🇧🇷✨The Nexialist #0035
The Brazilianization of the World | Being Black in Brazil | Greengo Dictionary | The Guarani Language | Pão de Queijo | AmarElo | Propaganda Feud | Brazilian Beauty and more...
Seja bem-vinde ao meu cantinho (or Welcome to my little corner, in good Brazilian Portuguese)
The 7th of September is a big day for Brazilians, it’s our 199th Independence Day. I know I always post something Brazilian here, but today I have the excuse to go all the way since the next Nexialist will be overdue. Buckle up and get ready for a waterfall of content from or about Brazil (for English speakers/understanders).
🫀Extra: I’m very excited to share The Best Social Conference, a project I have been working on with the team from The Best Social, which will happen on October 28th. Early birds ticket sales started this week and I would love to see you there. If you would like to stay updated on the lineup: Instagram.
The Best Social Conference is a global stage to showcase social media innovation, creativity and impact. We focus on social media that is socially and culturally relevant: how is social media shaping society and being such a mighty force of influence in different cultures? We want to zoom in on the real social side of social media.
🪨Black Rock
Still, one of my favorite Brazilian music videos. Here is my Youtube playlist with my all-time favorites.
Brazil's most innovative band, Teto Preto, describe their debut album, 'Pedra Preta', in typically outlandish fashion as "a green and yellow abortion, a celebration ritual of what we live and believe." This has nothing on the official video for the title track, a glorious nine-minute foray through the world of Teto Preto which features at one point a huge inflatable penis unfurling across the screen. A definite late contender for music video of the year.
- Source: 4:3 Boilerroom
🗣Greengo Dictionary
Greengo Dictionary is great if you want to understand (or get confused) about Brazilian Portuguese slang and memes, our most fluent dialects. They do a literal translation, then the meaning of it, always with humor. Expect lots of bad words and sexual innuendos.
👅The Guarani Language
It is nice to see Paul doing videos about indigenous languages, especially the ones from South America. Many of these things I didn’t know: In Paraguay, Guarani is an official language, but in Brazil and Argentina the language is endangered. In Paraguay they even had a moment in history when it was forbidden for two Spanish people to get married, since they wanted to mix the race, helping maintain the language.
🧀Pão de Queijo
I’m so excited to see Beryl making one of my dear comfort food, Pão de Queijo (literally cheese bread). These baked cheese balls are made from cheese, yuka powder, eggs, and oil. It is one of these things I learned to do after moving out of Brazil and I love bringing it to my friend’s house.
📖Propaganda Feud
In 1961, Life magazine photographed systemic poverty in Brazil. One Brazilian magazine responded with a similar report — featuring photos of New York City.
🇧🇷The Brazilianization of the World
The periphery is where the future reveals itself.
—Erroneously attributed to J. G. Ballard by Mark Fisher
Recently, I heard this term and it stayed with me. There have been many interpretations of the term, most of them with the underlying inequality. It’s heartbreaking because it’s real.
Most often, “Brazil” has been a byword for gaping inequality, with favelas perched on hillsides overlooking millionaire high-rises. In his 1991 novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland referred to Brazilianization as “the widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.”1 Later that decade, Brazilianization was deployed by German sociologist Ulrich Beck to mean the cycling in and out of formal and informal employment, with work becoming flexible, casual, precarious, and decentered.2 Elsewhere, the process of becoming Brazilian refers to its urban geography, with the growth of favelas or shantytowns, the gentrification of city centers with poverty pushed to the outskirts. For others, Brazil connotes a new ethnic stalemate between a racially mixed working class and a white elite.
Read: The Brazilianization of the World by Alex Hochuli
✊🏾Being Black in Brazil
Brazil imported more enslaved people from Africa than any other country, more than 4 million, and was one of the last countries in the world to abolish slavery in 1888. Not so long ago. The impacts of that still hunt people of color in today’s Brazil and we see a gigantic racial inequality, which many people were taught to look away from.
Something you should know is that Djamila Ribeiro, who is one of the amazing women narrating the video, is one of the most, if not the most, important contemporary thinkers in Brazil. She has the power to explain everything so calmly and clearly, it is a superpower.
💛AmarElo
This beautiful musical documentary became very meaningful to me (and to a lot of people, I would say). I watched it with tears in my eyes and successive chills. Emicida, one of the most relevant artists of today in Brazil, manages to give us a history class as his concert at the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo is taking shape. This theatre is historically a white-dominated place, which makes it even more powerful to see how much meaning this has. It’s on Netflix and there are subtitles in different languages.
💋Brazilian Beauty
Season 2 of Beyond Beauty with Grace Neutral is focused on the beauty industry in Brazil, one of the largest in the world. She talks about extreme beauty addiction and the ongoing beauty revolution. I really enjoy the way she interviews the people and makes all of them so unique.
🏳️🌈Zap Zum
As I was getting ready to schedule the newsletter, this came out. I cannot talk about Brazil without mentioning my beloved Brazilian drag queen star that brings joy to me and so many other LGBTQ+ people around the world, Pabllo Vittar.
❤️If anything made your brain tingle, click like and don't hesitate to share it with the world. It helps The Nexialist to reach more curious minds. See you next week!🦦
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🤙Call me…
If you like what you see here and your project, brand or business needs some ideas or inspiration from outside your bubble, maybe you need a Nexialist to help you out 🙋🏻♂️ I can participate in brainstorms and workshops, guide inspiration sessions, or provide you with creative research. You can always send me an e-mail to figure something out together.