Nelson Maleiro, o gigante de Bagdá - apropriação cultural e ressignificação do orientalismo no carnaval de Salvador

Abstract

Between the 1950s and 1960s, when the Trio Elétrico was not yet the main attraction of the Salvador Carnival, the orientalist groups Mercadores de Bagdá and Cavalheiros de Bagdá, formed mostly by black revelers, recreated a playful Orient on the avenue inspired by cinema American and English. Elements of filmic iconography, such as clothing and key images such as the desert, camels, elephants and magic lamps, were given new meanings by these associations based on their own social realities, but also on the power of otherness, inscribing a new identity, where the representative figure of the Arab metaphorically behaves like the other (black) of the other (white). This is performed by the Giant of Baghdad, a character created by carnival artist and musician Nelson Maleiro, a protagonist in the production of floats and the manufacture of percussive instruments. Although it is characterized as a colonial discourse, orientalism in Salvador's Carnival was then rearticulated, as shown by the analysis of concepts from the field of culture, such as hybridism, ambivalence and stereotype, engendering new meanings to that allegorical system.