“A Thread that Connects the Worlds”: Ovoid Logics and the Contradictory Lines of Force of Brazilian Improvisations

Abstract

From sports to politics, from architecture to economics, from the arts to pedagogy, the social and cultural spheres of Brazil have often been characterized as having decidedly improvisative valences. The importance of improvisation to the enactment of brasilidade (Brazilianness) would seem to be borne out by the sheer abundance of common words and phrases used in everyday Brazilian speech that highlight extemporaneous action: jeitinho, malandragem, ginga, jogo de cintura, malícia, gambiarra, esperteza, axé, manha, suingue, astúcia, drible, malabarismo, balanço, equilibrista, pirataria, arranjar-se, molejo, cordialidade, and so on. This essay points to a few “complex tendencies” and “contradictory lines of force,” that emerge out of this lexicon, providing snapshots of three key loci within and around which one can examine and critique the stories people—Brazilians and non-Brazilians alike—tell about what is often taken to be the zygotic relationship between improvisation and brasilidade (Brazilianness). Each of these snapshots—of the jeitinho brasileiro, of the gambiarra aesthetics of the global favela, of futebol brasileiro (Brazilian soccer)—reveal, I hope, that the concept of improvisation (rendered directly and in its many other lexical guises) performs a vital function in Brazil. It’s a nexus around which deliberations over matters of national import take place, a ready-to-hand theoretical apparatus for peering into the “inert vectoring” that characterizes the varied performances of citizenship that take place within Brazilian communities. I’m careful, however, to let the discussions contained in this essay play out within a global frame, working under the assumption that Brazil is not (and never has been) coterminous with itself, and showing that Brazil is constantly being reborn—infranationally, nationally, and globally—under the contradictory forces of appraisals of the improvisative.