O que é isso, Caetano?

Abstract

Building upon the polemic that has brought poet and musician Caetano Veloso and literary critic Roberto Schwarz to the forefront of the cultural debate of the Left in Brazil, I discuss how the tension between an engaged, Revolution-driven attitude, and the counterculture agenda of the sixties may be still alive. Rooted in the struggles against the Brazilian dictatorship, such a tension can help understand how artists and intellectuals are haunted by the necessity of a historical synthesis, and how they face the challenge of imagining alternatives to a world whose end can neither be defined nor achieved. In order to address the meaning of those tensions around the open-endedness of history, topics such as consumerism, politics, desire, sex, the body, and the arts, are discussed in the light of the dispute between Veloso and Schwarz.

Keywords

• Brasil
• queer theory
• cultural studies
• sexual revolution
• tropicalismo
• counterculture