Overlapping Nations: Tension between Hip-Hop and Brazil

• In Event: Words, Beats, Life Presents The Brazil Issue: New Approaches in Brazilian Hip Hop

Abstract

Transnational capitalism and technology have facilitated the increasing penetration of Brazil within the circuits of global culture. While Brazil has historically been embedded within global culture, elites have attempted to police how Brazilians engage the global through the notion of nation and national identity. Skidmore (1993) illustrates the enormous influence that Western Europe wielded onto Brazil’s lettered elite in early 20th century. Today, many Brazilian elites travel around the world, eat U.S. fast food, wear the latest fashion in North America and listen to Top 40 music. And their Brazilianness is rarely questioned.

Yet when Afro-Brazilians engage with U.S. black culture, they are chastised for being un-Brazilian and charges of U.S. cultural imperialism arise (Hanchard, 1994). Fears of racial consciousness and subsequent antagonisms threaten the notion of Brazil as a racial paradise and more specifically social structures that marginalize Brazilians along racial lines. Through the example of “hip-hop baiana”, I analyze how black hip-hoppers utilize increasingly accessible technology to cannibalize, to invoke Oswald de Andrade (1932), the hip-hop nation in their cultural expressions and productions. In doing so, I explicate how this process and production open up new possibilities of cultural politics and illustrates a concerted effort to a more democratic and equitable Brazil. In other words, they harness global culture and the hip-hop nation in order to participate in Brazilian civil society and for their voices to be heard from the margins.

Author

• Bryce M Henson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign