fado's city gray a&h

Fado’s Cityanhu_1089 141..163

LILA ELLEN GRAY

Department of MusicColumbia University621 Dodge Hall2960 Broadway, MC1815New York, NY 10027

SUMMARY “Fado’s City” examines the poetics and affective place-making politicssurrounding practices of performance and reception of the musical and poetic genre offado in Lisbon, Portugal. Drawing on literature in the anthropology of the senses, affecttheory, interdisciplinary work on genre, and scholarship in the anthropology of soundand aesthetics, this article argues for the labor of musical genre in organizing, recon-textualizing, and mobilizing place-based affects and modes of sociality. [Poetics,Affect, Music, Portugal, Europe]

There is a curve on the route of the number 28 trolley in Lisbon, a route hailedas one of the most scenic in Europe, from which Wim Wenders shot footage forhis film Lisbon Story (1994) to the fadoesque soundtrack of the Portuguese popgroup Madredeus.1 There is a curve where it rounds alongside the Miradourode Santa Luzia (the viewpoint of Santa Luzia) near the top of the neighborhoodof Alfama. For a moment the view of the entrance to the discovery of the worldunfolds, a shimmering view of a river so vast it appears a sea. Below, historiesunfurl, houses stacked on top of houses, crumbling walls, winding alleyways,stones upon stones, bricks, dirt, rubble. On a sidewall, tile displays narratestrategic moments in Lisbon’s history. To the left is the street of the gates to thesun, Portas do Sol; directly behind is the street of São Tomé. The streets sing. Amap of the street names of Lisbon reads both like a poem and a litany of colonialconquest: Rua da Saudade, Avenida do Brasil, Avenida da Índia, Rua deAngola.2

There are stories Lisbon told me in graffiti, “Basta de miséria” [enoughmisery], “Pretos fora!” [blacks out], “Estou sozinho, estou triste, etc.” [I amalone, I am sad, etc.]. There are stories that fado singers (fadistas) sang to mealone—hushed singing, intimate singing, “Let me tell you, let me sing to youhow it goes, they don’t sing these songs anymore, these are the old songs. Letme tell you, his singing even made Amália cry.”3 There is the singing of stories,which listeners told me made their skin tremble, get cold with goose flesh (pelede galinha), made the body vibrate, the eyes tear, the throat catch. There aresongs listened to in semidarkness, with eyes closed, with listeners who are alsosingers, where those who know how to hear well are deemed the truest fadistasof them all. There are fados sung by girls wearing jeans and lace shawls,dreaming of stardom, reaching toward the imaginary of a voice so big that it

Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 36, Issue 2, pp 141–163, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.© 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2011.01089.x.

becomes the “soul” of a nation, a nation that, as local legend has it, in “discov-ering” Africa “discovered the world,” a world whose center was imagined asthe city of Lisbon.

The city of Lisbon exists almost symbiotically with the musical genre of fado;endless fados celebrate the city, literally singing it into affective sonorous being.Lisbon’s geographical positioning as colonial port city figures prominently inboth popular and academic origin narratives for fado. In these contexts the portcity is posited as the embryonic, decadent, contaminated, and cosmopolitanground that enables the figuring of an expressive musical genre “born” ofcultural hybridity. The city of Lisbon plays a central role in fado lyrics, ininternational fado marketing strategies, and in ways fado musicians and fansspeak about their relationships to music making and listening.

Many Lisbon fado musicians understand their fado to be deeply emplaced.One feels how to sing, based on a personal experience of locality, as felt in relationto neighborhood, to the city of Lisbon and to a sense of Portugal’s place withinthe rest of the world. In traveling the world as the soul of Portugal’s city, fado’sstylized sonic icons of instrumental and vocal weeping affectively shape circu-lating imaginaries of Lisbon as nostalgia, Lisbon as lament. As a sung poeticgenre voiced from the city’s socioeconomic margins, fado developed in theearly 1800s in Lisbon with origin narratives linked to prostitution, criminality,and the traffic in slaves; it was later embraced by the upper classes (Brito 1994;Nery 2004). During Portugal’s dictatorship (1926–74), the state’s role in thedevelopment of official fado venues (casas de fado) facilitated fado censorship,sanitization, and professionalization. Meanwhile, some singers sang revolution-ary lyrics behind closed doors. Following the revolution in 1974, there was abacklash against fado because of its supposed relation to the dictatorship; manyfado venues shut down. Fado’s success on the world music market over the pastdecade, a newly thriving Lisbon fado scene, increased attention to fado byinternational media and culture industries, and a globally realigned music andheritage industry (Ochoa-Gautier 2006) have recast the political stakes attachedto fado. Its official framings have moved from a genre of “deviance” and protestto a “national” genre, then to an underdog genre of the postdictatorship era,and now to an “expedient” (Yúdice 2003) cultural resource (as a candidate in2011 for UNESCO “intangible cultural heritage” status).

In contemporary Lisbon fado performance thrives in tourist oriented profes-sional casas de fado and in restaurants that host amateur fado in the key“historic” neighborhoods of Alfama and Bairro Alto. Fado circulates as ambientsound in many Lisbon restaurants, can be heard through loudspeakers on citystreets, and is sometimes used on television commercials for promoting Portu-guese products. Fado is also performed on concert stages, in numerous amateurvenues in Lisbon and its suburbs, working-class bars (tascas), and neighbor-hood recreation centers. Both the “world music” and tourism industries drawon fado’s working-class or racially hybrid “origins” in shaping authenticity.Fado in Lisbon is performed and enjoyed by local actors from a diverse socio-economic spectrum, although particular venues and styles may be marked byclass, with the distinguishing characteristic that in a city with a large, diverse,and ever-growing immigrant population, the majority of participants continueto be white Portuguese.

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For many practitioners and fans, fado is marked by its cathartic ability topurge suffering through its aurally voiced and embodied reenactment; its lyricsoften convey a sense of hopelessness in the face of “fado” (lit., “destiny”).Stylistically the fado voice and its accompanying instruments (guitarra, viola)evoke sadness through employing multiple “icons of crying” (Urban 2000:156).4

To vibrate a note while playing the guitarra is to weep ([gemer]; see Castelo-Branco 1994); the voice of a singer often hovers on the break of a sob; the fadistamight employ downward glissandi in expressing intense emotion; the singermight sing until her voice hurts; at the moment of climax, a listener might brusha tear from her face. Not all fados voice lament; there are upbeat and humorousfados. But in the wider symbolic work that fado does, fado is overwhelminglya genre about loss and suffering and revolves around the distinguishing tropeof saudade, a bittersweet nostalgia.

Fado exoticizes itself as genre and the city of Lisbon self-reflexively throughthe poetics of its lyrics. In its circulating representations, in fado documentariesand films, fado as practice and object is often rendered exotic through poeticand aesthetic strategies. Camera shots of the cityscape might be blurred; thenarration might employ heightened poetic language. Both of these practicesforeground the form of the message (Jakobson 1960:356), marking fado and itscity as poetically saturated alter-worlds. In travel literature or CD booklets thatcirculate with internationally marketed fado recordings, fado might be linked toa “Mediterranean” or “Latin” feeling or marked as a sonic window onto asoulful geotemporal periphery. These representations all feed back into thesense of what fado is (and might become) back home in Portugal.

Europe’s South has been shaped as Europe’s East or backward “other,” by anintellectual and literary culture of the northern metropoles, where universaliz-ing West–East imaginaries have been mapped in multiple forms onto Europe’sNorth–South since at least the 1700s (Dainotto 2007; Fernandez 2008).Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) suggests that Europe’s Catholic South might func-tion as a “zone of repudiation” for Europe’s core (or Protestant North). In thissense, the “zone of repudiation” collects and holds cultural detritus, cast-offs,that which has been repudiated and elsewhere reformed or edited out: “Suchprocesses create a large domain of cultural trash, which returns as parody,‘folklore,’ or even ‘heritage’” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:177). Anthropologicalwork on southern Europe from the 1970s and 1980s commonly posits a core-periphery economic model with the Mediterranean or the south as Europe’sexploited periphery. This model follows Wallerstein’s (1974) theorizations of the“world system” where the periphery is mined for raw goods crucial to produc-tion in more powerful industrial centers (Gilmore 1982:182). In relation tonarratives originating in Europe’s economic center, Portugal is continuouslyrewritten as Europe’s wayward (but feeling-filled) economic periphery, short onresources of financial capital but abundant in resources of sentiment. (A celeb-rity fadista tells me how a foreign friend of his claims that “Switzerland is themonetary bank of Europe but Portugal is its bank of the spirit” [interview,Carlos do Carmo, November 12, 2002].)5 Sonorously, in these discourses, thiscapacity for feeling takes persuasive form in the genre of fado.

How does fado figure affective geographies of Lisbon and Portugal in con-temporary geopolitical dialectics of North and South? How might fado shape

Gray Fado’s City 143

the ways in which Lisbon places are felt and imagined in relation to the vestigialburdens of Portugal’s long-standing dictatorial regime? Central to these ques-tions is the role of aesthetic practice and production in shaping the structures offeeling, habits of memory, and the bodily practices on which the production oflocalities (Appadurai 1996) depends. Numerous anthropological case studieshave eloquently argued that the material physicality of place is often inter-twined with the ways in which actors shape memory and sociality (see Feld andBasso 1996; Stewart 1996; Tsing 1993, 2005), and that expressive vocal practicessometimes play a key role in mediating relationships between place, memory,and sociopolitical life (Fox 2004; Samuels 2004). Likewise, scholars of expressiveculture are increasingly calling for an examination of the aural and the sonic askey sites for understanding the production of knowledge, localities, places,social identities, and publics (Erlmann 2004; Hirschkind 2006; Ochoa-Gautier2006; Samuels et al. 2010; Stokes 2004). Just as walking through the streets of aneighborhood conditions the habits and memory of the body (de Certeau 1984),listening to music, playing music, singing songs, also creates its own “habitus.”6

Feld (1996b) theorizes an “acoustemology” of place, a symbiotic relationshipbetween body, voice, place and song, ways of knowing the world and one’splace in it, in relation to sound making and practices of audition.7 I take thissymbiosis as a ground against which to figure place in the specific historical,urban, and geopolitical context of contemporary Lisbon, a city situated in ageographically and economically peripheral country, which was home to one ofEurope’s longest dictatorships. This is a country (and a city) marked by denselylayered and often competing claims by local actors to history, to the modern, tothe national, and to the European.

Fado excessively gathers stories, memories, and feelings into its generic foldand releases them with a promiscuous indexicality. It mediates a politics of bothscale and of affect, an aesthetics of both the durable (the layout of a neighbor-hood, the structuring of a viewpoint that directs a gaze) and of the ephemeral(the seeming intangibility of the aural, of musical practice). Through poetic anddiscursive reflexivity, an affective sedimentation through reiteration, a sono-rous vocality whose signifying exceeds the limits of the explicitly referentialand comes to stand in for feeling, fado gathers a surplus of meanings. I arguethat through a poetics of excess gathered in fado as genre, that sound andsociability, story and feeling are sutured to geographies and histories of thehyperlocal and to the intimate. In fado’s wider circulations, these geographiesand histories take on metonymic valences (as nation, as periphery, as Southern,as a sensuous premodern).8

Place-Name Fado

When he sings, I see the entire city stretched out before me.—a Lisbon music consultant on listening to the voice of fadista Carlos do Carmoin 2003

Fados whose lyrics celebrate aspects of the city of Lisbon and itsneighborhoods are so common that they form a lyric subgenre within fado.9

Themes might include places that hold symbolic importance in fado lore or


references to places of scenic beauty. In a self-reflexive turn, many fado lyricsreference miradouros, well-known viewpoints high on the city’s seven hills.Fado neighborhoods, the river, monuments, chapels, obsolete fado houses,current fado houses, street names, and names of squares are also commonreferences. I call this subgenre “place-name fado.” In place-name fado, placesmight be linked to other expressive practices such as Lisbon’s popular marches,or to representations of “folklore” or rusticity. In some of these fados, places aresonically and affectively described. A place-name might be sung with virtuosicornamentation by the fadista; an instrumentalist might improvise a response,figuring a chord with a quivering timbre or citing a motivic fragment fromanother fado as musical commentary. Creative singing or instrumental playingcan thus foreground descriptive affective sonic markers, commenting stylisti-cally, timbrally on place, charging it with feeling, making it cry. Lyrics oftenself-reflexively mark the fado voice, timbre, or the sounds of fado instrumentsas saudade filled, or pain filled (magoada).

The lyrics from the classic fado song (fado canção) “Vielas de Alfama” (Alleysof Alfama) begin like this:

Dead hours, darkened nightA guitarra trembling (trinar), a woman singingHer fado of bitterness (amargura)And through the window-paneBlackened and brokenHer pained (magoada) voiceSaddens those who pass by10

The refrain that follows sings a story where all fados are said to “speak” (dizer)of the Lisbon of the past and where fado literally dwells in the Lisbon neigh-borhood of Alfama and in its alleys. The fado appeared as a remake on the 2003album Fado Curvo by Mariza, currently the most renowned fado diva interna-tionally, and forms part of the repertoire for many amateur and professionalsingers.

“Vielas de Alfama” is one of many fados whose lyrics fall within the thematicgenre of place-name fado. These fados are often unabashedly celebratory, via theintense invocation of nostalgia or saudade in a lyric style evoking a “permanentway of seeing any historical city” (Williams 1973:152). This permanence of a citysuspended in time through its mode of aestheticization is sometimes echoed infado form—as many celebratory place-name fados are in the fixed form of fadocanção or scored fado song (often with a refrain), as distinguished from tradi-tional fado that is strophic, with no fixed melodic base, and highly improvised.Place-name fado lyrics sometimes feminize Lisbon or miniaturize it (Stewart2003), naturalizing both a way of gazing on Lisbon and a particular politics ofintimacy.11 Sentimentalizing place-name lyrics, some vestigial from the regime,nostalgically bind place and effect temporal stasis along with various politicalerasures. This aesthetic is common in the composition of new lyrics, and iswidely found in all of the circuits through which fado travels. I discuss twomore examples of such lyrics below.

“Lisboa é Sempre Lisboa” (“Lisbon is Always Lisbon”) is a scored fadocanção from the 1950s, in part popularized by the resonant, chesty, almost


lounge like swooning vocal style of the male fadista Tristão da Silva. The lyrics(and possibly the chesty or more “lyric” vocal sound in performance asopposed to a more nasal vocal sound) are emblematic of place-name fadoscomposed during the dictatorship and set to fado canção, which are still com-monly performed and composed today.

RefrainLisbon is always Lisbon, of its lanes and alleysAnd the simple little houses of Alfama and MadragoaOf the lovers at the windowsOf the marches that the people singOf the old cathedral Sé, the processions, and of faithWith its street cries (pregões), Lisbon is always Lisbon12

The neighborhoods of Alfama and Madragoa, with their “simple” “little”houses are referenced alongside architectural patrimony (“the old cathedral”)and “invented traditions” (“the marches that the people sing”).13 In the firstverse (not cited above), the rustic folk is gendered female; Lisbon is a varinaor a woman selling fish on the streets. Throughout, Lisbon is marked femi-nine, a feminine that is at once quaint and childlike, exotic and soulful: she“loses her silly little head” and she “sings the fado and feels saudade.” In thefinal verse, Lisbon is “held to the guitarra” (presa à guitarra) and sings fado“until dawn.”

“Alfama Eterna” [Eternal Alfama] (below) presents lyrics that convey asimilar sense of stasis focused around Lisbon’s quintessential “traditional”neighborhood. Álvaro Rodrigues, a poet in his eighties, who considers himself“The popular poet of Alfama,” wrote the lyrics. This fado circulates currently inthe amateur circuit and has been performed in amateur practice in the neigh-borhood of Alfama since at least the late 1970s.

RefrainMas quem passar pela velha Alfama a horas mortas[But those who pass through old Alfama during the dead hours of the night]Terá que ouvir uma guitarra a trinar[Will hear a guitarra trembling]Em noites calmas, gentinha sentada às portas[On calm nights, the people sitting at their doors]Em cada peito há uma voz para cantar[In each heart a singing voice]Em qualquer rua, em qualquer beco há sempre um fado[In every street and in every alley there is always a fado]A dar nas vistas nesta Lisboa moderna[Present in this modern Lisbon]É tradição, é recordar o passado[It is tradition, it is to remember the past]Ai querida Alfama, tu és sagrada, tu és eterna[Ai darling Alfama, you are sacred, you are eternal]14

In the weekend sessions I regularly attended during 2001–03 at the amateurfado venue the Tasca do Jaime, in the neighborhood of Graça, just up the hillfrom Alfama, I heard the lyrics to Rodrigues’ “Alfama Eterna” sung almost


every week (and they are still part of the repertoire in 2011). Oftentimes, twowomen, Fernanda Proença (who many referred to as “the voice of the neigh-borhood” [voz do bairro]) and Ivone Dias, both Alfama born, would sing thisfado together. They would take turns at singing the phrases (joining in togetheron the last line) to a densely packed audience comprising of mostly neighbor-hood locals and a few tourists in the small space. In their performances, Proençaand Dias almost always emphasized the word “tradição” (tradition), particu-larly in its last instance, with ample vocal ornamentation, drawing out the word,suspending it in time. Local audience members always joined in on the refrains,singing with ease. These lyrics connect the tremulous sound of the guitarra tothe intimate spaces of neighborhood and to the nostalgic eternal. This type ofreference, where the sounds of the guitarra are poeticly sutured to the past ofplace (as tremulous [trinar], vibrating [vibrar], or weeping [gemido]), is commonin place-name fado. This reference echoes the sentiment of a well-known gui-tarrista who told me, “the guitarras cried more in the past.” Note how in each ofthe above three fados, both mention of the guitarra and the trope of the singingvoice recurs (“a woman singing,” “the pained voice,” “in each heart a singingvoice,” “held to the guitarra and sings until dawn”), reflexively linking fadosounds and affects to fado places.

Fado’s Neighborhoods: Bairro Alto and Alfama

The sentimentalizing aesthetic of place-name lyrics and representations offado’s mythological neighborhoods in contemporary Lisbon echoes a geopo-litical strategy of scale employed by the state during the dictatorship. Thisstrategy mapped a Portuguese cartography of both the enormous and theminiature (Holton 2005:9), the expansive reach of the colonial state alongsidesocial structures of intimacy and interiority (of neighborhood, of family, offaith). State cultural policy beginning in the 1930s fostered aesthetic practicesand cultural institutions with the aim of ruralizing Lisbon’s neighborhoods andturning them into small villages (aldeias) within the city (Holton 2005; Melo2001).This move was linked to an ideology of the “rural” as sanitizing “urbandegeneracy”; fado itself was in part sanitized via a poetics of rusticity, a coun-terforce to weaken fado as the voice of working-class opposition that predatedthe regime (Nery 2004).

Alfama. Bairro Alto. Madragoa. Mouraria. These are the neighborhoods offado “origin,” birth, and legend. With the formation of professional fado housesin key “traditional” neighborhoods (particularly Bairro Alto and Alfama) in the1930s and the explicit linking of these venues to international tourism in the1950s by state cultural policy (Nery 2004), fado tourism and the fetishization ofLisbon’s mythic fado neighborhoods converged. Censored fados sung in thesevenues, and that circulated on the radio and in recordings, affectively renderedsonorous a politics of intimacy, often sentimentalizing the home or family andreifying fado’s neighborhoods (see Nery 2004).15 Two of the neighborhoodsmost linked to fado myths of origin are Bairro Alto, through its 19th-centuryreputation for bohemian “low-life” and prostitution, and Alfama, as the raciallyhybrid dockside neighborhood bearing the “illicit” influences of the port. Incontemporary Lisbon, both Alfama and Bairro Alto are still fetishized by fado


tourism, by tourists, in fado venues and exhibits, fado practice, lyrics and lore,and in fado marketing both locally and globally writ.

In Bairro Alto, a “typical” fado house (casa típica) serves traditional Portu-guese food at inflated prices and usually demands a high cover charge. Fadooften mixes with folklore in these venues. “Folklore” may take the form ofdance numbers that are interspersed with the fado, in which the audience maybe called to participate. For example, at the notoriously touristic Café Luso inBairro Alto where a poster outside lures in tourists with the phrase “traditionwithout translation,” in both English and Portuguese, fado performance occurson a platform stage juxtaposed with folklore inspired dances against an illumi-nated backdrop representing the city of “old Lisbon.”

On any given night at Luso, busloads of tourists sit at long tables, chatterboisterously, and rattle their silverware; fado’s mandatory aesthetic of darknessis punctuated by incessant bursts of flash bulbs. All the while one of the venue’scontracted fadistas sings expressively on the platform stage with two or threeinstrumentalists, vying for the audience’s attentiveness (silent attentive listen-ing is rigorously demanded and routinely practiced among local fado audi-ences). The fadista finishes a set, and brilliantly adorned dancers claim the stage,twirling, holding letters above their heads that spell out L-U-S-O and cajoleaudience members to join. A cameraman gets on the stage inviting tourists to bephotographed for a fee. The package-deal tourists clear out before midnight andthe staff quickly rearranges the space. They close off the stage area with slidingdoors and move the chairs and tables into an intimate configuration; thedancers go home, the singers and instrumentalists remain. The fado, to beappreciated in silence and darkness, begins.

Alexandra Klein and Vera Alves (1994:42–43) describe décor often found invarious tourist-oriented casas de fado: paraphernalia pertaining to bullfighting,photos of famous guests, fake cobblestone floors and street lamps, muralsrepresenting “historic” Lisbon, fado accessories, photographs of well-knownsingers and instrumentalists, and assortments of objects that evoke particularrural regions of Portugal. This hodge-podge of objects, running the symbolicgamut from evocations of the aristocracy to peasantry, becomes kitsch, a folk-loric setting staging the performance of “culture.”

Vestigial staging practices in Bairro Alto’s professional fado houses currently“folklorize” fado through contamination.16 In some of Lisbon’s tourist fadoclubs, framing and staging practices rely on a habitus of erasure vestigial fromthe past: the codified sanitation of fado through the construction of official fadohouses, the mixing of fado with “folklore,” the folk kitsch surround, and thesinging of some lyrics that were shaped in response to former state censorship.The residual “folk” clings to fado over 30 years after the dictatorship’s fall. Itsaura is reproduced nightly in some of Bairro Alto’s folklorized casas típicas, thetangled histories perhaps invisible to the tourist and rendered through repeti-tion as part of the everyday sense of things for staff members and regulars.

Yet there are multiple night scenes in Bairro Alto. A sushi bar stands adjacentto a trendy sneaker shop with a dance floor; retro wear and high designerfashions are displayed in boutiques that also serve tea and advertise yogaclasses. Techno music blasts from a bar; gay male couples stand outsidesmoking. Illicit drugs are quickly exchanged on a dark corner. Fado bouncers


for the tourist houses stand outside trying to lure customers. A store specializ-ing in condoms, open only at night, stands nearby a forsaken fado house whereonly two tourists sit; the wailing of a tired fado voice can be heard pouringthrough the open doors. The customer who might go to the Café Luso wouldprobably not be the same customer who would seek out the bar Tasca do Chicodown the street. On a fado night at Chico, a stream of Europe’s 20-somethingtourists, mixed with regulars from the Lisbon amateur fan circuit, can be seenthrough a smoky haze listening to amateur fado. This is a radically differentscene from the middle-aged European tour groups at Luso, and also from themostly Portuguese audiences, with the majority of participants over the age offorty, that one might find in select venues in Lisbon hosting amateur fado.17

Chico’s audience might consult the Rough Guide or Time Out Lisbon; some ofthem might purchase Chico’s low-fi “live” CD (Tasca do Chico 2002) that wasproduced to intentionally retain the ambient sound of the bar. This is theaudience created from Europe’s hub trickling out to its “repudiated margins” insearch of the “real thing.” Indeed, when Mariza, the world music fado diva, isin town, she occasionally stops by Chico for an impromptu performance.

In the fado museum situated at the base of the neighborhood of Alfama nearthe riverside docks, the first exhibit reveals two views. Inside a glass case inminiaturized splendor is an imaginative reproduction of the sociality, rusticity,and patrimony of what appears to be Lisbon’s quintessential fado neighbor-hood writ small (see Figure 1). A plaque beneath the case labels the exhibit

Figure 1.“Vielas” (Alleyways), 1998, by Rui Pimentel, collection of the Museu doFado, Lisbon. Photograph by the author. Permissions granted from the

artist and museum for reproduction in print.


“Vielas” (alleyways), stating it to be a “reconstruction of the typical environ-ment of the historic neighborhoods of Lisbon.” Yet the obvious reference of thisminiature neighborhood is to Alfama. The landmark, the Alfama church, Igrejade Santo Estêvão, is a famous site in fado lore and is subject of fado lyrics by thesame name. It forms the focal point for the diorama’s perspective. The stair-cases, esplanades, the sheer density of people interacting on the street, andthe variety and types of social activities—many of them associated with“tradition”—in this scene also mark the neighborhood as Alfama. Metonymi-cally, the miniaturized representation of Alfama and the types of sociability itreifies, stand in as “typical” for all “historical” Lisbon neighborhoods.

On the Largo da Saudade (a play on the name of a real Lisbon street inAlfama, the Rua da Saudade) an apron-clad miniaturized clay woman is per-manently frozen into a gestural mime of what might be a performance of atraditional street cry or the performance of fado; her head is thrown back, hereyes are closed, her mouth open wide, her feet planted to the ground. Womensell produce on the narrow cobble street lined with colorful buildings, balco-nies, and iron street lamps. A man gestures at his mistress who stands sulking,she wears bright lipstick and a fadista’s black shawl. Laundry flies on lines. Awoman kneels, grilling sardines. Men play cards outside of a tavern. Womentalk to one another through open windows. A street vendor blows panpipes.Sounds of traditional fado can be heard from the speaker system in the adjoin-ing room. Turning one’s back on the exhibit reveals a large window that over-looks the neighborhood of Alfama. Men chatter by the fountain, people sitoutside drinking wine, a doorman at the fado club Taverna d’el Rey prepares forhis shift, a cement mixer mixes, laundry hangs flying in the wind, women talkto one another through open windows, posters are spread on scaffoldingmarking Alfama as a zone of urban restoration declaring: “Alfama is fado” (seeFigure 2). The museum window frames my gaze of Alfama below.

In addition to its status as the fado neighborhood in the Lisbon imaginary,Alfama is also often represented, from tourist pamphlets and academic texts tofilms and television documentaries, as the most typically “Lisbon” and “Portu-guese” neighborhood in Lisbon (Costa 1999:32–33). At the same time, Alfamacopiously gathers surplus signification (of patrimony, of history, of race, class,and ethnicity, of the “popular,” the criminal, the touristic, of fado) whichrenders it “other” even for many residents within the city. It bears vestiges ofthe Arab in its name and in its labyrinthine layout; it also bears vestigesof a medieval Jewish quarter, a community of freed black slaves, palaces ofroyalty, the original city wall. For much of the 20th century, Alfama was markedby the poverty of its inhabitants (many whom had migrated from the ruralprovinces in search of work), by a decaying architectural infrastructure, difficultliving conditions, as a place of urban degeneracy and crime, and by an almostconstant process of urban reconstruction (Costa 1999). Alfama as the densemicrocosm of the “typically” Portuguese was in many ways shaped by theEstado Novo: architecturally, scenically, and socioculturally (Costa 1999:35).Architecture, staircases, arches, tiles, “Moorish” facades, viewpoints, such asthe Miradouro de Santa Luzia, and fountains were all parts of the Estado Novo’sliteral re-forming of the physical space of the neighborhood; strategic alter-ations accented particular aspects of Portuguese patrimony and history (Costa


1999:35). Many of those alterations remain today but blend so much into thelandscape of the quotidian that they are forgotten.

Alfama and other “traditional” Lisbon neighborhoods have over the pasttwo decades been subject to intense sociological and anthropological scrutiny(see Cordeiro 1997; Costa 1999). This work focuses primarily on the uniquetypes of sociability and cultural practices that these neighborhoods are seen toengender or maintain. This research also attends to social impacts of Lisbon’surban restoration projects with respect to neighborhood belonging, urbanflight, and gentrification. Alfama appears to be caught in a play of shadows andmirrors, ever reconstructed, continuously the focal point of multiple gazes—tourist, culture-industry, academic, state—and like all of Lisbon’s fado neigh-borhoods, gazed on self-reflexively, fetishized, and shaped by fado itself. At the

Figure 2.Urban renovation scaffolding in Alfama, 2002, “Alfama é fado” (Alfama is

fado). Photograph by the author.


same time, fado as genre, as performance practice, and as tourism and culturalindustry is invigorated both by the attention given to Alfama and to the dyna-mism of the neighborhood, which nevertheless is almost always represented infado lyrics as eternal and unchanging. A feeling of neighborhood from therepeated hearing, singing, or playing of a fado, a feeling of intimacy wrought bya particular arrangement of staircases and alleyways, a sense of history onemight feel by passing a monument that is sung about over and over again, oreven the very framing of the gaze out to the river that opens into a sea, these allput the senses in dialogue with the residual topographies and aesthetic prac-tices of a national imaginary of a dictatorship over 30 years officially long gone.

Placing Lisbon, Portugal, and Europe’s South

I walk down the Rua Augusta in Lisbon’s Baixa shopping district on a Julymorning in 2003; a teenage boy with a clipboard follows me doggedly asking,“Do you think Portugal is a developed country?” I jump onto the number 28tram; it breaks down in Alfama and tourists aboard use the twenty minutes fora photo-op, while locals mutter about how things are always the same, “This isjust a party for the tourists, the city council doesn’t do a damn thing, Portugalis just like a third-world country.” I run into a guitarra player in front of hisinstrument shop in Alfama and he tells me, “We are at the foot of Europe, we areisolated. Lisbon is a village (aldeia); people don’t know the world. We have justSpain and the sea, we were only big before there were airplanes, before therewere trains; but to be in the center, like Belgium; they are obliged to meet theworld. I am thinking of leaving and going back to England for a while, wherepeople have a different vision of the world; but the business is better here.” ASlovakian tourist couple from Germany sits next to me at an amateur fadosession and listens to the fado with a raptness bordering on tears. They tell me,“The Germans have no heart, no feeling, it has been drilled out of them; but herein a city so poor, they know how to live, they sing from feeling, they sing fromthe heart.” As we leave together, one of them tells me that Lisbon feels like it is25 years behind the rest of Europe, even eastern Europe. “They [the Portuguese]were shut off from the rest of Europe for so long. But soon world capitalism willtake advantage of Portuguese generosity and feeling and run over them all.”

These narratives point to the fraught positioning of Portugal in the Europeanimaginary, from the perspective of anxious locals to the nostalgic gaze of theSlovakian tourist from Germany. For the tourist this temporal difference islinked through an experience of listening to fado in an amateur club, to feeling,an emotionality that will be taken advantage of when the time of “worldcapitalism” catches up to it. The Germans, evidently imagined as in the grip of“world capitalism” have had the “feeling drilled out of them.” In my conver-sation with the guitarrista, Lisbon’s geopolitical and temporal positioning wasframed with the word “aldeia” (village), a village that modernity has passed by.The tourist tells me, “They were shut off from the rest of Europe.” The EstadoNovo did its best to cordon off the state, both its real and imagined borders, andto affect an idyll of nation through a turn inward, to the “land,” to the rural andbucolic, and backward, both to a preindustrial past and to the golden age ofPortuguese colonialism. One way in which nostalgia and nation were mapped


onto land was through the trope of saudade, which for nationalist ends, wasshaped as a specifically Portuguese sentiment of longing, with the practice offado a key conduit.18

Portugal is perhaps uniquely situated as the European nation with the sharp-est contrast between its remote past as former economic and colonial power andits status during most of the 20th century as one of the poorest countries inEurope. Yet a mythology of Portugal as former geographic and economic centeris still bolstered by a deep colonialist nostalgia. Portugal’s positioning on themargins of Europe, sharing borders only with Spain and the sea, was sometimescited to me by my Portuguese interlocutors as both a reason for their “culturalcosmopolitanism” and as an explanation for feelings of isolation, marginality,and “backwardness” in relation to the rest of Europe. In this context, “cosmo-politanism” is usually associated with the Portuguese impetus to “discover” theworld, and with Lisbon as a former crossroads for world commerce, thusindelibly stamped by cultural hybridity. Geographical marginality maps ontoresidual memories, practices, and senses of place born from almost 50 years ofexclusionary tactics—the isolationism wrought through practices of censorship,political repression, travel restrictions—and current economic crisis.

Fado circulation via the world music industry reenforces core-peripheryeconomic stereotypes of Europe’s north and south.19 Both the world musicindustry and fado tourism help shape Portugal and Lisbon from the perspectiveof Europe’s “center” into geographical “zones of repudiation” with all of thefallout that that entails, effecting characteristics commonly associated with nos-talgia: temporal stasis, bounded geographies, erasure of historical specificity(see Fox and Yano forthcoming; Trouillot 1995). This hearing from “afar” inter-animates the hearing and musical practices from “within”—tourist casas defado and amateur Lisbon bars, Europe’s North and Europe’s South,geographical-economic center and periphery, city and country—in a continu-ous aesthetically productive dialectic (Feld 1996a; Meintjes 2003).20

Fado’s “World”

Mariza, the international fado diva, strategically launched her first disk andher international career with the Amsterdam-based label “World Connection”in 2001. Two years later, after Radio 3 BBC awarded her their world music prizein the Europe category, her influence within Portugal increased in relation toher validation abroad.21 In the late 1990s Cristina Branco, a fadista who isarguably more widely known in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France than inPortugal, had already made her European career through her success in theNetherlands where she released her first recording. The recordings of thefadista Mísia, in the early 1990s, were some of the first fado recordings to bemarketed from the “world music” category. Mísia began her recording career inParis. Like Branco, she has greater notoriety in France, Belgium, the Nether-lands, and Germany than she does in Lisbon or in Portugal and is known forher collaborations with Europe’s artistic elite, such as the French actress IsabelleHuppert.22 Although the international and national career of the late fado divaAmália Rodrigues was launched in the 1940s and 1950s by her initial successesin Paris and in Rio de Janeiro, the current patterns for successful international


fado careers over the past decade have been shifting, particularly in relation tothe prominence of the Netherlands as a hub. Although the Netherlands andFrance have sizable Portuguese populations, the success of Mariza, Branco, andMísia is linked to marketing for the category of a cosmopolitan “world,” ratherthan to Portuguese immigrants outside of Portugal.

In its packaging for “world” and for its circulation within Europe’s “core,” asit is for the local Portuguese market and in self-reflexive discourse within thegenre, fado remains intrinsically linked to “feeling” and “soul” and to a Lisbonand Portuguese based “essence.” Yet these voices “transcend” the specificity ofplace through “innovation” and often through the evocation of “celestial,” or auniversalized melancholy.23 Mariza is introduced in her first disk as “planetary”with a Portuguese twist: “Mariza is an adorable extraterrestrial being, someonesent by the Great Creator to reinvent the Fado. Mariza came as a bolt oflightning from the Soul of Old Portugal, a lost and found in the Sea of Intran-quility within Portuguese Music. This is the kind of music that one doesn’t justplay, or just sing, but more than anything else, one feels” (Mariza 2001, emphasisadded). The “music as a universal language” theme, where the languages of theworld’s musics are translated by sound that signifies “feeling,” serves as thecentral unifying trope of the international “world music” industry. Yet, in rela-tion to fado, the question remains as to how the work of “feeling” and ofemotional excess (which fado chatter cultivates around its object) plays out inthe “world” and at “home” and in the dynamic charge and exchange betweenthese two spaces and places.

In the seven years of its world music awards program (2002–08), BBC Radio3 chose six of its seven winners from Europe’s periphery for its “Europe”category (four from southern Europe); Mariza won in 2003 and was a finalist in2006.24 The critical role that the music industry in Europe’s North plays in thesuccess and circulation of fado divas for both the European and the “worldmusic” market suggests that core Europe is mining its periphery for emotion-ality, for excess, and that a salient way in which this rawness of “unmediated”feeling is indexed is through the sounds of the singing “southern” voice. Andwhile those who listen to fado as “world music” in Amsterdam or Paris mightfeel themselves to be partaking in the cosmopolitan and exotic, some youngfado musicians in Lisbon spoke to me with resentment about fado’s classifica-tion outside of Portugal. For them, “world music” carried a contaminatingstigma. One young professional guitar player told me in 2003, “‘World music’ isfor Africa, maybe for Brazil, for the third world. Tango isn’t ‘world music.’ Jazzisn’t ‘world music.’ Fado isn’t ‘world music.’” Fado’s self-orientalizing dis-courses of affect, nostalgia, and place converge with exoticisms of fado andEurope’s South shaped from Europe’s center. A lingering place-making fadoaesthetic of the former dictatorship circulates on some “world music” record-ings where it maps onto entrenched European North–South dynamics.

Lisbon from the Miradouro of Meia Laranja

Meia Laranja is a small viewpoint on a hill on the very edge of Lisbon’s“historical” periphery that looks on a large housing project (bairro social), theneighborhood of Casal Ventoso. I learn about Casal Ventoso in 2003 through the


voice of fadista José Manuel Osório who sings a fado named “Fado da MeiaLaranja,” for which he collaborated on the lyrics with one of Lisbon’s bestknown fado poets, José Luís Gordo. During the dictatorship, Osório was anactor, an outspoken political activist, and a fado singer. He sold his fado record-ings, which would have been censored, on the black market. When we met, hewas a fado researcher, singer, and a celebrated AIDS activist. I hear him sing thisfado for the first time, improvising to the music of the traditional fado “FadoVitória” in an amateur venue in Alfama, where on this evening there is a mix oftourists and locals. He is seated, his feet tap, his eyes close, his body quiverswith the intensity of the focus in his voice as he suddenly bursts forth on aphrase after holding a silence just beyond the point of expectation or pushes anote to the timbral edge of breaking.

Meia Laranja opens to the view of the principal entrance to one of the most problem-atic neighborhoods in the city of Lisbon. Here one can buy everything, sell every-thing: antiques (stolen), automobiles (stolen), passports (false), airplane tickets (toeverywhere in the world), medications (stolen from the hospitals). It is an under-world of criminality and of marginality, a type of reality that many know only fromthe cinema, but this is no film, this is the most difficult reality imaginable. [personalcorrespondence, Osório, August 14, 2004]

In 1995, when this fado was written, the neighborhood of Casal Ventoso,beneath the viewpoint called “Meia Laranja,” was one of the most active sitesfor illegal drug trafficking in Europe. This was enabled by Lisbon’s geographi-cal location as port city on Europe’s margins, its proximity to northern Africa,and the complicity, or at least a lack of attention to the problem, of local policeand authorities. By 1998, in response to both European and state sponsoredinitiatives, many residents had been relocated and a number of dwellingsdemolished in an effort to “clean up” Casal Ventoso (Chaves 1999:23).

“Fado da Meia Laranja”Ali à Meia Laranja[There in Meia Laranja]Meio inferno de Lisboa[Half hell of Lisbon]Onde a morte anda a viver[In the presence of death]Há milhares de olhos baços[There are thousands of dim eyes]E a vida tem quatro braços[And life has four arms]Para a morte se esconder[In which death can hide]Por entre gente perdida[For in the middle of lost souls]Jovens entregam a vida[Young people give up their lives]À loucura que se esbanja[To a madness that wastes them]E nas veias de tristeza[And in the veins of sadness]Tantas facas de pobreza[There are so many needles of poverty]


Ali à Meia Laranja[There in Meia Laranja]Há tanto cavalo à solta[There is so much heroin, and the authorities just turn a blind eye]Com chicotes de revolta[With whips of revolt]Num galopar que magoa[In a gallop of anguish]Há punhais de infelicidade[There are daggers of unhappiness]Ali se mata a idade[There which kill the youth]No coração de Lisboa[In the heart of Lisbon]25

Osório accentuates the throaty and sometimes nasal grain of his voice, stra-tegically prolongs silences, and plays with rhythmic meter and with extremes ofvocal volume, moving from a whisper to almost a shout, affectively intensifyingGordo’s lyrics and drawing his listeners into a space of intimacy. We sit on theedge of our seats in the small space in darkness, listening to this man who seemsat this moment only voice and tremulous sound. The silences between vocal-izations are charged; we collectively hold our breath.

By crying this particular Lisbon, Osório’s “Meia Laranja” helps restore the gritof materiality to fado’s city and return the city of Lisbon back to fado. These lyricsand Osório’s performance of them are striking for drawing heightened attentionto current social realities. Not only is the dark side of Lisbon in the contemporarymoment rarely a subject for fado but also social problems, concerning drugtraffic, immigration, racism, domestic violence, and AIDS, are often eclipsed inthe day to day. “Meia Laranja,” while playing on fado’s fetishization of neigh-borhood, does not marshal the folk, the nostalgic, or the colonial cosmopolitan toshape the place of Portugal, or of Lisbon. It does not erase the “real.”

Affects of Genre

The larger story I tell here is a story about genre, about the power of amusical genre to shape topographies of affect and public feeling, the kind ofaffect that binds people to places or that imbues a place with desire, and abouta dialectic between a musical genre and the city to which it is most attached.26

This is not an argument that exclusively binds genre’s affective potencies tonarratives of the nation, the city, the country, or particular belongings or histo-ries. Rather, I am interested in how musical genre works mercurially in itssyncretic iterations, how a musical genre in its excessive formal repetitions andimprovisations along with its stereotypical affective and sonic registers mightshape feeling, which becomes shared sentiment, while opening up new possi-bilities for the experience of place and subjectivity. I have granted genre someagency in order to try to understand it in an interdynamic relation both withhow individuals and communities experience senses of place (Feld and Basso1996) and with the shaping of wider representations and affective topographiesthat are both socially and geopolitically situated. Thus, I follow the lead of recentscholarship in the humanities and social sciences that argues for the need to


take seriously the power of aesthetic form or genre in rendering communicativeand affective the implicit narratives that shape one’s sense of self and place inthe world (Berlant 2008; Frow 2005; Holt 2007; Stewart 2007).

Lisbon is not alone as a city that is associated with and lays claim to its ownmusical genre; there is often a powerful interdynamism between particularmusical genres, specific cities, and the poetics and politics of place-making.27

The story I tell here can also be read as another anthropological case study thatinvestigates iconic or indexical linkages between song genres of loss andlonging, and places, regions, or nations (see Dent 2009; Fox 2004; Yano 2002). Itis also in conversation with meta-generic analyses that seek to understand whyso many social, musical, aesthetic, and political parameters surrounding sunggenres of nostalgia run cross-culturally and in parallel (see Fox and Yanoforthcoming; Wilce 2009).

Berlant (2008) thinks about genre as a “form of aesthetic expectation withporous boundaries allowing complex audience identifications” and argues thatgenre “locates real life in the affective capacity to bracket many kinds of struc-tural and historical antagonisms on behalf of finding a way to connect with thefeeling of belonging to a larger world, however aesthetically mediated” (Berlant2008:4). Theorizing musical reception, circulation, and experience through theprism of genre brings to this discussion the sensuality of sound in combinationwith the rich and polysemous way in which the often not explicitly referentiallanguage of music interacts with meaning, memory, feeling, and place-making(Feld et al. 2004; Samuels 2004). Perhaps we can think about musical genres,particularly sung vocal genres (in that singing presents “surplus-articulation”[Dolar 2006:32]) as excessively porous across different sensory domains, thussupremely powerful in their potential to perform multiple kinds of affectivelabor.

Fado cannot contain its own excess, its sense and sound of itself as affect.Lisbon is overdetermined by the fado, mimicking the fado in its excess. Fadosets in dialogue multiple imaginaries of place, history, and feeling: Lisbonneighborhoods as Portugal’s “land,” fado as Portugal’s lost sociality, lost place,lost time, fado as Europe’s “country,” fado as universal melancholy, fado asLisbon’s excessive feminine, fado as residual practice of one of Europe’s longestdictatorships. Or fado, as some fans put it to me, fado as always, but always arevolutionary song, which will forever slip through the cracks and resist stateappropriation, at once too personal, too social, too wayward, and too powerfulto belong to the country. These overlaps and discontinuities open fissures inmusical, historical, and genre-based narratives of place and of belonging. Theyreveal places where geography and geopolitics, official and nonofficial Portu-guese histories, the intimacy of neighborhood, and politics of the state, indus-tries of music and culture, and lastly, fado aesthetics, lyrics, and lore intersectwith layered, competing, and often contradictory meanings.

Notes

Acknowledgments. Field research in Lisbon between 2001 and 2003 was generouslysupported by the Social Science Research Council IDRF program with funds fromthe Andrew G. Mellon Foundation, by the Luso-American Foundation, and Duke


University. Subsequent research was supported by Columbia University and the Luso-American Foundation. Writing during 2004–05 was supported by the Franklin Humani-ties Institute and in 2009–10 by the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Portionsof this article were read at the Columbia University ethnomusicology colloquium,2005; Portuguese World Music: Luso-African Forms and their Diaspora, Yale University,2006; and the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association,Philadelphia, PA, December 2–6. I am grateful to readers from the Duke Ethnomusicol-ogy Working Group (summer 2008: A. Ciucci, L. Meintjes, A. Minks, and J. Woodruff),to members of the 2009–10 “Vernacular Epistemologies” seminar at the Rutgers Centerfor Historical Analysis, and to the anonymous readers of Anthropology and Humanismfor their comments on drafts of this article. I thank Ana Gonçalves for assistance withthe Portuguese orthography. Last, I am grateful to the fadistas at the Tasca do Jaimein Lisbon and to José Manuel Osório (1947–2011) for rendering affective to me fado’scity.

1. Wenders claims that the way in which he explores the representation of Lisbonin this film was influenced by the soundtrack, which was made prior to the shooting ofthe film: “The city certainly had inspired this band and their music, now their musichelped us to enter the city and find our way through it, and through our story” (Wenders1995:4).

2. This article appears in an earlier version in Gray 2005 and in extended form in Grayin press. It is based on ethnographic and archival research conducted by the author onfado performance and reception in Lisbon between 1999 and 2010 with 22 months ofconsecutive field research conducted during 2001–03. For additional approaches to therelationship of fado to place and to Lisbon see Brito 1999; Costa 1999; Costa and Guer-reiro 1984; Elliott 2010; Gray 2007.

3. Reported speech in quotation marks with no citation following indicates materialtaken from field notes. All translations are by the author. Amália Rodrigues wasPortugal’s most celebrated fado diva of the 20th century. She died in 1999.

4. Urban details four “crying signal types”: “(1) the cry break, (2) the voiced inhala-tion, (3) the creaky voice, and (4) the falsetto vowel” (2000:156).

5. Carlos do Carmo. Recorded interview with author. Lisbon, Portugal, November12, 2002.

6. See Bourdieu 1977. See Buck-Morss on the writing of Asja Lacis andWalter Benjamin on decay and the city of Naples: “The phenomena—buildings,human gestures, spatial arrangements—are ‘read’ as a language in which ahistorically transient truth (and the truth of historical transiency) is expressedconcretely, and the city’s social formation becomes legible within perceived experience”(1990:27).

7. “Acoustemology, acousteme: I am adding to the vocabulary of sensorial-sonicstudies to argue the potential of acoustic knowing, of sounding as a condition of and forknowing, of sonic presence and awareness as a potent shaping force in how people makesense of experiences. . . . Experiencing and knowing place—the idea of place as sensed,place as sensation—can proceed through a complex interplay of the auditory andthe visual, as well as through other intersensory perceptual processes” (Feld 1996b:97–98).

8. My thinking about genre takes its cue from recent scholarship on public sentimentthat locates aesthetic genres as critical to shaping the “affective intensities” of the social(see Berlant 2008:4), from work in linguistic anthropology that extends Bakhtin’s (1986)sociohistoric approach to speech genres to argue for genre as practice based (Hanks1987), and that foregrounds generic intertextuality in relation to verbal discourse andsocial power (Bauman and Briggs 1992).

9. Other common themes for fado lyrics include: fado itself, the mother, family,romantic betrayal, the colonial “discoveries,” heterosexual love, saudade.

10. Lyrics by Artur Ribeiro, music by Maximiano de Sousa.11. The gendering of the nation as feminine is one of nationalism’s (and colonial-

ism’s) most hackneyed tropes (see Berlant 2008; Chatterjee 1993; McClintock 1995;Ramaswamy 2010).


12. Lyrics by Artur Ribeiro, music by Nóbrega e Sousa.13. In the annual popular marches, Lisbon neighborhoods compete in parades on the

June saint day for Saint Anthony. These parades are an “invented tradition” from thedictatorship era; see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983 as cited in Costa 1999:33.

14. Lyrics as dictated to me by the fado poet Álvaro Rodrigues and the fadistaFernanda Proença in 2003 (written permission granted by author for reproduction oflyrics). Rodrigues sets this poem to music of the fado “Lenda das Algas” by JaimeMendes. Rodrigues was also an interlocutor in an earlier ethnographic study on Alfamawhere this fado also appears (Costa and Guerreiro 1984).

15. See fadista life narratives in Costa and Guerreiro 1984 for a nuanced explication ofhow some working-class amateur fadistas in Alfama used their lyrics to critique theregime and for their reactions to the “sentimentalization” of fado wrought by statecultural policy.

16. Fado, as an urban and “debauched” song form, was generally not consideredfolklore during the dictatorship (although beginning in the 1950s, in the professionalhouses, it was often performed alongside versions of sanitized folkloric dance; seeHolton 2005 on folklore and the shaping of a “politics of the spirit” during the dictator-ship and Nery 2004 on fado policies in the 1950s).

17. The configuration of the typical audience for amateur fado is rapidly changing asglobal media outlets report on “out-of-the way” places where the in-the-know touristcan hear the “real thing,” as videos shot on cell phones in amateur venues by touristscirculate on YouTube, and as new venues spring up that cater to this audience. The 2007international release of the film Fados by the Spanish director Carlos Saura (the produc-tion of the film was generously supported financially by the Lisbon municipal govern-ment), and the current Lisbon based campaign to have fado declared “Patrimony ofHumanity” by UNESCO, are also likely contributing to shifts in Lisbon’s internationalfado publics.

18. See Leal 2000 for a genealogy of the concept of saudade as a literary, philosophi-cal, and poetic topos going back to the 15th century. Of particular salience for this articleare his arguments concerning the literary–philosophical movement of saudosismo as acult of Portuguese exceptionalism that bolstered the nationalism of the first republic1912–26, the appropriation of the concept of saudade during the Estado Novo (1926–74)and its linkage to fado, and postdictatorship strategic uses of the term by different socialgroups in Portugal (Leal 2000:14). See also Gray 2007; Holton 2006.

19. What is striking is that a core-periphery model still holds for much fado produc-tion, circulation, and distribution within Europe, even though transnational neoliberalcapitalism has greatly complicated this model’s usefulness for understanding politicaleconomies of Europe’s margins.

20. The fado repertoires and vocal timbres that travel most successfully on the inter-national market (which are often different than those preferred at the level of thehyperlocal), in turn come to influence local preferences and practices in nuanced ways.Female fado voices have traveled more successfully internationally than have malevoices. (See Gray forthcoming on the labor of the feminine in translating fado to aninternational audience.)

21. Immediately following the award, Mariza appeared with greater frequency inPortuguese media and the award was capitalized on in the domestic advertising of herdisks.

22. These claims to reputation and notoriety of Branco and Mísia are made based onobservations gathered while living in and conducting fieldwork in Lisbon during theearly 2000s while making regular visits to the Netherlands.

23. The cover of Mariza’s CD Terra Mariza (2008) shows her hovering epically, domi-nating a miniaturized global landscape with a famous Lisbon colonial monument in thebackground.

24. Romania in 2002; Portugal in 2003; Spain in 2004, 2005; Romania in 2006; Francein 2007; and Spain in 2008. In 2002, Romania won under the rubric of “Europe/MiddleEast,” which by 2003, the BBC had split into two categories (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/worldmusic/, accessed June 10, 2008).


25. Written permission granted in 2009 by José Luís Gordo to reproduce lyrics to“Fado da Meia Laranja.”

26. See Cvetkovich on “public feeling”: “Political identities are implicit within struc-tures of feeling, sensibilities, everyday forms of cultural expression and affiliation thatmay not take the form of recognizable organizations or institutions” (2007:461).

27. See, for example, Luker 2009 and Savigliano 1995 on tango.

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