Description:

Brazil underwent a severe military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985. Although artistic expressions were largely censored, music became a common channel through which Brazilians offered resistance to and criticized the ideology and acts of the military regime. This workshop will focus on the strategies used by Brazilian composers to communicate their ideals and concerns with the nation to the people in general. By looking at several songs and their lyrics, we will discuss why and how they often escaped censorship, and what types of messages they portrayed. Prof. Idelber Avelar is a Full Professor specialized in contemporary Latin American fiction, literary theory, and Cultural Studies at Tulane University. He is the author of The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (2004) and The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (1999), winner of the MLA Kovacs prize and also published in Spanish and Portuguese. He has published over 50 articles on Latin American literature, culture, and music in scholarly journals in Europe and the Americas, has been the recipient of Rockefeller, Ford, and Hewlett grants, and has recently won the Brazilian Foreign Ministry essay contest on Machado de Assis. At present he is working on two monographs, El vértice y el desamparo: Arte, subjectividad y masculinidad en la novela argentina post-crisis and Timing the Nation: Rhythm, Race, and Nationhood in Brazilian Popular Music as well as an edited volume (with Christopher Dunn), Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship.

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