Memes in Brazilian Digital Culture

This chapter demonstrates an approach to studying digital culture within Brazilian cultural studies that both plays to the existing repertoires of scholars in this area and incorporates the agilities and sensitivities required to do justice to digital culture. It presents a case study of the famous Brazilian internet meme “Cala boca Galvão” of 2010, a joke played by Brazilian internet users at the expense of foreigners, which mushroomed from a catchphrase shared on Twitter during the FIFA World Cup, protesting the verbosity of well-known television presenter Galvão Bueno, into a spoof fundraising campaign to save an endangered parrot in the Amazon. Adopting and adapting a framework put forward by Brian T. Edwards, the chapter analyzes the “meaning,” or content, of the meme (a dispersed collection of texts) and its “movement,” or circulation, revealing how both touch on issues of national identity (including the ongoing importance of television) and the relationship between Brazil and the world. The chapter argues that the continued reverberation and sedimentation of “Cala boca Galvão” and the proliferation of memes emerging on a daily basis in Brazil make digital culture – and the intersections between it and other cultural arenas – essential topics for research in Brazilian cultural studies.