scholarly journals Samba beyond the parade

Author(s):  
Paulinho da Viola

In this interview, singer and songwriter Paulinho da Viola comments on the documentary Partido alto (1976–1982) and his friendship with director Leon Hirszman. He also describes the origins of partido-alto as a variety of samba, the transformations of samba schools in the 1960s and 70s and his relationship with audiovisual media during this time period, including the music documentary Saravah (Pierre Barouh, 1972) and televised music festivals. A crucial figure in the history of samba, Paulinho da Viola was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1942. As a son of a middle-class choro guitar player, he soon became interested in the samba that was played in the slums, most notably Samba School Portela in the Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood of Oswaldo Cruz. Paulinho’s career, which started in the 1960s and continues today, combines a plethora of vital song releases such as “Foi um rio que passou em minha vida” (“A River Broke into My Life”, 1970) and “Dança da solidão” (“The Dance of Loneliness”, 1972) that helped rejuvenate samba, with a political stance that vindicates the roots of this music genre as a popular community practice. In line with his political beliefs, in 1970 Paulinho used his popularity to endorse the first album by Velha Guarda da Portela, a band of senior singer-songwriters who had been marginalised by the music industry. In the mid-1970s, Paulinho became increasingly critical with the gradual commodification of samba and Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, to the point of breaking up with Portela Samba School when traditional composers, such as those from Velha Guarda, were ignored by the directorship. His involvement with Hirszman’s Partido alto was strongly attuned with that moment in his career, because partido-alto contains a variety of archaic, improvised samba that contrasts with commercial, commodified practices. He worked as a consultant, interviewer and narrator for that film, as well as a performer, alongside his admired colleagues from Velha Guarda da Portela.

Author(s):  
Christopher T. Keaveney

Chapter 3 examines the long history of baseball films in Japan, a tradition nearly as old as the history of Japanese cinema itself. After a brief survey of the early history of cinema in Japan, a tradition whose history parallels that of the game of baseball chronologically, the study focuses on early shomingeki films and explores how baseball became an important marker of domesticity and middle class respectability in this genre of film in the 1930s. The chapter then examines several pivotal films in the postwar era, examining how baseball was used alternately to perpetuate a national hero in Suzuki Hideo’s Immortal Pitcher (1955) or to chart the corruption and greed surrounding professional baseball as in Kobayashi Masaki’s I Will Buy You (1956). In the 1960s and 1970s, as young filmmakers arose to challenge the dominance of the great postwar filmmakers and to produce often avant-garde and politically charged films that reflected an international challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood films, the baseball film was again adopted as a means to offer that challenge. Ōshima Nagisa’s Ceremonies, in a film that contests the very concept of the baseball film, uses baseball as a metaphor for the Japan’s abandonment of its citizens during the war. The recent splatter comedy baseball films of Yamaguchi Yūdai likewise play with the familiar tropes of Japanese baseball and of the baseball hero as antihero in problematizing the very concept of the baseball film.


Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Vitor Ferreira

The aims of this article are to identify, describe, and sociologically understand the different somatic cultures in contemporary Portuguese society—i.e., the distinct ways in which different generations have thought about, used and lived the body from the time of the Estado Novo (the New State, which was the regime that governed Portugal from 1933 to 1974) until the present day. Beginning with the hypothesis that there are different, historically institutionalized, somatic modes of attention to the “young body”, the author uses the most relevant institutions of the socialization of the body as analytical dimensions and investigates their main incorporation strategies and models of corporality. This hypothesis is informed by different generational conditions that change people’s uses of their body, their experiences of living in it, and their thoughts on the matter. Using these analytical dimensions, the article presents a typology that identifies, describes, and comprehends the three somatic cultures in the recent history of Portuguese society: the culture of physical invigoration that forms part of the legacy of the New State; the culture of physical rejuvenation inherited from youth cultures of the 1960s and 70s, along with the growth of body design industries in the 1980s; and the culture of physical perfection inherited from the biotech culture in the 1990s, accompanied by the radicalization of the body design industry. This approach entails the discussion and reinterpretation of a corpus of historical literature, presenting research data on the body in a defined time period (1930 to date) and space (Portugal), analyzed from an embodied perspective of generational change.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 1-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Stamp

Has any architecture – even the concrete ‘shoe boxes’ of the 1960s – received such consistent abuse as the neo-Tudor of the first half of the twentieth century – especially in its middle-class, suburban manifestations (Fig. 1)? ‘The abominable Tudoristic villa of the By-pass road’, ‘The worst bogus Tudor housing estates’, and ‘Those repellent, jerry-built, sham-Tudor houses that disfigure England’ are some contemporary judgements. And as far as that enthusiast for the modern, Anthony Bertram, in his 1935 book,The House: A Machine for Living In, was concerned:The man who builds a bogus Tudoresque villa or castellates his suburban home is committing a crime against truth and tradition: he is denying the history of progress, denying his own age and insulting the very thing he pretends to imitate by misusing it.


Author(s):  
Todd M. Michney

The story of white flight and the neglect of black urban neighbourhoods has been well told by urban historians in recent decades. Yet much of this scholarship has downplayed black agency and tended to portray African Americans as victims of structural forces beyond their control. In this history of Cleveland's black middle class, Todd Michney uncovers the creative ways that members of this nascent community established footholds in areas outside the overcrowded, inner-city neighbourhoods to which most African Americans were consigned. In asserting their right to these outer-city spaces, African Americans appealed to city officials, allied with politically progressive whites (notably Jewish activists), and relied upon both black and white developers and real estate agents to expand these "surrogate suburbs" and maintain their liveability until the bona fide suburbs became more accessible. By tracking the trajectories of those who, in spite of racism, were able to succeed, Michney offers a valuable counterweight to histories that have focused on racial conflict and black poverty and tells the neglected story of the black middle class in America's cities prior to the 1960s.


Urban History ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (02) ◽  
pp. 303-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
LEANDRO BENMERGUI

ABSTRACTThis article explores the construction of publicly financed low-income housing complexes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1960s. These housing developments were possible thanks to the arrival of foreign economic and technical assistance from the Alliance for Progress. Urban scholars, politicians, diplomats and urbanists of the Americas sought to promote middle-class habits, mass consumption and moderate political behaviour, especially among the poor, by expanding access to homeownership and ‘decent’ living conditions for a burgeoning urban population. As a result, the history of low-income housing should be understood within broader transnational discourses and practices about the ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ of the urban poor.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110296
Author(s):  
Dilek Kaya

This article focuses on cinemagoing in Izmir (the third largest city in Turkey) in the 1960s and the 1970s, when the city developed a vibrant cinema culture with its numerous winter and summer cinemas. It attempts to undo the problematic conceptions of homogeneous audiences and cinemagoing experiences by focusing on how gender shaped and constructed the experiences of middle-class audiences. The primary source material for the article is qualitative data obtained from 62 oral history interviews, in addition to the contents of local newspapers and film industry magazines. The article argues that although, for women, cinemagoing was a very meaningful event in itself, it was not a wholly free and easily pleasurable activity. It also suggests that women, like men, went to the cinema to see a variety of films more than they went to socialize, and their choice of films was not limited to supposedly women’s genres. Overall, the article attempts to break with the nostalgic tone in popular and academic discussions of cinemagoing in Izmir and other cities in Turkey. It shows that cinema in Izmir, and possibly elsewhere in Turkey, was not just a forum of collective entertainment and pleasure, but also a locus of struggle.


Author(s):  
Marlon Salomon

This article intends to briefly reconstitute the history of the introduction of Alexandre Koyré’s work in Brazil. I do not seek to make a general analysis but just to focus on two pathways by means of which his work was introduced in this country. I endeavor to reconstitute the history of the translation of his books into Portuguese and identify the main vectors and intellectual contexts responsible for his works’ acclimatation in Brazil. Those two pathways roughly correspond to two distinct geographies and intellectual cartographies; in Rio de Janeiro, interest in his work stemmed from the introduction of French epistemological thinking in the wake of philosophers’ readings Louis Althusser’s works after the 1960s; in São Paulo, it was linked to university institutionalization of the history of science, starting in the late 1950s, initially promoted by scientists. That history enables an understanding of the major lines and forms that the history of science assumed in Brazil. Furthermore, the study permits the comprehension of the logic of the international circulation of ideas and the history of the translation of human sciences books as forms of cultural appropriation.


Author(s):  
Carlos Sandroni ◽  
Felipe Barros

Samba schools are musical and recreational associations linked to carnival, created in Rio de Janeiro between 1928 and 1932 approximately. The first competitive samba school parade was held during the 1932 carnival, and since then they have held annually, always during carnival. Samba schools were also created in São Paulo later in the 1930s and gradually spread throughout Brazil, expanding internationally from the 1970s onwards. Since the end of the 1950s, the samba school parade has been recognized as the principal event in the Rio de Janeiro carnival. It is characterized as a performance involving music, dance, costume, and artwork. In the 1930s, each school sang up to three different sambas: the rule of just a single samba per parade was established later. Instrumental accompaniment is produced by the bateria, a set of membranophones and idiophones, which is perhaps the most the most characteristic element of a samba school. In addition, a small group of guitars and cavaquinho (a type of ukulele) provide the harmonic base for the singing. A group of judges mark the competition: points are organized by theme, music, dance, and outstanding features. The parade has gone through numerous transformations over the years. One such was the growing importance of the enredo, the central theme or story guiding the parade as a whole. In the 1950s, the composition of the sambas for the parade came to be driven by the need to present each aspect of the enredo in the music and lyrics, which led to the creation of a new type of samba, the samba-enredo. At time, the sambas performed in the parades were not very different from the sambas released on records and sung in different contexts in festivities. In the 1960s, the coordination of all aspects of the parade, with the aim of showing the enredo in the best manner possible, led to the emergence of a new role, the carnavalesco, who is charged with choosing the theme and designing and planning everything related to the parade’s visual and scenic dimensions. Increasing public interest in the samba schools was accompanied by the growth of the parade itself, implying ever greater costs, connections, and conflicts with the public authorities and with different private economic agents, including in some cases illegal economic activities, such as gambling. The importance of the parade of the samba schools for the city of Rio de Janeiro was expressed in the construction in 1983–1984 of a new and immense urban structure, known as the Sambódromo. Designed to shelter the parades without disturbing urban circulation, as had happened until then in the mounting and dismantling of stands, the Sambódromo is used throughout the year. Its open spaces host various festive events in the city, while the closed ones are used for activities linked to public education.


Author(s):  
Zachary J. Richards

The Cosmological Mosaic, a Roman imperial period mosaic found in Mérida in western Spain, has been the subject of inquiry for numerous archaeologists and art historians since its excavation in the 1960s. Though a large portion is no longer extant, there is much to be gleaned about this mosaic through the stylistic, scientific, historical, political, and religious contexts in which it finds itself. The visual resemblance to other mosaics in the Middle East and North Africa show that this work was invested with connections and interests spanning across the large empire. This view is supported by the elements of astronomy found in the work and how they relate to the possibility of an abundantly prosperous society. With this, one may deduce what exactly would have occupied the missing portion of the mosaic. The time period in which the mosaic was likely constructed provides insight into the political climate of the era, which then reveals the possibility of religious motivation for installing the mosaic in its space. Here, I intertwine all of these factors to speculate on the significance of the Cosmological Mosaic, not only in terms of broader history of art, but for the motivations of its ancient Roman owner as well.


Author(s):  
John White

A prominent thesis of British philosophy of education in the 1960s was that the pursuit of different forms of knowledge is central to education. The fact that the thesis is difficult to justify philosophically raises questions about its historical provenance. The idea of such a curriculum can be traced back through the history of the middle-class curriculum to the education of dissenters in the eighteenth century and further back still to sixteenth-century Ramism. There are indications that some leading 1960s philosophers of education were affected, positively or negatively, by these older religious ideas, but it is not clear how much should be made of this.


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