Publications

Public opinion and part of the academic community consolidated the position that, during the period of the 1964 military dictatorship, Rio de Janeiro’s samba schools functioned as an ideological arm of the regime, reproducing an adherence that would have mostly contaminated their plots. Seeking to understand its real impact in that period, we carried out a survey of the themes addressed by the schools in the main group of the Rio carnival between the years 1968 and 1984. To do so, we focused on five thematic fields: racial theme, predominantly black, tangentially black, predominantly indigenous, and adherent theme. Analyzing the historical context in light of theories of resistance (Gilroy, 1993; Johansson and Lalander, 2012; Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013; Scott, 2013), combined with studies by Cavalcanti (1994, 1999) and Tureta and Araújo (2013), what we actually found was that the adherent content proved to be much less influential than imagined. Samba schools predominantly developed a set of plots that addressed, whether partially or dominantly, a comprehensive universe of black themes as a way of circumventing censorship and reaffirming the Afro-Brazilian cultural importance that has guided this practice since its early hours.