O acontecimento narrado na avenida: a carnavalização do noticiário nos enredos críticos das escolas de samba cariocas

Abstract

Each year, Rio de Janeiro’s samba schools craft narratives known as enredos — storylines that celebrate biographical, historical and geographical themes and articulate discourses of social and humanistic resistance. This study examines how current events and news are critically “carnivalized” in the parades of the city’s Grupo Especial (Special Group), understanding the enredo as a collective construction shaped by tension, symbolic disputes, and cultural resistance. The research is grounded in the hypothesis that, just as there are criteria of newsworthiness (Traquina, 2008), there are also criteria of news carnivalization that guide the selection of themes, their negotiation, and their transformation into spectacle—later reprocessed by television media. A survey of parade scripts identified 186 presentations featuring some form of contestation between 1980 and 2025 (30.24% of the total). For in-depth analysis, six emblematic enredos were selected following case study methodology (Yin, 2001) and narrative analysis (Motta, 2013): Tupinicópolis (Mocidade, 1987), Ratos e urubus, larguem minha fantasia (Beija-Flor, 1989), Criador e criatura (Mocidade, 1996), O boi voador e o cordel da galhofa nacional (São Clemente, 2004), Meu Deus, meu Deus, está extinta a escravidão? (Paraíso do Tuiuti, 2018), and História pra ninar gente grande (Mangueira, 2019). These parades exemplify diverse forms of social critique — political, economic, religious, and cultural — highlighting the carnival’s ability to translate journalistic events into popular and contestatory narratives. Findings indicate that, by revisiting critical historical and contemporary themes, samba schools reframe collective traumas, transforming carnival laughter into an instrument of denunciation, reflection, and hope.