Mobilizing regionalism at Land's End: Popular electric guitar music and the Caribbeanization of the Brazilian Amazon

This dissertation explores the intersection of popular music and the politics of place and space in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. More specifically, it employs multi-sited ethnographic methodology in examining the relationship of the lambada---a genre of electric guitar-based dance music consolidated in the port city of Belem, Para in the 1970s---to hegemonic developmentalist ideologies during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1984) and to Brazilian multiculturalism in the early twenty-first century. This dissertation demonstrates how the lambada makes audible a history of mobile, cosmopolitan connections that transcend and transgress the boundaries of the Amazon region proper. These submerged "translaterai" links with the circum-Caribbean and the Brazilian Northeast challenge hegemonic constructions of Belem as a provincial outpost or pocket of exclusion "at land's end." Conceptualizing the Amazon region as a cosmopolitan contact zone for flows of Amazonian, Caribbean, and Northeastern Brazilian culture in this way demands an alternative to the center vs. periphery analytical paradigms that have heretofore rendered connections among and along peripheries invisible. The concept "frontier cosmopolitics" is therefore proposed as a means of theorizing the way Amazonians invoke the circum-Caribbean not only as a utopian site of cosmopolitan belonging beyond the nation, but also as a strategy for valorizing the Amazon within the political and cultural economies of the multicultural Brazilian nation.