Pavãozinho e Cantagalo, na Zona Sul da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, e um de seus principais acervos é o Circuito Casas-Tela, composto por pinturas em graffiti que utilizam paredes e muros das casas de moradores para registrar memórias, histórias e culturas locais. Que demandas surgem a partir da entrada do graffiti em um museu de território? O graffiti frequentemente é considerado como uma arte (manifestação) de caráter fugaz, porém ao ser incorporado à memória das Casas-Tela, ele sofreu processos de restauração. Ao ser restaurado o graffiti teria perdido sua originalidade? Ao fazer parte de um museu institucionalizado ele também deixaria de ser graffiti? Ao restaurar graffiti o MUF estaria quebrando paradigmas? O que determina a efemeridade desta arte? Em que medida o restauro do graffiti pode se configurar como uma valorização da arte e do próprio artista? Eis algumas das questões que permeiam esta pesquisa que se concentra na análise das implicações decorrentes da entrada do graffiti no MUF, especialmente no período contido entre 2010 e 2014. Tudo indica que o restauro dos graffiti enquanto tema e problema teve seus “deslimites”, pois cada Casa-Tela foi restaurada de uma forma distinta. O que parece estar em jogo e presente no desejo de restauro das Casas-Tela, obras coletivas e vivas, é a preservação da informação, não importando se há ou não mudanças nas pinturas restauradas. Os desenhos devem preservar a capacidade de comunicar o conteúdo de memórias do museu. Todo esse processo sugere que o MUF tem buscado, com o graffiti e seu poder dialógico, o reconhecimento das memórias das favelas em que está inserido como parte integrante da cidade do Rio de Janeiro.