Artífices da Manguetown : a constituição de um novo campo artístico no Recife (1991-1997)

Abstract

The cultural scene called Manguebeat was a phenomenon that happened in the 90’s in the city of Recife, capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. This scene initially only intended to create places to a group of young middle class have fun in the night of the city. After the success of the parties promoted for this young boys and girls the city watched the born of a new cultural scene with a lot of bands that mixed regional rhythms with musical information from other cultural traditions. This cultural scene found some obstacles to get its legitimacy as a valid artistic field because there was a dominant vision about the culture inspired for the regionalist Armorial Movement, led by the writer and popular culture researcher Ariano Suassuna. In the pages of this work we discuss this process of legitimating of the scene and we try to see which representation of the city emerges from the symbolic production of the Manguebeat. We will try to study this process taking as basis the analysis of the release Caranguejos com cérebro and the first albums from Chico Science & Nação Zumbi and Mundo Livre S/A that were the mainly bands of the scene. In addition we will analyze some material from the Pernambuco’s Jornal do Commercio that legitimized the scene and we will use some texts from Folha de São Paulo’s Ilustrada’s cultural supplement that made Manguebeat known in São Paulo. We will take as theoretical basis the Pierre Bourdieu's field concept to analysis this cultural scene. This concept can support us in the analysis of the the constitution of Manguebit in Recife in the 1990’s and in that attempt of the group of young people involved in this artistic field to reshape the city's cultural scene through the building of a particular image of the city, creating a Recife’s new representation. We get the objective to consider how this scene was the way which a group of young residents of Recife, cultural periphery of a globalized world, try to insert it city into the national industry of culture.