The contemporaneity of Clube da Esquina’s critical songs of the military dictatorship

Spectacular time, remembrance and resistance

Abstract

This article intends to situate the group Clube da Esquina as a cultural producer of songs that were critical of the military dictatorship in the 1970s and to examine, in accordance with Walter Benjamin’s concept of remembrance, their validity at the present time as resistance to the production of social amnesia about this regime, in the context of the spectacular time, as conceptualized by Guy Debord. The dialectical method of critical theory is employed, as the research examines the object in specific historical situations. In the songs by Clube da Esquina, resorting to the memory of the narrative subject about repression and the victims of the military dictatorship became a strategy to preserve the history of the country. Although the criticism of the regime was under censorship, avoiding the oblivion of what happened was a possibility to contest what was being done, to think about the transformation of society, and to project itself into the future as a historical document.