Abstract This article examines the New Right’s stagings of transgression during Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign. It takes as an entry point the campaign’s adoption of ‘O Proibidão do Bolsonaro’ (Bolsonaro’s Prohibited Funk), a contrafact of the funk hit ‘Baile de Favela’ (Favela Funk Party). The article then situates the song within a constellation of other contrafacta circulating on social media platforms and on the streets of São Paulo to reflect on the New Right’s transgressive performances and controversial claims to facticity. It demonstrates how the New Right deploys this sensibility to signal its alternativity to the liberal ‘mainstream’, a strategy that distances the movement both from neoliberal promises of tolerance and from the aesthetic canon of the traditional right. In a context marked by political corruption, economic crisis, and post-truth politics, this performance of transgression falsely constructs New Right leaders as truth-tellers.
Abstract In 1942 and 1943, Orson Welles produced the radio series Hello Americans , sponsored by the Office of Inter-American Affairs, as part of his efforts as a wartime goodwill ambassador. The twelve thirty-minute episodes explore various regions of Central and South America – including Brazil, the Andes, the Caribbean, and Mexico – and address themes of history and culture. This article examines the sonic strategies – encompassing music and sound – that Welles employed to promote a Pan-Americanist agenda within Hello Americans , focusing on how radio as a medium becomes a site of transatlantic encounter. How does Welles’s use of sound and music shape and communicate a particular vision of Latin American identity within the broader context of Pan-American cultural exchanges? This analysis explores how sonic elements serve as tools of cultural diplomacy during moments of encounter, illustrating how music and sound can foster understanding while also constructing idealized images of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Abstract During the Second World War and the Cold War, the U.S. military developed a hydrophone array system called SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) to listen underwater in the ocean. This arose in response to the threat posed by enemy submarines. But this technology was also fundamental for listening to oceanic living beings. This paper explores the history of the invention of SOSUS as fundamental to redefining a subaquatic Caribbean by tracing the history of research that led to its deployment. Through the interrelationship between military and environmental sonic history, the author seek to problematize the notion of encounter and explore the following questions: What does the encounter between animal and machine biopower tell us about the history of acoustic Atlantic crossings? Moreover, why was SOSUS deployed in the Caribbean initially and what sort of understandings of the submarine ocean and the history of the Anthropocene does this give rise to?
