the participants of Tropicalismo in the photo from the album Tropicália
Tropicalismo, or tropicália, was a Brazilian cultural movement that began in 1968. The manifesto of this movement was the album Tropicália ou Panis et Circensis (shown above), whose title comes from a song by Caetano Veloso, which in turn takes its name from an art installation by Hélio Oiticica. The principal participants included the musicians Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, Tom Zé, Nara Leão, and Rogério Duprat, as well as the poets Torquato Neto and José Capinan. You can see some of the central elements of Tropicalismo in the image selected for the album cover: it is a parody of a middle-class family (Dunn 93) that also demonstrates some “clichés of tropical scenery, such as palm trees, [which mix] with references to carnaval and hippie culture” (translated from Santos 55-56).
As we'll see in the following pages, tropicalismo worked with imitation, stylistic fusion, and popular tastes to share its message with the public. Its music combined various elements to establish a relationship between art and music which took from musical predecessors to construct a new, intellegent cultural product accessible to both the Brazilian and international public. At the same time, the music served as a form of cultural resistance that reacted to the in Brazil. Through the media, tropicalismo confronted cultural and political problems to establish the importance of modern Brazilian culture in the international sphere.
This website was originally created for an undergraduate course in the Departmnent of Spanish Language and Literature at Brandeis University, offered in Spring 2003. It was originally written in Spanish, and I have translated my own words to English for this website.
