Cultura como política de estado no Brasil: a iniciativa oficial e sua busca pela consolidação da identidade nacional

Abstract

The present study searches to elucidate how from the moment the Brazilian state pulls to itself the responsibility of being both a cultural creator and promoter, it ends up creating an artificial and superficial version of the country’s culture, in which all sorts of different manifestations should, in a way, fit the criteria to be recognized as genuine, in a process that makes it elitist and alienates all those for whom these cultural texts should make sense. Beyond the historical process already described by multiple authors, the study searches to analyze these movements of creation, revision and promotion by the state of all these different cultural manifestations and how they were received and assimilated by a population with whom they had no direct identification, under communication and semiotics lenses with the help of the works of Edgard Morin, Amálio Pinheiro, Serge Gruzinski, among others. Pursuing a more precise portrait of the origins of theses practices and how they were translated by various areas of communication, a parallel is traced between the strategies utilized in the Brazilian Republic consolidation post-Imperial era and the very successful legitimation effort of Getúlio Vargas’ Estado Novo leaded by the Health and Education Ministry and the Advertisement and Press Department. To achieve that, and trying to materialize the problem even more, another parallel is traced between two fictitious and media characters from each period: the newspaper caricature of Juó Bananére, from the First Republic period, an anti-establishment character, whose main theme was precisely the parody and ridicule of the intellectual and political elites; and the hiper glamorized Joe Carioca, in the Estado Novo period, an almost precise opposite to Bananére, the parrot was a makeshift spokesperson to the government both in Brazil and throughout the world, selling a romanticized version of a country that lived under a dictatorship in which, thanks to censorship, characters like Bananére were no longer permitted to exist. The main point is the analysis of how, sometimes, a lot of these initiatives become successful by imposing a version of the Brazilian culture top to bottom while excluding and marginalizing other cultural manifestation as legitimate as the chosen ones, and how, sometimes, such exclusion ends up opening up a representation and legitimation abyss between the governing classes and the general population. It’s clear, in the same way, how such abyss manifests itself differently in a free-speech and free-press society than it does in a censored one