Essays Brazilian

In these crisp, shrewd essays, a scholar of European modernism trains his insights and considerable critical acumen on contemporary Brazil, subjecting to scrutiny those spheres dearest to "Brazilian culture": the São Paulo Biennial; tropicália; City of God (both novel and film). Dialectical readings in the best sense, these brilliant, penetrating essays offer not pat resolutions but all the productive, joyous energy of tensions that pull at one another and spark new meanings and musings. Durão and friends eschew moralism to dwell, for instance, with the paradoxical promises of the pop song, at once utopian and commodified, mass without actually being popular, forging of communities and manipulated affects alike - but they also circle back time and again to the "raging coexistence of domination and resistance" marking contemporary Brazil. Amidst such contradictions, the very concept of equality is subject to ideology critique: neither ignored nor really believed in. Essays Brazilian spans a number of fields and figures, from music, visual art, literature, film, to criticism itself, and from outsider artist Arthur Bispo do Rosario to the contemporary artist Gil Vicente; from reception histories of Adorno, Bakhtin, and 12-tone music in Brazil to Reinaldo Moraes' recent novel Pornopopéia to the surprisingly (and convincingly) profound meaning of goofs in Fernando Meirelles' 2002 film City of God. Throughout, Durão and friends show how both popular and avant-garde artworks address Brazil's complicated history. If the essays suggest that national allegory has not wholly disappeared in the era of globalization, they also suggest - to cite Durão and Trocoli's reading of artist Nuno Ramos - that such allegories might well hold for any work of art today, mixing "exhilaration, because everything remains to be done, and mourning, because everything seems always about to disappear, because it is so difficult for things acquire the state of being, to become existent." Rachel Price Princeton University