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Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-4294804

1527-1900

Bryan McCann,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

As Brazil's right-wing military dictatorship tightened the screws in the late 1960s, popular musicians, visual artists, and authors on the left produced an outpouring of vital work. This cultural production challenged and provoked the military government but also offered penetrating criticism of flaws and failures within the Left, or the multiple Lefts. Scholars have analyzed this rich, complex cultural production created under the shadow of dictatorship for many years. What happened next has received far less scholarly attention. How did the remarkable cultural outpouring of the late 1960s evolve in the 1970s and beyond? What did it reveal about the changing dictatorship, the changing marketplace, and strategies and possibilities on the left and beyond? Chris Dunn explores these questions in this remarkable book, an outstanding work of cultural history and criticism.Dunn argues that the cultural outpouring of the late 1960s marked the inception of a fertile Brazilian counterculture, one that branched in several unruly directions over the course of the 1970s. Dunn engages scholarly interpretations of counterculture in the United States and Britain, particularly Theodore Roszak's theory of the counterculture as a symptom of alienation in a time of affluence and Thomas Frank's analysis of the shortcomings of counterculture as contestation, a contestation checked by the inevitable “conquest of cool” by Madison Avenue and the machinery of the marketplace. Dunn draws judiciously on these insights, but his interpretation of Brazilian contracultura is more flexible and optimistic. The Brazilians who experimented with disruptive art, psychedelic drugs, alternative sexualities, and a racial politics of bodily celebration were not afflicted by affluence. They responded to the opportunities of the so-called Brazilian economic miracle stoked by the dictatorship's incentives for consumer spending in the early 1970s, but they also shined a light on that miracle's limitations, its illusions and devalued currency.As in the United States, ad agencies in Brazil quickly discovered the marketability of counterculture and used its spirit and iconography to sell everything from blue jeans to steel wool (an alacrity that made Brazilian advertising among the world's most creative). But Dunn argues that such inflections did not constitute a conquest of cool, in part because few Brazilian counterculturists aspired to coherence. They were more likely to celebrate the incoherent, the fleeting, the impure. Much of Brazil's counterculture was like the parangolés created by the iconic plastic artist Hélio Oiticica, which were experimental art capes assembled from discarded materials, designed to transform the wearer temporarily into kinetic sculpture. Brazil's counterculture was born under the sign of transformation and rebirth. It could not be pinned down, a mutability that frustrated critics on both right and left but that delighted its creators and practitioners.As a result, Brazil's counterculture transcended and confounded comfortable dialectics. The black soul culture celebrated by lower-middle-class black youth in Brazil's major cities was playfully consumerist but had serious implications in its rejection of the cultural expectations of idealized racial democracy. Soul dancers borrowed creatively from US popular culture and the rhetoric of civil rights to challenge conceptions that black Brazilians should dance samba and deny the existence of racism. In doing so, these dancers also challenged the dogma of Brazil's nascent Movimento Negro Unificado (Unified Black Movement), pushing it toward more flexible understandings of empowerment.Gender-bending popular musicians and authors similarly challenged both traditional gender roles and restrictive definitions of gay rights. Ney Matogrosso, an openly gay singer known for his countertenor voice and his sensual stage performances, rejected and lampooned expectations of Brazilian male heterosexuality. But he also eschewed association with an emergent gay rights movement that politicized unambiguous sexual identity, preferring instead to celebrate sexual ambiguity and “the unbounded play of erotic desire” (p. 195). Dunn acknowledges that ambiguity ran the risk of reinforcing the primacy of heterosexuality and homophobia but argues that the erotic theatricality of performers like Matogrosso forced the emergence of a more capacious and flexible understanding of gender roles. The counterculture was decisive in pushing Brazil toward acceptance of public homosexuality far in advance of its Spanish American neighbors.One of the great strengths of this book is that Dunn grounds his analysis of performances like that of Matogrosso in richly detailed research into changing mores and their political and social context. Among his illuminating examples is that of a resident of the Rio de Janeiro favela of Babilônia who embraced the hippie movement in the 1970s, which demonstrates that the idea of a journey of self-discovery through countercultural exploration could be just as appealing to the disenfranchised as to the middle class. Dunn draws heavily on archival research, extensive oral historical work, and wide-ranging, sensitive interpretation of literature, song, visual art, and journalism. The result is a masterful work of cultural history, sure to be of compelling interest to any student of Brazil in the 1970s and of Latin American counterculture more generally.