The city seasoned the soul of the hill

Orestes Barbosa’s recipe to nationalize the samba from Rio de Janeiro (1933)

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the historicity of samba and how it was turned into a Brazilian national symbol, through the analysis of Samba, sua história, seus poetas, seus músicos e seus cantores, written by Orestes Barbosa in 1933. Set in the context of fervent debate regarding what were Brazil’s national features, this work is here examined as a nationalist discursive formation, and of romantic inspiration in the music scope. The discourse present in the work of Orestes Barbosa exposes a tension within that debate, that can be observed through the articulation between different temporalities, evoking either tradition or modernity as categories of “space-time” qualifying the samba as a symbol of nationality. However, rather than put themselves in diametrically opposite positions, the temporalities intertwine themselves as if they were in an intersection zone. By suggesting that the hill of Rio de Janeiro city preserve the purity of the samba, Orestes Barbosa turns the genre into a sort of “urban folklore”, because he idealizes the city space as a place of tradition, similarly to rural areas that produce folklore, considered national in the context of the 1920’s and 1930’s.