Events
GIEEMP Seminar | Jingles as Affective Politics in Brazil’s 2022 Election
PERMANENT SEMINAR OF THE RESEARCH GROUP ON ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND STUDIES IN POPULAR MUSIC
23.04.2025 | 3 PM | NOVA FCSH, Colégio Almada Negreiros, Campolide (Lisbon) | Room 208 - Floor 2 | Zoom Room
Free access, in person and online.
Jingles as Affective Politics in Brazil’s 2022 Election
Kjetil Klette-Bøhler | University of South-East Norway
To what extent can election campaign jingles be understood as a form of musical policing? How are people exposed to political arguments and moral visions with catchy melodies that take hold of voters’ minds, thus reconfiguring their sense of logos, ethos, and pathos musically? This presentation is based on a book in progress that explores these questions through an ethnomusicological study of how right-wing candidate Jair Messiah Bolsonaro used music to recruit voters in Brazil during the 2018 and 2022 election campaigns. I complement this focus with a discussion of how the leftist candidates Fernando Haddad and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva used jingles to recruit voters during the same period. I also portray the broader historical context of jingles in Brazil and combine historical research together with music analysis and ethnography. By comparing how music and jingles were used in election campaigns, across left and right, I challenge established divisions between ‘musical politics’ and ‘musical policing’, that is, between music as a form of political participation and music as a tool of political manipulation.
Kjetil Klette-Bøhler | Professor of Music and Culture at the University of South-East Norway and prior to this he worked as a Professor of Social Research at NOVA: Norwegian Social Research, Oslo Metropolitan University. He researches music, culture and politics with a focus on musics from Cuba and Brazil and related popular music in Norway, Europe and the U.S. Klette-Bøhler has published 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and co-edited the books Citizenship and Social Exclusion (Routledge 2023, with Takle, Vedeler, Schoeyen and Eriksen) and Festivalpolitikk i endring (Vigmostad & Bjørke, 2023, with Takle, Henningsen, Dokken, Røberg og Knudsen). His articles have appeared in Musical Quarterly, Twentieth Century Music, Latin American Music Review, Popular Music, Music Perception, and Ethnomusicology Newsletter, among others. He has also co-edited two special issues related to affective politics in Journal of Extreme Anthropology. He is currently working on developing Jingles as Affective Politics into a book.
