Exoticism and cultural excess: Representations of Brazilian music in The New York Times

This article explores the meanings and uses of representations of exoticism and excess attached to Brazil and to Brazilian popular culture, expressed in cultural reviews in The New York Times. The newspaper constitutes a powerful discursive site for the production of US cultural dominance, often defining second-class cultural locations for other cultures and countries. Representations constitute the work of fixing “preferred meanings,” and they can function as subtexts to legitimize products and actors that are close to Euro-American forms of culture, founded in categories of race, gender, social class and social behavior. The New York Times revitalizes an interest in Brazil, but this interest is ambivalent. Euro-American patterns are the dominant point of reference, and the proximity of Brazilian cultural forms to African or to European culture constructs those products as having inferior or superior cultural value. Representations create different cultural and political locations for Brazil and the United States through the construction of exoticism and excess, and disseminate European-American cultural dominance in a reinforcing cycle of production.