Against the Current

A timely and measured account of electricity’s material and aesthetic impact on Brazilian culture.

Electricity has become an inescapable structuring force in modern life. Electrification has also been proposed as possible solution to fossil-fuel driven environmental crisis. But for all its promises, electrification has material demands. Against the Current examines electricity as an overlooked yet pivotal force in twentieth-century Brazilian aesthetics. Focusing on moments in which electricity’s presence or absence erupt into works of literature, film, visual arts, theater, and music, Victoria Saramago shines a light on the promises and pitfalls of electricity, in turn illuminating the characteristic tensions of the Anthropocene.

Brazil's uneven history of electrification is based on one of the highest rates of renewable energy generation in the world. Brazilian cultural production has been keenly aware of the contradictions of electrification’s material promises and demands. This book shows how electricity is the hidden undercurrent of the most iconic turns in twentieth-century Brazilian history—from anthropophagy to the sertão, and from the dictatorship to dams—and proposes a new understanding of Brazilian aesthetics as inextricably intertwined with debates about energy.