UC Riverside

In his essay Dialética da malandragem (Dialectics of Trickery) (1970), literary critic Antonio Candido analyzes the figure of the malandro (trickster) as a Brazilian literary figure, concluding that his malice is not intrinsic, but the result of the brutalities and injustices of life. I borrow the title of my dissertation from Candido’s essay, and I contend that the malandro, a bohemian and charismatic trickster who cleverly bends rules and out-smarts social conventions and adversaries, served as a model of resistance for artists working during the Brazilian military-civil dictatorship (1964-1985). Most studies about the malandro dismiss his Afro-Brazilian origin. In my framing, malandragem is fundamentally a legacy of colonialism and slavery, and intimately related to Exú, an extremely important deity in the Afro-Brazilian religious pantheon, the messenger that navigates between the world of the living and the orixás (gods). This divine trickster at once subverts and maintains order, opens and closes paths, and in so doing transcends boundaries and brings dynamism to life. God of crossroads, master of ambiguity and liminality, he symbolizes a Black culture of resistance against oppression. I argue that similarly to Exu, who moves between seemingly incompatible spheres, so artists during the dictatorship drew from local cultural traditions and blended them with international trends, reconciling the popular with the avantgarde. While the malandro has received scholarly attention in religious studies, music, literature, theater, cinema, popular culture and anthropology, this figure has not been explored with the deserved emphasis for what regards the visual arts. Examining the work by Heitor dos Prazeres, Hélio Oiticica, Abdias do Nascimento, Cildo Meireles, and Paulo Bruscky among others, this dissertation investigates the work by both Afro-Brazilian and Euro-Brazilian artists who incorporated marginal figures as subjects of their works, and more significantly, it illustrates how artists embraced marginal behaviors as a strategy to eschew censorship, challenge traditional art institutions, and expose the hypocrisy of the national motto “Order and Progress.”