In terms of cultural presence and influence, blackness has been symbolically central to the development of Brazilian popular music, but during this process black people themselves have been socially marginalized and disadvantaged. This pattern of exclusion is familiar enough from other places, but the story of how it unfolded in Brazil is not that well known. Here is where Darién Davis’s study of the role of what he calls Africaneity in Brazilian popular music fills something of a gap.
The influence is clear enough. White popular music stars of the second quarter of the twentieth century in Brazil drew on Afro-Brazilian popular culture in various ways. They sang of black social issues arising from living in the favela, referred to black characters and took on black personalities, popularised black slang and black idioms, and performed dances associated with Afro-Brazilian people. By contrast, prior to the 1950s, blacks were often prohibited from performing on significant national stages or representing Brazil abroad. Mulato performers complicated the picture, helping to pave the way for the acceptance of black performers. The picture is complicated further by the fact that white performers also helped to increase demand and opportunities for blacks. They were not simply appropriating and exploiting, though the market for Brazilian popular music was controlled by wealthy white men with transnational economic interests. For reasons such as these, Davis is quite justified in stating that “race played paradoxical roles in the forging of the Brazilian popular music tradition in Brazil and abroad” (xx).
He is also aware that “race” cannot be isolated as a discrete category, for it always intersects in historically various ways with social class and gender. His purpose in the book is to see how these different forces interacted and combined in the forging of the Brazilian music industry. The period on which he focuses in executing this purpose is the Vargas era, which ran from the 1930s to the early 1950s. President Getúlio Vargas courted musicians and performers throughout the period associated with his name. This period witnessed the emergence of Brazilian radio and cinema, the professionalization of music production and performance, and the establishment of Rio de Janeiro’s samba schools, the teatro de revistas (popular revue theatres), and the casinos, all of which provided forums for musical expression and performance. These developments would not have occurred without Afro-Brazilian cultural creativity and the infusion within them of blackness or Africaneity.
Davis begins the book with a review of the work of pioneer early twentieth-century instrumentalists and composers such as Sinhô, Ismael Silva, and the virtuoso Pixinguinha. He also discusses how Paris played such a critical role in establishing Brazilian music on a global basis, and providing an international urban space for contact and dialogue with other Afrodiasporic musicians and musical forms. Davis then moves on to deal with the legacy of Vargas, the already mentioned major forums in which music was created and performed during the period of his presidential watch, the mass technological forms that helped shape modern Brazilian music, and the roles played by Afro-Brazilians in radio, recording and film. Black composers, musicians and performers collaborated with those singers and entertainers who became nationally successful, but in the 1920s and 30s none of them became a major musical star and so never figured in any position of prominence during the early days of the mass media. Social divisions saw to that, though again their relation to cultural development and change was never straightforward. We can see this through the two iconic figures of Brazilian popular music: Francisco Alves and Carmen Miranda.
The career of Alves, the radio pioneer of samba, had consequences in two directions: his collaborations with black and mestiço composers and musicians helped popularize black musical culture, while his singing partnership with Mário Reis helped gentrify emergent national tastes. Miranda similarly attained a position of national pre-eminence as a popular music star. Along with other white female performers, she benefited disproportionately from black popular musicians and composers, yet also helped to open up the dialogue with Afro-Brazilian musical tradition, and drew overtly on Africanisms in her performances. Davis uses both performers as the center-points around which to base further discussion of the interconnections of “race,” class and gender. Carmen Miranda’s move abroad made her a popular music ambassador for Brazil, and Davis follows up his chapter based on Miranda and her sister, Aurora, by focusing on the early globalization of Brazilian popular music, from the 1930s to the 1950s. This further promoted the Afro-Brazilian roots of the music, along with North American notions of Latinidad, which in turn were built on popular conceptions of blackness.
Davis has written an interesting and worthwhile study of the modern development of Brazilian music. It is generally well researched and shows a close acquaintance with relevant primary and secondary sources, though it is peculiar that Peter Fryer’s recent book on African musical heritage in Brazil is not even mentioned. While the book makes reference to a number of important sources in music studies and cultural history, it falls short in establishing its relevance to broader fields, theories, and debates. There are certain other weaknesses as well, such as a failure to conceptualize what is meant by “mask,” but these are outweighed by the book’s main strengths: its attention to detail within a finite historical focus, its clarity and accessibility, and its intellectual grasp of what was involved in black/white asymmetries as these were manifest in musical production during the Vargas period.
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[Review length: 913 words • Review posted on September 15, 2009]