The Complexity of the Dance of Forms in the History of Society

An Analysis of Brazilian Tropicalismo Based on Roigean Notions

Abstract

In his methodological proposals for the elaboration of a History of Latin American Ideas, Arturo Roig suggests a methodological expansion that involves leaving the framework of the text and works of consecrated thinkers in search of choosing objects of analysis that represent diverse structures of expression of thought. Music, for example, can be approached as a form of symbolic production in whose inner life discourses are hidden, which provide elements for the elaboration of the history of thought of our peoples. This article proposes the use of Roigean notions in the discursive analysis of Tropicalismo, a Brazilian musical movement of the late 1960s, with the aim of demonstrating that aesthetic demonstrations are also political attacks. From an aesthetic-political valuation, we explain some categories that compose the artistic-cultural discourses of that time marked by an authoritarian modernization imposed by the dictatorial regime and by a modernity still diffuse and established at its expense.