“Negro é a raiz da liberdade”: questão cultural, “questão social” e a consubstancialidade em Dona Ivone Lara

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the expressions of the dialectic between the “cultural issue” and the consubstantiality present in the life and work of singer-songwriter Dona Ivone Lara. We discuss popular culture as one of the main sources of struggle and resistance to capitalism, in a society where culture reproduces the ways of life and expressions of social classes’ artistic production. Through it, ideas and principles are directed towards legitimizing and strengthening the interests of the dominant classes. Especially in countries with dependent capitalism, the contradictions present in popular culture can express the interests of the subaltern classes, while also expressing elements of the dominant culture. In Brazil, samba is the musical genre that stands out in terms of its artistic representation of the way of life and interests of the working class, since it comes into being in the midst of a dialectical process that involves the foundations of the country's socio-economic, political and cultural formation, interwoven with the particular social relations of gender, race and class of a peripheral capitalism in a territory marked by colonial relations. In this way, through bibliographical and documentary research, with an exploratory bias and qualitative approach, we will analyze the socio-historical determinations of capitalist development in the formation of the Brazilian “cultural issue”. Using the historical-dialectical materialist method, we will look for manifestations of these elements in the artist's work, from a perspective of social totality, considering her artistic-cultural praxis as a form of counter-hegemonic cultural production representative of a specific way of life of the working class in Brazil. We have therefore carried out a study of how the determinants of Brazil's economic and social formation influence the development of a “cultural issue” in the country, expressed intensely in the production of samba, especially in the work of Dona Ivone Lara.