Redemptive Regionalism in the Brazilian Northeast: Forró and the blows of Popular Culture in a Global Economy concentrates on a genre of popular music that originated in rural Northeastern Brazil but has achieved national prominence, forró. Both informed by and problematizing the fields of ethnomusicology, sociology and communication studies in Brazil and internationally, this study utilizes literary criticism and critical theory to analyze the lyrics and music of form from a subalternist perspective, thereby expanding upon and beyond the work done by academics in the aforementioned fields. A study of form benefits from such an approach because it is the most successful at revealing the genre's antinomic perspective that alternately incorporates rural and urban, modern and traditional, local and national cultures, practices and ideologies into its lyrics as well as into its technologies of reproduction such as recordings and performances. For the many poor and working-class Northeasterners who have been displaced from their home region for economic reasons, the music of form is a redemptive attempt at establishing a collective, immanent relationship to history in the diaspora. The study also involves a diachronic analysis of this Northeastern genre's transformation from a rhythm called baião that symbolically represented the Northeast as a simple, coherent entity, to forró, a more allegorical representation that appreciates the true class, gender, racial, and generational complexity of the region. The development of the genre, as well as the circulation of theory related to cultural production and identity, are contextualized in a global economy. While trade liberalization and the related decline of state-sponsored nationalist cultural projects in Brazil have led to the rise of regional and other subaltern genres to national prominence, this democratization is accompanied by a remapping of cultural hierarchies onto the global level of the world market. Such hierarchies are reproduced in spheres as diverse as multinational culture industries and North and South American centers of postcolonial or postmodern intellectual production. Ultimately, the work raises the question of form's ability to circumvent these hierarchical mediating structures in order to participate in a global, egalitarian multitude of cultural producers.