Ph.D. candidate Rafael Torralvo gives a talk based on his dissertation titled, “TRANSArmorial: The Cultural Politics of Sound, Knowledge, and Identity in Ariano Suassuna’s Armorial Movement (1970-Today)”

This talk offers a synopsis of the Armorial Movement with a particular focus on a pivotal chapter of my dissertation that investigates how Armorialistas contributed to an aural modernity through the mediation and transformation of written knowledge into sound. Conceptualized by the doyen of letters, Ariano Suassuna (1927-2014) in 1970, the Armorial Movement sought to reimagine national cultural identity by cultivating an erudite art form rooted in folk traditions of the Northeast region. Suassuna, one of Brazil’s most celebrated playwright and scholar, was part of an intellectual milieu that leveraged literary production as a privileged means of accessing sociopolitical and cultural capital. In this talk, I propose that Armorialistas found in sound an epistemological model to articulate the Armorial Movement's politics and counter the dominant historiographical discourses that framed the Northeast as a space of sociopolitical and cultural backwardness, alienated from Brazilian modernity. I explore how Suassuna's writings on the specificity of Northeastern culture were transduced into a sound epistemology and subsequently inscribed into highly mediated, ideologically charged, and aesthetically conditioned archives that performatively reproduces the Armorial Movement's ideologies. Through a contextualized listening of the Armorial archive, I seek to denaturalize the Armorial Sound epistemology, shedding light on the production, dissemination, and acceptance of knowledge while interrogating the Armorial Movement's project in relation to the military's regime nationalist agenda. By exploring the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of this archive, I aim to critically assess the movement’s cultural politics and its implications for the broader understanding of modernity in Brazil.

About the speaker: Rafael Torralvo is a violinist and scholar currently pursuing a PhD degree in Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University. Born in Brazil and educated in the United States, Rafael holds a BM and a MM degree in violin performance from James Madison University and West Chester University of Pennsylvania, respectively. He is also an alumnus from the Frost School of Music, at the University of Miami, where he received a MM degree in musicology. He presented papers at the American Musicological Society, the Brazilian Studies Association, has given talks at the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Arizona, and the University of Birmingham (UK). His dissertation project was supported by funding from the American Musicological Society’s M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Fund for Research in France, Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities Timothy Murray Graduate Research Grant, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program Graduate Research and Travel Grants, and the Einaudi Center for International Studies.