ABSTRACT
The popular oral and chapbook poetries of northeast Brazil, which are related to medieval Iberian troubadour and ballad traditions imported to Brazil in the sixteenth century, perform postcolonial receptions of classical Greece and Rome in their exploration of modernity and racial and class conflict. This chapter examines how these foreign and erudite myths become important to local politics and facilitate the expression of covert popular counter-narratives. First it considers cantoria from the turn of the twentieth century – public improvised verse duels that contest individual status – in which Greco-Roman mythologies are especially effective at enacting social hierarchies. The resulting hybridities between the local and foreign, combined with the cantoria’s dialogic format, produce a destabilizing polyphony, which allows established reputations to be challenged. Secondly, it examines printed folhetos or cordel from the early twentieth century, in which the poetries both engage in and are appropriated by wider regionalist conflicts, where they are reframed as premodern and traditional. Whilst many northeastern elites appropriated Romanticized popular culture and Classical Europe to naturalize racial and social narratives about their region, Greco-Roman myths become an abstracted way in which to destabilize suppressive ideologies and express the very conflicts the elites attempted to erase.
