Transando com deus e o lobisomem: Counterculture and authoritarianism in Brasil Grande
Description
The year 1968 was marked by political turmoil throughout the world. In Brazil, 1968 was marked by the promulgation of Fifth Institutional Act, which signified the hard-line turn of the right-wing military regime that installed itself in 1964. The Act proscribed political opposition groups, suspended habeas corpus, established censorship, suspended Congress, and undermined civil liberties. As cadres of young, clandestine resistance groups took up arms against the regime, the military police meted out torture. At the same time, censorship of journalism, literature, theater, and popular music became widespread as the military government, haunted by the specter of an underground opposition among its youth, proscribed the brand of cultural production it associated with the left-leaning youth culture. It was at this time that a counterculture began to coalesce in Brazil. Described as the 'desbunde,' a Portuguese word roughly translated as 'drop-out,' the Brazilian counterculture reflected, on the one hand, an aestheticization of the kind of political organization that became untenable in the wake of the military government's hard-line turn in 1968. The counterculture did not represent, however, a simple proxy for proscribed political action, but rather also addressed political questions that were marginalized in traditional leftist praxis: personal and individual concerns surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and the body. This dissertation introduces the Brazilian counterculture, describing Cinema Marginal, Poesia Marginal, the alternative press, and the radical theater as important coordinates in its development. The work focuses principally, however, on popular music, and in particular the importance of rock-and-roll music as a privileged point of reference for the Brazilian counterculture. Locating counterculture and rock-and-roll as phenomena at once local and global, this dissertation examines the differences between these manifestations in Brazil and other developing Latin American nations. This study focuses specifically on Raul Seixas and the Novos Baianos, two of the most popular countercultural rock-and-roll outfits in Brazil in the 1970s. Their work is taken as emblematic of the way in which rock music encoded the central questions, polemics, ideals, and aesthetics around which the Brazilian counterculture coalesced