“Will I be the owner of this party?”

Memory, carnivals and the expectations about the Constitution

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze how the productions of sambas-enredo (comparing them with the parades) in the 1980s and 1990s, in the carnivals of Rio de Janeiro, understood the social promises involved in the transition from the military dictatorship to the democratic regime. To this end, I examine how the legal-political expectations of the constituent project were perceived and narrated in the selected sambas and parades. This involves looking not only at sambas that dealt with the issue explicitly, but also those that dealt with it indirectly. In the first group, I bring together sambas that openly dialogued with terms inherent in the legal discourse and debates of the Constituent Assembly. In the second group, I start with sambas that sometimes embodied plural perspectives on the very idea of a constitution, sometimes focused on the problem of social inequalities, sometimes addressed the issue of partying as an element of projecting reality and social desires. To this end, I also propose a contextualization of the debates involved in redemocratization and the underlying promises of citizenship.