Brasilidade in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

During its short lifespan, the hobbyist journal Revista Phonoarte served as a soapbox for two seemingly disparate issues: the role of the phonograph in early 20th-century Brazilian society and the specific character of national identity, or brasilidade. Spanning fifty issues, the magazine, edited by writer José da Cruz Cordeiro Filho, raised a voice of “phonographic advocacy,” extolling the ways in which, thanks to its fusion of industry and culture, the new sound reproduction technology was poised to be an instrument of moral uplift and national development for a country in the throes of cultural modernization. In 1931, before the magazine’s three-year run ended abruptly, Phonoarte celebrated the arrival of nationalist strongman Getúlio Vargas as a major step towards the ennoblement of the phonograph and, by extension, the modernization of Brazilian society. Combining close analysis of the journal and new access to the personal documents of Cruz Cordeiro, the magazine’s founding editor, this paper argues that a diachronic view of the magazine’s shifting focus, with increasing emphasis on popular music and national industry, anticipates themes that would become hallmark features of Vargas’ economic and cultural nationalism. I argue specifically that the unresolved tensions between modernity and tradition that defined the Vargas regime’s “culture wars” were rehearsed in nuce and in specifically sonic terms within the pages of Phonoarte. This line of argumentation seeks to build on a growing literature that backdates key features of the Vargas regime to an earlier period while tracing some of its animating issues to civil society rather than state-led initiatives.