A moderna tradição brasileira: relações entre modernização e cultura da tropicália/marginália à geração marginal-periférica

Abstract

The purpose of this Thesis is to think about the transformations in Brazilian contemporary culture related to the process of capitalist modernization of our society from the 1960s on, which irreversibly inserted the country in the net of the international market of cultural goods. The line of reasoning pursued is that there has been an important transition during the 1990’s, taking our culture from a “pop” perspective to a “popular” one – which can be seen in remarkable parallels (of continuity and rupture) between the period of “tropicália/marginália” and that of the hip-hop movement. The study will be based on the hypothesis that the Brazilian pop art of the 1960s and 1970s, due to its interest and incorporation of forms, themes and media of international mass culture, relates to a gesture of deterritorialization of the cultural imaginary, thus associated with the ongoing modernization and globalization; the hip-hop movement in Brazil, on the other hand, portrays the experience of modernization from the perspective of populations marginalized in the process of globalization, denouncing it from an internal perspective, which reaffirms cultural territoriality and leads to a rescue of a “popular” discourse. This is very similar to what Milton Santos called the “periphery revenge”: the moment when mass technologies would be appropriated by popular segments to produce their own discourse. Thus, for the purposes of this hypothesis, the term “popular” refers to the representations and cultural relations based on the community and the territory; and “pop”, in turn, refers to the languages, symbols and forms that reach massive and transnational scale by the means of the cultural industry. The method proposed is a comparative analysis, bringing together both generations to be read from the perspective of Even-Zohar's polysystem theory, as well as the perspective of Brazilian critical tradition – represented here by the concepts of “dialética da malandragem” (Antonio Candido) and “dialética da marginalidade” (João Cézar de Castro Rocha). The objective is to analyze different ways by which our cultural system (or sectors of this system) can interact with the international system of modern culture, either by opening itself (permeability) or by being resistant (impermeability). The corpus of study is composed by parallel works of the two periods in various media: poetry (26 poetas hoje [1975, org. Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda] and Literatura Marginal [2005, org. Ferréz]); fiction (Panamerica [1967, José Agrippino de Paula] and Cidade de Deus [1997, Paulo Lins]); music (Tropicália [1968, various artists] and Sobrevivendo no inferno [1998, Racionais Mcs]).