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Renovation and Conservation in Brazilian Literature and Music

Various Brazilianist cultural critics have sought to categorize stylistic tendencies in twentieth-century Brazilian popular culture with spatio-temporal dialectics. More specifically, these critics suggest as cultural paradigms the dialectics between modernity and tradition, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, or the rural and the urban. The dialectic between regionalism and cosmopolitanism is often further subdivided spatially into the local–regional versus the national or the national versus the international spheres. Often these dialectics are combined in obvious ways, such as the regional and the rural on the one hand and the cosmopolitan and urban on the other. A salient example can be found in the work of postcolonial theorist Silviano Santiago, who divides popular culture in Brazil over the course of the twentieth century into a multicultural, cosmopolitan vein on the one hand and a regional-traditionalist vein on the other. The cosmopolitan vein runs from the modernists of the 1920s to the Brazilian rock and rap of today, whereas one can trace a regionalist vein from the Northeastern social-realist novels of the 1930s to today’s country music (música sertaneja, not to mention forró) and the continued importance of popular regional literature (literatura de cordel). These stylistic emphases are certainly significant, but I would suggest that there is a more fundamental division of tendencies from which all the aforementioned spatiotemporal dialectics derive. This is the division between the renovationist and conservationist impulses of the diverse array of Brazilian artists. Renovation and conservation are two fundamental stylistic approaches towards cultural production that define any Brazilian artist’s relationship to the general formal and historical evolution of his or her particular genre. These concepts have the advantage of avoiding the spatiotemporal reification of what are actually complex historical processes of intellectualcultural labour. All too often the work of a particular artist is defined as a sort of ‘tamed hybrid’ of the rural and the urban or the modern and the traditional, in order to support the hegemonic Freyrean paradigm of miscegenation and cultural hybridity. Here I refer, of course, to Gilberto Freyre’s successful efforts to develop a dominant Brazilian national imaginary defined primarily through cultural-racial hybridity. In the realm of artistic production, the work as reified hybrid and the artist as hybridizer are simplifications that can be avoided if we take a step back and consider the artist’s work through a hermeneutics of renovation and conservation. This study will do so with the examples of two important and contrasting examples of Brazilian artists and their approaches to cultural production. On the one hand, the modernist poet, cultural critic and paulista Oswald de Andrade represents an extremely influential renovationist tendency with his call for a cannibalist cultural revolution. On the other, Pernambucan popular musician Luiz Gonzaga, father of the genre of Northeastern country music