Cultural Studies: the defense and the fight of the excluded

In his inauguration address at the Ministry of Culture of Brazil (MinC, in the Portuguese acronym), on January 2nd, 2003, Gilberto Gil evaluated the role of republican institutions as fosterers of the national culture up to that moment. “The State had never been on a par with the crafting of our people, in the various branches of the Brazilian symbolic creation large tree.” Further ahead, he summed up the task he intended to undertake from that moment on: “There are two things that, today, get international irresistible attention, intelligence, and sensitivity towards Brazil, one of them being the Amazon, with its biodiversity. The second one is the Brazilian culture, with its diversity of signs. Brazil represents this, with its diaspores and its mixes, an issuer of new messages, within the context of globalization.” Bold, but certainly coherent with his trajectory.

While at MinC, he turned into countless public policies what he conceived as the duties of the ministry—symptomatically extinct, on January 1st, 2019, by the provisional measure N. 870, equivalent to an executive order, in the context of the administrative reform promoted by Jair Bolsonaro’s administration: “It is the open space for the popular creativity and the new languages. The space available for adventure and boldness. The space for memory and invention."”

Gilberto Gil dusted away—or better yet, shook vigorously—an Eurocentric conception of culture belonging to the elite and to scholarly productions. He had found a Culture Ministry on a shoestring budget, embedded with the neoliberal policies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration and focused solely on productions from the Southeast as well as on businessmen, who were using the Rouanet Law—a government mechanism to foster cultural production—as a corporate marketing tool, wanted. It was not an easy task. Gil had collected enemies, even among artists who were considered progressists.

In the editorial, Gilberto Gil remarked that such protagonism of culture, in Lula’s administration, would have lifted up Brazil even further in the international picture. This culminated in the UNESCO Conference, in Paris, in which the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions was adopted, an instrument that regarded cultural diversity as a fundamental right and base for self-determination and sovereignty of peoples. The minister credits the signing of the document, in October 2005, “to the work of the Ministry of Culture of Brazil, sided by countries like Spain, France, Canada and Mercosur neighbors.” It has all to do with the proposals of Cultural Studies: the defense and struggle of the left outs starting off from their cultures.

Gil’s trajectory in arts and in public administration communed, in fact, of an inseparable wish to unite in policies and creative projects something that should never had been set apart: the common roots and symbolic exchanges of culture among Africa, Brazil, and Latin America, ever since its European colonization, in favor of democracy. An example of it, in the late 1970s, was his participation in the Cultural Council of Bahia State; another example, the releasing of albums with multiple accents and sonorities, of which Soy Loco por Ti, América, Refavela e Kaya N'Gan Daya are illustrations.

Gil himself had combined the ancestor country musicality from his hometown Ituaçu, the city that saw him grow up, to the vanguards of experimentation from the capital, when he moved to Salvador. There, he forged his political-musical heritage in his activities ahead of the Academic Center, in the Business Management School, when he first met friends like Caetano Veloso, Torquato Neto, José Carlos Capinan. His tendency to experimentalism was amplified in the Tropicália movement: the cultural hybridism, mix of tradition and modernity, and which contrasted with the setback imposed by the military dictatorship. When he returned from exile, Gil recalls, he toured the university circuit, performing in over 20 cities in São Paulo state.

Truthful to multiculturalism, he merged in songs geographic coordinates and cultural influences: from rock to punk, from soul to disco music. From 1987 on, and as a natural unfold of his double life, he presided over the Gregório de Mattos Foundation, institution focused on Afro-Brazilian culture, when he strengthened ties between Bahia and Africa, which culminated with the opening, in Salvador, of a Benin House and, in Africa, of a Bahia House. Gil got involved in the restoration of the Historic Center of Salvador, in a project with the signature of architect Lina Bo Bardi.

His political-artistic acting, especially as one of Tropicália’s most important names, have earned him books, articles and academic thesis in Europe, Latin America and Brazil. Gil created and helped to change worlds, ways of living, that have paired with the culture of Brazilian people. Or better yet, with the cultures of the peoples of Brazils. Axé!