Brazil, by both area and population, is the fifth-largest nation on Earth. Its economy is perhaps the sixth- or seventh-largest and will soon surpass those of France and Britain. Yet this great state has barely registered its presence globally. In the complex flux of globalized popular culture or the rarefied circuits of high culture and the sciences, Brazil is an undercurrent.
Music and Carnival are, in their picture-postcard form, perhaps the most widespread, if glib, images of the nation. Denuded of their social and political context, they serve, alongside Copacabana and the palm-fringed beaches of its northern coasts, as code for languid tropical hedonism, the brand identity of Brazil in the global tourist market.
Alluring as these traditions may seem, the global popularity of samba is dwarfed by that of salsa or Jamaican reggae, a now-global musical genre from an island with 1 percent of Brazil's population. And — though we need not take the views of the Nobel Foundation and its judges as the definitive word on the nation's sciences and arts — it is notable that not a single Nobel has been awarded to a Brazilian.