The swing of the tropics: the presence of jazz in the formation of Brazilian Popular Music (1919-1959)

• Grant number: 18/16812-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2018
• End date: July 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Heloísa André Pontes
• Grantee: Rafael Do Nascimento Cesar
• Supervisor: Marc Adam Hertzman
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 16/02062-1 - The swing of the tropics: the presence of jazz in the formation of Brazilian popular music (1919-1959), BP.DR

Abstract

This project seeks to comprehend the construction of narratives regarding Brazilian popular music in its correlation with the North-American cultural production, mostly jazz. Having in sight its massive presence in Rio de Janeiro between the decades of 1920 to 1950, my main goal is to investigate the means by which the understanding of an "authentic" Brazilian culture, expressive of a national identity and riddled with by several racial discourses, depended on the continuous dialogue, although sometimes veiled, with foreign cultural forms. The access to North-american symbolic goods, deriving from the consolidation of a highly urban mass culture, produced a kind of sociability in which jazz-bands and rodas de samba shared the same space, enabling different ways to experience and represent modernity through music and the body. In this sense, to consider the circulation of symbolic productions beyond national borders allows us to perceive the nation's constitution as a relational process that articulates both identitary micropolitics and worldwide power relations. Moreover, this project is attentive to how other categories - as race, gender, sexuality, nationality, cultural "genuineness" and cultural "influence" - may also travel along countries and be constituted within these movements.