Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship ed. by Idelber Avelar, Christopher Dunn (review)

As the first step for gaining recognition by the Brazilian Electoral Court, the new political party ARENA—acronym for the National Renewal Alliance—had its statute published by the government newspaper Diário Oficial on 13 November 2012. The move was an obvious attempt to resurrect the right-wing party that provided political legitimacy for the infamous military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s. The document was conceived and signed by a 23-year-old law student who, ironically, received a scholarship from the current leftist government and enjoys a level of political freedom never allowed by the former ARENA legislators. The platform of the new party proposes the end of racial quotas at universities and any ‘special’ status that current laws grant to disadvantaged groups, lowering the age of criminal responsibility, and reinstating the discipline of Moral and Civic Education to the middle-school curriculum—a notorious programme devised by the military in 1969 to indoctrinate the youth politically under the pretext of teaching citizenship (Folha de São Paulo, 13 and 19 Nov. 2012). Although this agenda aims to eliminate policies of political freedom and social inclusion promoted after redemocratization, voices in support are becoming increasingly loud. Even a representative of the PMDB (the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party)—a direct off-spring of the only opposition party during the former ARENA years—is suggesting the return of Moral and Civic Education as a means of politicizing the apathetic youth (blog of the State Representative from Ceará, Dra. Silvana Oliveira, 24 Oct. 2011, <http://depsilvanaoliveira.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html>; accessed 19 Dec. 2012).

How fragile are some recent social conquests and how malleable the concept of citizenship! Events like these corroborate the need for keeping alive the debate about social inclusion and the state’s role in safeguarding irrefutable human rights, while confirming the relevance of Brazilian studies on citizenship published in the last decade (José Murilo de Carvalho, Cidadania no Brasil, o longo caminho (Rio de Janeiro, 2001); Jaime Pinsky et al., História da Cidadania (São Paulo, 2003); Dalmo Dallari, Direitos humanos e cidadania (São Paulo, 2004); Marilena Chauí, Cidadania cultural: O direito à cultura (São Paulo, 2006)). This list now includes a noteworthy collection of essays organized by Christopher Dunn and Idelber Avelar.

The first five chapters of Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship work with the widely accepted definition of citizenship as a type of political identity that encompasses a set of duties and rights related intrinsically to the concept of nationality. Within this framework, the authors approach music as an agent or enabler of citizenship. Music can be a disciplining instrument, demanding loyalty and hard work from the masses. Or it can be used to denounce injustice, a tool in the fight for full participation in the political process and equal access to education and health care. However, an important premiss of this book, outlined in the introductory chapter, is that practising music can be in itself an exercise of citizenship. Since a strict juridical definition would not allow such a claim, the book also works, especially from the fifth chapter on, with a less legalistic and more realistic model of citizenship that unfolds in the political, economical, and cultural spheres. First used by Renato Rosaldo (‘Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy’, Cultural Anthropology, 9 (1994), 402–11, and ‘Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism’, in William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor (eds.), Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Politics (Boston, 1997), 27–38) to address the preservation and development of a Latino cultural lineage in the context of migration and occupation, the concept of cultural citizenship acquires a different facet here, as it resorts to ‘notions such as recording and mixing, rather than preservation, as better terms to describe how music has acquired citizenship dimension in Brazil’ (pp. 3–4). Dunn and Avelar elaborate their argument by claiming that ‘the political dimension is...