Jorge Mautner and Countercultural Utopia in Brazil

Abstract

When Gilberto Gil, the former Brazilian Minister of Culture under the Lula government, appeared at the 2003 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he came with a dramatic message for this elite international community of statesmen, intellectuals, and financial barons: “Either the world becomes Brazilianized, or it will be Nazified.”¹ It would be difficult to imagine a more dramatic claim for the moral value of a national project than Gil’s statement, which posits a stark dichotomy between the promise of a harmonious “Brazilianized” world and one that devolves into fascism, ethnic strife, and genocide. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a leader from any other country to make such a claim without causing a scandal or being dismissed as a patriotic crank. Other possible models come to mind for ethnically diverse democratic nations that have managed peaceful internal and external relations, but it seems unlikely that we will see any time soon similar exhortations for the world to be “Canadianized,” or “Zambianized.”