Brazilian Racial Politics

With one of the highest concentrations of black people in the Americas and a thriving Afro-diasporic culture, the city of Salvador in Bahia has earned the reputation of being Brazil's "African Rome." As Fryer (2000), Henry (2008), Pinho (2010) and others have demonstrated, for over a century, Bahian musicians have sonically and discursively asserted this image through a range of carnival, folk, and Afro-religious musical genres. This presentation, for the first time, documents an intensified expression of this phenomenon where musicians deploy symphonic sounds, Christian songs, and the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion to portray Bahia as being more African than Africa (i.e., having preserved a purported African essence more purely than in the African continent itself). As Pinho (2010) and I (Diaz 2014) have shown, in Bahia this essence often aligns with essentialist views of Africa: being predominantly rhythmic, percussive, spiritual, embodied, and spontaneous. To this end, I conducted an in-depth ethnographic study of a collaboration between the Orquestra Afrosinfônica (a Bahian symphony orchestra taking inspiration from Candomblé music) and Angolan gospel singer Dodô Miranda, who visited Bahia in 2012 invited by Bahian black activists. For the occasion, the orchestra's director arranged Angolan Christian song "Nabeleli Yo" to be performed by his orchestra and Miranda. My analysis of the stylistic features and performance practices of this piece, in conjunction with data collected ethnographically (interviews with musicians and audiences, participant observation, and field recordings), press reports, concert reviews, and online videos, demonstrate how the musicians' and audiences' varied associations to Candomblé, Evangelicalism, and symphonic music contribute to the construction of Bahia's hyperreal Africanness. Of particular importance is the composer's view of Candomblé and African traditional religions as embodiments of an African essence and of Evangelicalism (particularly, neo-Pentecostalism) as their nemesis. This religious battle, mirroring broader debates in Brazil and Angola about African authenticity and religious intolerance, is played out in a symphonic soundscape that, I argue, raises the perceived value of African and Afro-Brazilian music in the eyes and ears of Bahian people.

The term samba, originally used to describe generic musical gatherings of enslaved and freed Black Brazilians during the nineteenth century, became associated with a specific commercial genre of popular music in the 1930s. Samba, the genre, became one of the essential symbols of national identity and was celebrated for its ability to represent the fraternity between white and Black Brazilians. Historians have documented the constant musical exchanges between Rio de Janeiro's white and Black communities, as well as the development of non-segregated neighborhoods where self-manumitted Africans and poor European immigrants lived in shared spaces. Musical styles that later became associated with samba were shaped in such spaces, and white and Black musicians often performed together in events or ensembles. Yet, Rio de Janeiro's periodicals shows that audiences continued to perceive distinct forms of the genre based on race. Drawing from archival research that includes dozens of periodicals from Rio de Janeiro and commercial recordings of music from 1900-1930, this paper examines how audiences and musicians in the city reinforced or challenged racialized notions of sound and music. I identify practices of white musicians, critics, and audiences that narrowly defined samba as a strategy aimed at racializing music and its black practitioners. The work of whiteness was characterized by discourses and practices that reinforced notions of white superiority, not only by rejecting specific aural elements that were perceived as black, but also appropriating those elements while attributing its "improved" character to white musicians. Black musicians, on the other hand, made constant artistic interventions that asserted samba's historical connections to Black aesthetics. These interventions did not result in an essentialized expression of blackness. Rather, Black music constantly defied models, and maintaining a commitment to improvisatory practices, allowed Black musicians and communities to explore the many expressions of their lived experiences. This paper builds on Nina Eidsheim's concept of the Race of Sound to argue that "race-ing" sound as "black" is a historically contingent act, that can be used either as a strategy to maintain racial hierarchies, or as a way to reinforce connections with African diasporic practices. 

Ever since Menotti del Picchia described Heitor Villa-Lobos as "um índio de casaca" (literally: an Indian in a tuxedo) in 1927, this characterization of the composer has gone unchallenged. It has framed in fact discussions of his life and works in films, documentaries, dance events, and scholarly essays (Manchete Video 1980, Schic 1987, Wiese 2009). As is well-known, Villa-lobos adopted this identification and profited from it in the 1920s while living in Paris, shocking audiences with the exoticism of his Nonetto and Choros No.10. This latter was received not only as an example of "brutality" in music, but also as an embodiment of his exotic musical identity. Villa-Lobos went as far as appropriating the experiences of Hans Staden, using the history of a captured sixteenth-century German explorer who survived the threat of cannibalism to be propagated it as his own (Mariz 1989, Appleby 2002).


My recent discovery of previously unexamined archival materials at the Villa-Lobos Museum complicates Behague's assertion that "the extent of indianism in [Villa-Lobos's] works has been largely overstated … he probably sensed the inappropriateness of Indian music as a potential expression of national music, since it remained until recently outside the mainstream of Brazilian music." Evidence illustrates that Villa-Lobos's initially appropriated indigenous music and images as exotic and othering features in his music from an early age. After the Estado Novo (1937-1946), however, his appropriation of indigenous music and image adopts a more political tone. He used early typological studies, as well as historical and anthropological accounts of contact to justify both his nationalism and the formation of the Brazilian nation. In doing so, he composed massive works such as O descobrimento do Brasil (1937), Symphony No. 10 (1952-54) and music for the film Green Mansions (1958) that glorify the imagined other, while reinforcing the policy of forced assimilation.