Is there a theory of peripheral postmodernism? Tropicália and the art criticism of Mário Pedrosa in the 1960s

Abstract

ABSTRACT After Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil performed at the 1967 MPB Festival, there was a change in Brazilian culture. From 1966 to 1968, Mário Pedrosa outlined in his Correio da Manhã columns what he understood by postmodernism by analyzing contemporary visual arts. Despite the contemporaneity between Tropicália and Pedrosa, his analysis is not used to understand the intervention of the two musicians in the Brazilian culture of the 1960s. Thus, we will reconstruct Pedrosa’s concept to investigate Tropicália as a manifestation of postmodernism in the periphery.

Keywords

• Mário Pedrosa
• postmodernism
• center-periphery
• Tropicalism