Next stop: Manguetown – Cultural Flows in the City and a new Look back to Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to raise reflections about the Manguebeat scene, a movement that erupted in Recife at the end of the 1980s. In this context, a relation between the city and the cultural productions of the band Chico Science & Nação Zumbi – specifically in the albums Da Lama ao Caos (1994) and Afrociberdelia (1996) – is proposed, a dinamic that projects a symbolic space understood as Manguetown. The aim is to understand how the songs inscribed on the scene reflect another image of Brazil to Brazil and diversify a hegemonic axis of production and circulation of culture. To this end, the contributions of Henri Lefevbre (2002), Benedict Anderson (2008) and Georges Didi-Huberman (2015) are recollected for the construction of a theoretical apparatus that allows the investigation of this scenario.This process is accompanied by considerations on the dynamics between global and local – considering the ideas of Andreas Huyssen (2002) in the wake of Cultural Studies – configured in the privileged space of analysis of the city.