Developmentalism and Democracy: The Public Life of Odorico Tavares in Bahia, Brazil

Through an analysis of the work of Odorico Tavares – newspaper editor, author, critic and patron of the arts – this paper explores how a relatively late flowering of Bahian-based modernists in Salvador in the 1950s initially relied on cultural inclusion to negotiate the tensions between an agenda of conservative economic modernization and limited political inclusion for the city’s majority African Bahian population. However, by the 1960s, as illustrated in the Tavares-directed Diário de Notícias weekend “Arts and Culture” section (itself edited by Tavares), this conciliatory position in the cultural life of the city was rivaled by firmer criticisms and starker class analyses of inequality in Bahia. Tracing how these positions – and Tavares’ own position – responded to the conservative economic modernization favored by the state political and economic elite reveals the tensions within Bahian cultural life in the years leading up to the military coup of 1964.