Brazil: Arts & Media

Brazilian literature reaches back to Joaquim Machado de Assis, the 19th-century novelist whose satirical realism made him the country's most celebrated writer, and forward to Modern Art Week, held in São Paulo in February 1922, when figures such as Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral, and Anita Malfatti staged exhibitions, concerts, and readings that launched Brazilian modernism across literature, painting, and music.

That modernist current fed later movements including Tropicália and bossa nova, the soft, jazz-inflected samba variant that emerged from Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s. Radio played a central role in building Brazil's mid-century star system, turning singers into national celebrities and linking the recording industry to the nascent film business; samba itself, rooted in Afro-Brazilian communities in Rio, remains the country's most internationally recognized musical export.

Brazilian cinema found a distinct political voice in the 1960s Cinema Novo movement, led by directors including Glauber Rocha, whose stark, socially critical films such as Black God, White Devil challenged the poverty and inequality of the era. Television grew into an equally influential medium through the telenovela, the nightly serialized drama format popularized by the network Rede Globo, which became one of Brazil's most widely consumed cultural products and an export in its own right across Latin America and beyond.