Dr. Castro and Mr. Science: the dissemination of Josué de Castro's concepts in the Manguebeat movement.
Josué de Castro; Manguebeat; Regionalism; History and Music.
In the 1990s, a movement that became known as Manguebeat emerged in Recife. Its initial name, “Manguebit”, symbolized the union of the city's frequent estuary landscape to the computational language – in which a bit means the smallest unit of information. In another telematic image, such artists elected a satellite dish spiky in the mud as the insignia of a project of correlation between the local and global dimensions. Considering that the object of this movement would have been the cultural identity of the city and considering the meaning of its images in the sense of an opening to contemporaneity and globalization, it is noted that the movement contradicted the predominant perspective in the city – of a regionalist traditionalist tendency. Despite its politically peripheral origin, and the traditionalism prevailing in Recife, this movement managed to be absorbed as a viable proposal for identification in the city, to the point of reaching the status of intangible heritage in the state of Pernambuco. As intellectual content, this movement drew on the scientific, political and literary ideas of Josué de Castro. In the present text, we intend to examine the role of the uses of the concepts of the Pernambuco physician and geographer in the success of the Manguebeat enterprise. In this, we will use Jacques Derrida's concept of dissemination to articulate our reasoning based on the examination of the literary and scientific writings of Josué de Castro, as well as the artistic production of the Manguebeat musicians. We take as a presupposition the hypothesis that Josué de Castro's criticism of the hunger problem made him insert himself in the debate on the Northeast region and in multilateral organizations. The products of such action, at the same time regional and transnational, would have given material to be used in Manguebeat's cultural proposal of valuing the local element through the opening to global content. This being adequate to the demands of the urban culture of its time.