Christopher Dunn: Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (2001)

“In the late 1960s, Brazilian artists forged a watershed cultural movement known as Tropicália. Music inspired by that movement is today enjoying considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular music, Tropicália dynamically articulated the conflicts and aspirations of a generation of young, urban Brazilians.

Focusing on a group of musicians from Bahia, an impoverished state in northeastern Brazil noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, Christopher Dunn reveals how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of São Paulo, Brazil’s most modern and industrialized city. He shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation’s idealized image as a peaceful tropical “garden” and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.”

Publisher University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2001
ISBN 0807849766, 9780807849767
276 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (82 MB)

Stephen Duncombe: Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (1997)

“In this comprehensive study of zine publishing, Stephen Duncombe explores the history and theory of subterranean cultural production. From their origins in early 20th century science fiction fandom, their more proximate roots in ‘60s counter-culture and their rapid proliferation in the wake of punk rock, Notes from Underground pays full due to the political importance of zines as a vital network of participatory culture, and analyzes how zines measure up to their utopian outlook in achieving fundamental social change. Packed with extracts and illustrations, Duncombe provides a critical overview of the contemporary underground in all its love and rage.”

Publisher Verso, London, 1997
Reprinted by Microcosm Publishing, Bloomington, IN, 2008
ISBN 9781934620373, 1934620378
256 pages

Reviews: Susan Larson (Arizona J Hispanic Cult Stud, 1998), Jason Kuscma (Other Voices, 1998), st (Social Anarchism, 1998).

Publisher (2017 edition)
WorldCat

PDF

Kasper Opstrup: The Way Out: Invisible Insurrections and Radical Imaginaries in the UK Underground, 1961-1991 (2017)

“A counterculture history of art and experimental politics that turns the world inside out

The Way Out examines the radical political and hedonist imaginaries of the experimental fringes of the UK Underground from 1961 to 1991. By examining the relations between collective and collaborative practices with an explicit agenda of cultural revolution, Kasper Opstrup charts a hidden history of experiments with cultural engineering, expanding current discussions of art, medias, politics, radical education and the occult revival. Even though the theatres of operation have changed with the rise of the Internet and a globalised finance economy, these imaginaries still raise questions that speak directly to the present.

Here we encounter a series of figures – including Alexander Trocchi, R. D. Laing, Joseph Berke, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge – that blurred the lines between inner and outer, the invisible and the material. Four singular forms of speculative techniques for igniting an invisible insurrection with cultural means make up the central case studies: the sigma project, London Anti-University, Academy 23 and thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.

Contained within these imaginaries is a new type of action university: a communal affair that would improvise a new type of social relation into existence by de-programming and de-conditioning us without any blueprints for the future besides to make it happen. Instead of being turned upside down, the world was to be changed from the inside out.”

Publisher Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe, 2017
ISBN 9781570273285
252 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF
Scribd