Sociogenesis of the saraus: a history of disruptions in Brazilian culture

Abstract

From a cultural and historical review, the aim of this essay is to propose a feasible sociogenesis of the term and practice of the saraus (“open mic literary events”), which operate today as important spaces for literary encounters and experiences in the urban peripheries. Starting from the “narratives of origin” constructed by poets Binho and Sérgio Vaz, pioneers of the so-called Marginal Literature Movement in São Paulo, I return to the history of this artistic activity in the European salons and to its transposition into the Brazilian cultural routine. This process was sponsored by artistic patrons, and subsidized by members of a newly wealthy coffee elite, which has fostered one of the largest artistic movements in Brazil: the modernism. My argument is that there was a correlation among the heyday of the art salons/saraus in São Paulo, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth, the prosperity of palaces in the city center by an expanding agrarian-industrial bourgeoisie, the outbreak of avant-garde in the artistic field, and the circle of industrialization the state of São Paulo was going through. These salons ended up creating spaces capable of merging the absorption of new ideas coming from Europe with the intense reiteration of a “national culture”, a process that ratified some desires for cultural and social changes.