Robert Stam

What I will be presenting here is drawn from what is by now a very long manuscript, part of a forthcoming book to be entitled Travelling Multiculturalism: Culture Wars around the Black Atlantic. The book attempts the Quixotic task of addressing the multicultural debates as they have been articulated not only across diverse national spaces – Brazil, France, and the United States. The book explores such diverse topics as the contested definitions of multiculturalism, the various forms of exceptionalism, the French theorizations of the Brazilian and North American Indian, the racialized dilemmas of Enlightenment modernity, and the Brazilian, French, and US debates about race, slavery, and multiculturalism. As a constant counterpoint, I interweave vibrant moments of Brazilian art and popular culture – the films of Glauber Rocha, the novels of Machado de Assis, the songs of Caetano Veloso. After initially agonizing over what to present here, I decided on a rather simple solution: to extract the passages devoted to Brazilian popular culture and have the larger theoretical points emerge from a discussion from a series of musical and filmic sequences. Brazilian music, it seems to be, has given a powerful voice to the constitutive muticulturality on Brazil, whence its chameleonic ability to move easily between various cultural repertoires, to negotiate multiple worlds in a ludic dance of identities reminiscent of carnival and candomblé. Popular music – that of the Tropicália singer/composers, for example – “performs” the muticultural debates in visual, sensuous and percussive form. Rather than explicate the clips, I will be bringing muticultural issues to bear on them through historically informed readings. Through the clips and my analysis of them, I hope to address some of the issues engaged by the Conference – colonialism and postcoloniality, the transnational flows of artistic information, official and unofficial national narratives, and the role of the arts (especially music and the cinema) in staging muticultural relationalities.

I would like to begin by analyzing a sequence from Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe (Land in Anguish, 1967). Apart from its catalyzing role for the Tropicália movement, the film here serves to introduce, in the manner of a musical ouverture, a number of the themes of my essay: 1) it foregrounds the literal multi-cultural encounter between African, indigenous, and European cultures; 2) it exemplifies the artistic move beyond nation-sate thinking toward more transnational frameworks such as “the Black Atlantic” and “indigenous America”; 3) it demonstrates the power of the arts to transfigure historical relationalities in ways that are at once cosmopolitan, international and very Brazilian; and finally, 4) it shows the potential pedagogical role of music and cinema for those of us who teach Brazilian culture abroad.