Primitive Modernities Tango, Samba, and Nation [Paperback]

Primitive Modernitiesinvites us to reconsider the boundaries that usually separate popular culture from the culture of the elite. It focuses on the cultural network that enabled popular musictango and sambato transform into national and modern forms. The origin of tango and samba is considered primitive, marginal. Yet in the early decades of the twentieth century, they each came to symbolize a nation: Argentina and Brazil, respectively. Garramu?o analyzes the aesthetic and ideological processes that enabled this transformation.Starting with the late nineteenth century, the author traces the changing meanings of the primitive in art, from savage and exotic to being linked to the modern. She considers not only music, but also painting, poetry, novels, essays, and films. Indeed, Garramu?o understands culture as fundamentally a space of differences. In this sense, the book is also a reconsideration of the field of comparativism and of Brazil's place in Latin American Studies. Primitive Modernitiesis a wonderfully ambitious effort to understand the modern aesthetic, literary, and political production in Brazil and the differences and commonalities with Spanish-America. In this illuminating book, Garramu?o brings together two powerful literary and intellectual traditions that have for too long been examined separately. Combining her literary and cultural scholarship with keen observations of the links between avant-garde artists and the national pasts, she offers a better understanding of the ways in which popular music, film and performers contributed to redefine nationhood in two key Latin American countries. Primitive Modernitiestraces how the changing meaning of the primitive enabled the transformation of tango and sambamusic considered primitive and marginal into art forms that symbolized the nations of Argentina and Brazil. Primitive Modernities: Tango, Samba, and Nationis a welcome tool for students without access to those languagel#-