Tropicália: Pop, Politics, and Counterculture in Brazil

Catalog description

Brazil’s “tropicalist” musical, artistic and literary movement of the Sixties and Seventies remains one of the most powerful and influential aesthetic experiences from the late twentieth century in all of Latin America. Its shrill juxtapositions of cosmopolitan with rural, and ethnic with industrial musical forms, of concrete poetry and street slang, hippie fashions and local TV kitsch aesthetics, enraged both the dictatorship and the traditional Left. In the course, we will study Tropicália’s musical expressions (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, Tom Zé, Jorge Ben) as well as their visual and literary forerunners and contemporaries (including, for example, the visual artist Hélio Oiticica, the poets Torquato Neto, Ana Cristina César, and Waly Salomão, film and theater directors José Celso Martinez Corrêa and Glauber Rocha, and the writer and underground filmmaker José Agrippino de Paula). We are also going to look into the longer history of the notion of the ‘tropical’ and into the impact Tropicália has had on more recent musical and cultural movements in Brazil (Manguebeat, Afro-Reggae, Fora do Eixo, or Baile-Funk).