White Face, Black Mask: Africaneity and the Early Social History of Popular

Music in Brazil

In this welcome addition to the historical literature on both popular culture and African diaspora performance in Latin America's largest nation,
Darin Davis delves into Brazilian popular music from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. Drawing primarily on archival recordings of interviews with
musicians, performing artists' memoirs, published song lyrics and mass media reports from the era, Davis traces how blackness came to take
its position of honour in Brazilian popular music. The author explicitly avoids the overly simplistic story so often told, which limits its scope to
the white musicians', industry executives' and impresarios' co-optation and exploitation of Brazil's Afro-descended artists. Although set against
a backdrop of indisputable racial inequality, African influences in Brazilian music were the result of a wide variety of types of relationships that
included employee-employer, friend, mentor, neighbour and colleague. These relationships created a characteristically mestio form of music,
which Brazilians then exported to an enthusiastic public throughout the Western world.
This book's analysis turns on a series of paradoxes at the heart of modern Brazilian society and culture. The first of these paradoxes is that
although commonly considered primitive, black music in Brazil became a crucial element in a cherished national, modern popular musical
tradition in the making. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, African-derived 'rhythms, idioms, symbols and styles' became integral
parts of mainstream commercial music in Brazil. Urban Brazilian society was racially mixed and in many real ways multicultural, and there
existed no clearly defined 'black communities' or 'white communities'. Yet, at the same time, the keepers of power were almost exclusively
white; black Brazilians both on and off stage held a decidedly unequal position in society.
Davis observes another, related paradox: African culture penetrated deeply into Brazil's national culture by way of a black mask worn by
European-descended Brazilians. White musicians assumed black stage personalities, used black idioms in their lyrics and sang about subjects
associated with Brazil's non-white majority. Davis explains, 'White or at least nonblack performers, literally and figuratively, utilized black masks
as a way to demonstrate that they were authentically Brazilian' (p. xvii). The author sensitively portrays white performers' relationship with
black/African culture, as he convincingly insists that white performers' habit of claiming these African customs as their own was far more than a
simple act of poaching.
The paradox of the 'white face' behind a 'black mask' in the book's title alludes to Black Skin, White Masks, the great anti-colonial and race
theorist Frantz Fanon's classic 1952 text. Davis' title reverses the formula of alienation that Fanon famously describes; in Davis' analysis of
Brazil, the masks are black, not white. The concept of a mask provides a useful way of thinking about cultural workers' conscious adoption of
personalities both on and off the stage; by colouring the mask as black or white, as Fanon did before him, Davis successfully evokes the
instability of racial and cultural identities. Yet, surprisingly, Davis avoids any discussion of Fanon's thinking and the context in which he wrote,
with the exception of a passing reference at the book's end. While a lengthy examination of post-colonial theory might have narrowed his
audience, even a brief exploration of Fanon's work in relation to his own would have enriched Davis' analysis and made more direct
connections to the scholarly literature on both the post-colonial condition and the Black Atlantic, two fields which have only recently started to
reach into Brazil.
Rather than describing performers who cynically put on and remove an artificial identity, Davis' account of African influences on Brazilian
popular music focuses on the performer's conversation with her or his cultural milieu. Davis employs the term 'Africaneity' synonymously with
blackness to describe Afro-Brazilian 'cultural practices, ideas, or sensitivities' (p. ix). This term communicates one of book's guiding premises:
'Africaneity' refers to cultural influence, not 'race'. This book emphatically valorises and establishes African diaspora culture as part of a cultural
exchange that unfolded in a specific place and time. In reconstructing the locales where this exchange happened, Davis provides a fascinating
panorama of the Rio-based entertainment industry of the age and the city's famous nightlife. Rio's radio auditoriums, cinemas, casinos and
other performance spaces attracted wide audiences partly because in these venues people could temporarily 'appear' middle-class, whatever
their actual socio-economic status.
Opportunities to produce and share popular culture before a mass audience mushroomed during the era from 1930 to 1954, the period
dominated by Getlio Vargas' two presidencies (1930-44 and 1950-4) and characterised by state sponsorship of mass/popular culture. Joining
the large literature on the politics of culture at the height of twentieth-century Latin American populism, Davis links the chronology of popular
music history to the era's political history. Vargas' populist presidency directly influenced the nature of popular culture, helping to spawn a
'Golden Age' in radio broadcasting.
The main focus of this book is not the Vargas era itself, or even the proliferating venues in which Brazilians shared popular culture. Instead, the
author is most interested in the performing artists themselves. Davis' narrative really hits its stride when it turns its attention to a carefully
selected group of musicians. At the heart of this book is a sort of collective biography of the 'pioneers' of Brazilian popular music on the eve of
its professionalisation. The book contains short sketches of the career trajectories of and engaging anecdotes about dozens of individual

musicians, but its crucial fourth and fifth chapters each dwell on extended analyses of the lives of two exceptionally important performers: one
man (Francisco Alves and his contemporaries) and one woman (Carmen Miranda, her sister Aurora, and their entourage). Davis argues that
'the idols of the radio played a critical role in convincing the elite of the value of popular music, and by extension the importance of black
popular culture to national culture' (p. 55). He depicts the era's performing artists as active participants in both their own lives and the formation
of a national Brazilian culture, and as ambassadors from the 'bohemian' and 'mestio' worlds in which they participated as urban artists to the
general population of Brazil.
Davis' focus on individual, exceptional artists vis--vis the markets in which they operated permits the author to probe both the literal and the
figurative 'ownership' of culture. In the book's introduction, Davis asks, 'Who owns and defines Blackness in Brazil?' (p. xix). The white males
who owned the spaces where people joined the 'temporary middle class' effectively became the proprietors of culture. The theme of ownership
reappears in Davis' several brief but interesting passages about the development of intellectual property law and the composers' union's fight
for its members to receive royalties. The author seems to imply that more, rather than less, intellectual property ownership would have rectified
the maldistribution of the fruits of Brazilians' cultural labour. Arguably, a more critical approach to what many today call the 'grab' to claim
proprietary rights over cultural expression might have provided precious insight into social inequality in Latin America. Nonetheless, the
seriously understudied phenomenon of the propertisation of culture is a key element of the story that Davis reconstructs.
Contemporary journalists writing about music have a favourite quotation - of uncertain provenance - that communicates their fascination with
the medium of music alongside their frustration with the inherent difficulty of evoking it with the printed word: 'Writing about music is like
dancing about architecture'. If, as this much-cited quotation avers, writing about music entails a great, almost foolhardy leap of translation
across disparate genres of expression, doing so while simultaneously trying to translate this music into social history before a foreign audience
presents an even more daunting challenge. In considering this book's most important contributions, one must pause to appreciate the great
difficulty of trying to explicate popular, 'street' culture to an audience removed by space and time. Untranslatable terms abound - not just those
related to issues of blackness, whiteness and race, but also colloquialisms whose precise meaning has been all but lost in time. As Davis is
keenly aware, then and now, popular music provides a wonderful medium for slang: both for circulating it among the music's contemporary
audience, and for later generations to read the history of popular culture through it. Davis devotes relatively little attention to individual song
lyrics and only limitedly does his analysis include close readings of either word or gesture. Yet he does pay careful attention to slang and
colloquialisms - not as individual expressions, but rather as a meta-language of cultural understanding between performer and audience. This
book shows the potential for historians to dig through the annals of popular music history and to utilise the records that musical performances
and careers have left behind as artefacts of much more than the history of music itself.
White Face, Black Mask provides compelling food for thought for Latin Americanist scholars who wish to deepen their understanding of urban
public life, Afro-descendent culture, its hybridisation, and the prehistory of its wide-scale international distribution. To Davis' credit, though, his
book seeks a wider audience than this tiny handful of specialists. Students and non-specialists in Latin American history and culture will find a
lucid explanation of many of the concepts that both attract the most interest and invite the greatest degree of misconception. As Brazilian
culture continues on its trajectory toward global prominence, this text will find an interested readership whom it will educate in the paradoxes
that propelled the culture along this trajectory in the first place.

Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil

The central focus of Hertzman's scholarly work is the black musical pioneers of the early twentieth century in Rio de Janeiro, a group that, as
he deftly illustrates, 'defies easy categorization' (3). This analysis of Rio's inter-war black communities, what the author terms a '"missing
middle" sandwiched between periods and places that have drawn greater scholarly attention' (6) is long overdue. The issue of intellectual
property in relation to popular music lies at the core of the book. At times the detailed statistical analysis can be a little dry, especially in the
final chapters when the author examines the inner workings and relative efficacy of authors' rights associations. The remaining chapters are,
however, enlightening and a fascinating read.
In Chapter 1 Hertzman outlines the social and economic contexts of nineteenth-century black musicians in what was Brazil's capital city chiefly enslaved income-generators for their owners - who ranged from court entertainers to barber-musicians. Rooted in exhaustive archival
research, Chapter 2 investigates police records relating to so-called vagrancy cases in order to challenge the widely held notion that black
popular musicians, especially self-styled malandro sambistas, were persecuted for their craft. Rather, the author argues, they were controlled
through economic means, being poorly protected by copyright mechanisms. The author then turns his attention, in chapters 3 and 4,
respectively, to the development of intellectual property law in relation to music in Brazil, and to the rise and success of the Oito Batutas and
one of this band's most important members, Donga, officially credited as the creator of 'Pelo Telefone', often mistakenly referred to as the first

composition to be generically categorized as a samba. The polemical issue of this song's authorship is discussed in the wider context of the
'ownership' of popular musical production in the era in question.
Chapter 5 looks at how Rio's Afro- Brazilian musicians engaged with journalists to further their careers and those of their peers, and Chapter 6
considers how such careers were moulded and often impeded by projects to define national identity and the place of race and music within it.
Chapter 7 focuses on the Society of Brazilian Theatre Authors (SBAT), Brazil's first authors' rights association, founded coincidentally in 1917.
In Chapter 8 the author then discusses the Unio Brasileira de Compositores (UBC; the Brazilian Union of Composers), Brazil's first and most
powerful musician-centred authors' rights organization. Both institutions are shown to be very hierarchical and defined by the 'narrow, racialized
definitions of authorship, ownership and creative genius that marked larger discussions and debates' (201). Finally, Chapter 9 provides a brief
overview of the post-golden age era, a period of reinvention for the likes of Donga and several other influential black musicians, who embraced
new identities in order to gain national attention in the 1960s and 1970s, the author argues.
This book makes some very important points that contribute to a more nuanced understanding of popular musical production in Rio in the first
decades of the twentieth century, and more broadly to our understanding of the social and racial contexts. Hertzman shows, for example, how,
contrary to popular opinion, most of the Afro-Brazilian musicians discussed occupied an economic middle ground, somewhere between the
impoverished underclass and the middle class. Overall, this study makes two fundamental contributions to existing scholarship: first, it
challenges what Hertzman terms the 'punishment paradigm'; and second, it prompts a re-evaluation of the role of certain female figures in
samba's creation and consecration. The author argues that the police did not use anti-vagrancy legislation to target musicians, using extensive
archival material to support his case. As he points out, however, informal interactions between the police and musicians could easily have gone
undocumented, and he refers to ample oral evidence that ad hoc repression did in fact occur.
The author contends that the 'punishment paradigm' that took shape in the golden age of the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s became widely
accepted in the 1960s and 1970s largely as a consequence of a series of interviews with ageing sambistas conducted by the Museum of
Image and Sound (MIS) in Rio. Afro-Brazilian musicians could recount cases of police harassment as a badge of authenticity, he argues, 'an
indication that an artist had paid his dues and assurance that his music was soulful because it had been shaped by pain and oppression' (64).
Hertzman's study is essential reading for scholars of Brazilian popular music, as well as social and cultural historians who work on the city of
Rio de Janeiro and Brazil more broadly. It is a most welcome addition to the existing bibliography in English on Brazilian popular culture.