: : Introduction Music As Practice of Citizenship in Brazil

: : : introduction Music as Practice of Citizenship in Brazil Idelber Avelar and Christopher Dunn In Brazil music has been both an instrument through which disenfran- chised groups have asserted claims to citizenship, as well as a tool in the for- mulation of disciplinary or repressive state policies. While music brought mixed-race and black people into the urban public sphere for the first time in the late nineteenth century with maxixe, it also encoded messages of obedience in the pedagogy of choral singing concocted by the authoritarian state of the 1930s and 1940s. Music allegorized hopes and anxieties like no other art during the military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s, but it also provided upper and middle classes with the paradigm for an exclusion- ary conception of taste, based on the imaginary belonging to a community of enlightened, sophisticated aesthetic consumers—an operation that im- posed a considerable stigma of “bad taste” upon the preferences of poorer populations (Araújo, 2002). Music has played a decisive role in reconstruct- ing the self-esteem of numerous communities in Brazil, from the rebirth of the Candeal neighborhood in Salvador, Bahia, to Recife’s definitive en- trance into a national and international pop scene. On the other hand, music has been the primary currency in the corrupt industry of the jabá (“payola,” record company bribes to radio stations), a practice as pervasive and politi- cally decisive in Brazil as anywhere in the world. Popular music has been, therefore, an essentially contradictory phenomenon in Brazil, one that in- variably produces multiple political effects. This book compiles essays that focus both on popular music as an agent and image of citizenship, as well as essays that detail music’s imbrication in the foreclosure of citizenship. Our chapters do, in fact, often study both movements simultaneously, thereby offering the dynamic picture of a cultural practice whose political meaning is never given in advance. This is the first Eng lish-language collection of essays that focuses on the political dimensions of Brazil’s most fecund form Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/651630/9780822393603-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 of popular art; it is also one of the first books to address specifically the question of citizenship in Brazilian popular music. Scholars have usually distinguished between a liberal school and a civic republican school in the interpretation of citizenship: the former empha- sized rights while the latter stressed duties (Heater 1999: 4–79). The liberal tradition is the more recent, but it has been the decisive force in shaping the ways in which citizenship has been conceptualized in the West for the past two centuries. For Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the major concern was the securing of order rather than the establishment of civic rights, but he can be seen as a precursor to the liberal tradition insofar as he shifts the medi- eval understanding of rights and liberties as belonging to groups and estates toward a system where the individual enjoys a direct relationship with the state (Faulks 2000: 22). John Locke (1632–1704) later systematized the liberal conception of citizenship in The Two Treatises of Civil Government (1690). The second treatise, particularly, presented a theory of individual natural rights, stating that every man should have the right to “preserve . his life, liberty, and estate” (1988: 323), a formula later adapted by the American and the French revolutionaries. As noted by Derek Heater, “Liberal citizenship was the offspring of the liaison between revolutionary upheaval and contrac- tarian natural rights theory, Great Britain playing the role of midwife” (1999: 4). The liberal conception of citizenship is predicated, then, on Hobbes’s individualization and on Locke’s naturalization of the concept of rights. The civic republican tradition can be said to hark back to Book III of Aris- totle’s Politics, which concerns itself with the definition of the citizen. The emphasis here is definitely on the requirements for citizenship,aretē (virtue) foremost among them. As one of us has shown in earlier work (Avelar 2004: 33–36), Aristotle’s attempts to establish an ontological rationale for the con- tingent Athenian requirements for citizenship (maleness, adulthood, owner- ship of property, etc.) endowed his politics with an essentially unstable nature. After all, Aristotle’s ontologizing efforts notwithstanding, today’s citizens could be the noncitizens of tomorrow due to, for example, a defeat in war. Aristotle inaugurated a long tradition in which the thrust to natural- ize the qualifications for citizenship clashed against the essentially contin- gent nature of those qualifications. The Aristotelian emphasis on virtue con- tinued with Marcus Tullius Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties; 44 BCE), which makes a strong argument, grounded on the Stoic ethic, about the citizen’s responsibility to the polis. Niccolò Machiavelli would later toughen those re- 2 Idelber AvelAr And ChrIstopher dunn Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/651630/9780822393603-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 quirements even more. The modern version of the civic republican tradition would be inaugurated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762), which, as Derek Heater points out, sets itself the task of answering a thorny question: “How can men subject themselves to government, which is nec- essary for security, while, at the same time, retaining their freedom, which is their moral right? His solution was the General Will” (1999: 50). Although the civic republican tradition would continue with the likes of Georg Hegel and Alexis de Tocqueville, the liberal tradition would undoubt- edly become the dominant one in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Standard accounts of citizenship have, in fact, inherited the Kantian belief in perfectibility visible in works such as To Perpetual Peace (1795), a short essay in which Kant addressed the possibility of a universally sustainable state of peace. The most canonical and foundational of these accounts of citizenship remains T. H. Marshall’s essay “Citizenship and Social Class” (1950), which distinguishes three forms of citizenship: civil, political, and social. By civil citizenship Marshall alluded to rights such as free speech, the liberty of the person, and the right to property and to justice, while political citizenship encompasses the right to participate in the exercise of state power through voting and other means. Finally, social citizenship repre- sents a “whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to share to the full in the social heritage” (Marshall and Bottomore 1992: 8). Implied in all its variants is the notion of “rights held by indi- viduals and protected by a state whose authority is exercised within explicit boundaries that cannot be exceeded without violating a state’s legitimacy” (Mitchell and Wood 1998: 1003). None of these classical theories, however, endow culture with any independent valence as an agent of citizenship. Only in past decades, propelled by new realities such as global migration, has a discourse around cultural citizenship consolidated itself (such discourse being, of course, one of the ways in which the relation between culture and citizenship can be posed). Cultural citizenship most often refers to the “maintenance and development of cultural lineage through education, custom, language, and religion and the positive acknowledgment of differ- ence in and by the mainstream” (Miller 2001: 2). We will place our emphasis less on lineage and maintenance than on processes of recodification and transformation of available cultural materials. More than the questions re- garding lineage and preservation raised by the term cultural citizenship in the contexts of migration in relation to which the term arose, this book will Introduction 3 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/651630/9780822393603-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 resort to notions such as recoding and mixing, rather than preservation, as better terms to describe how music has acquired citizenship dimension in Brazil. In a landmark book on the current expediency of culture as a mediator in a growing field of social and political circumstances, George Yúdice notes music’s increasingly relevant role for practices of citizenship in Latin America. Speaking of a cultural turn in citizenship, Yúdice highlights how practices of popular culture have opened up spaces of citizen representation not previously available. Located in the “turn to a politics of interpretability and representation in the 1980s and 1990s,” a transformation “from what was traditionally deemed properly political to cultural mediation” (2003: 164), these new forms of citizenship ask not who count as citizens but how they are construed; not what their rights and duties are, but how these are interpreted; not what the channels of participa- tion in opinion formation and decision making are but by what tactics they can be intervened on and turned around to the interests of the subordinated. (ibid.) Claims to citizenship have, then, progressively moved from relying on an ontology of political beings to something like a semiotics of political representation. Whereas previous historical moments often saw a dichotomy between, on the one hand, a musician’s career and, on the other hand, his/her “real” political action, in recent years it has become patent that the political dimension is to be sought in the cultural artifact itself. In other words, the argument on the expediency of culture does not simply note the increasingly broad political scope that culture has acquired as a mediator that provides access to areas not usually deemed cultural. The argument goes further, im- plying a redefinition of the very border that separated the political from the cultural. In fact, some of the most innovative interventions by musicians in the field of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of popular music in Brazil have effected precisely this form of agency of culture upon politics.

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