Primitive Modernities Tango, Samba, and Nation [Hardcover]

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.Florencia Garramu?o is Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Program in Brazilian Culture at the University of San Andr?s in Buenos Aires. One of the strong points of Garramu?o's book is its positing of an alternative to binary formulations of nationalism and cosmopolitanism . . . [T]his work remains an important study for Latin American specialists, among whom it will foster a lively dialogue across disciplines. Primitive Modernities: Tango, Samba, and Nationis a welcome tool for students without access to those languages in such fields as Brazilian and Latin American cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and literature; it is also an intriguing read for scholars of nationalisms more generally. The interdisciplinary nature of Garramu?o's work is unusual in the context of regional or national studies, and provides a good example of why we should examine any cultural object as part of an intense interactive process.Primitive Modernitiesis all the more rare for its flãÆ