Mixed Race Studies

The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil

University of North Carolina Press
February 1999
168 pages
6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-4766-4

Hermano Vianna

Edited and translated by

John Charles Chasteen, Associate Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Samba is Brazil’s “national rhythm,” the foremost symbol of its culture and nationhood. To the outsider, samba and the famous pre-Lenten carnival of which it is the centerpiece seem to showcase the country’s African heritage. Within Brazil, however, samba symbolizes the racial and cultural mixture that, since the 1930s, most Brazilians have come to believe defines their unique national identity.

But how did Brazil become “the Kingdom of Samba” only a few decades after abolishing slavery in 1888? Typically, samba is represented as having changed spontaneously, mysteriously, from a “repressed” music of the marginal and impoverished to a national symbol cherished by all Brazilians. Here, however, Hermano Vianna shows that the nationalization of samba actually rested on a long history of relations between different social groups–poor and rich, weak and powerful–often working at cross-purposes to one another.

A fascinating exploration of the “invention of tradition,” The Mystery of Samba is an excellent introduction to Brazil’s ongoing conversation on race, popular culture, and national identity.

Table of Contents

• Translator’s Preface
• Author’s Preface to the U.S. Edition
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Encounter
• 2. The Mystery
• 3. Popular Music and the Brazilian Elite
• 4. The Unity of the Nation
• 5. Race Mixture
• 6. Gilberto Freyre
• 7. The Modern Samba
• 8. Samba of My Native Land
• 9. Nowhere at All
• 10. Conclusions
• Notes
• Index

Anglo-Indian Identity, Knowledge, and Power: Western Ballroom Music in Lucknow

The Drama Review
Volume 48, Number 4 (Winter 2004)
Pages 167-182
DOI: 10.1162/1054204042442053

Dr. Bradley Shope, Assistant Professor of Music
Texas A&M Universtity, Corpus Christi

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Anglo-Indians relished Western popular music. For this marginalized group, this music was a way of promoting respectability. And though the music mimicked styles from America and Europe, its celebration was distinctly local.

Beginning in the first half of the 20th century, Western ballroom and dance music began to make its way into Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, as well as other cities in North India. It was imported via gramophone disks, radio broadcasts, and sheet music coming from Europe and America. In the 1930s, an increasing number of dance halls, railway social institutes, auditoriums, and cafes were built to cater to a growing number of British and Americans in India, satisfying their nostalgia for the live performance of the foxtrot, the tango, the waltz, the rumba, big-band music, and Dixieland. Influenced by sound and broadcast technology, sheet music, instrument availability, the railway system, and convent schools teaching music, an appreciation for these styles of music was found in other communities. Especially involved were Portuguese Goans and Anglo-Indians, defined here as those of European and Indian descent who were born and raised in India. For these two groups, it served to assert their identities as distinct from other South Asians and highlighted that their taste for music reached beyond the geographical boundaries of India. Numerous types of media, institutions, and venues contributed to this vibrant Western music performance culture in Lucknow in the early 20th century. James Perry, an elderly Goan musician, and Mr. John Sebastian and Mr. Jonathan Taylor, two elderly Anglo-Indian ex-railway workers, were involved in its performance and appreciation. By drawing from multiple field interviews in North India conducted with these individuals between 1999 and 2001, and by describing the character of the performance culture, I will highlight the role of music in creating socioeconomic mobility and a distinct identity among Anglo-Indians in Lucknow, and address issues of power relations and colonialism with reference to the consumption of the music.

Just before and during World War II, Lucknow was considered a strategic military defense location because of the fear of bombing campaigns in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) by the Japanese military. A large portion of the Allied Eastern Command was moved inland and established in Lucknow to counter…

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Recasting Race after World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany

University Press of Colorado
2007
320
9 b&w photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-87081-869-1

Timothy L. Schroer, Associate Professor of History
University of West Georgia

Historian Timothy L. Schroer’s Recasting Race after World War II explores the renegotiation of race by Germans and African American GIs in post-World War II Germany. Schroer dissects the ways in which notions of blackness and whiteness became especially problematic in interactions between Germans and American soldiers serving as part of the victorious occupying army at the end of the war.

The segregation of U.S. Army forces fed a growing debate in America about whether a Jim Crow army could truly be a democratizing force in postwar Germany. Schroer follows the evolution of that debate and examines the ways in which postwar conditions necessitated reexamination of race relations. He reveals how anxiety about interracial relationships between African American men and German women united white American soldiers and the German populace. He also traces the importation and influence of African American jazz music in Germany, illuminating the subtle ways in which occupied Germany represented a crucible in which to recast the meaning of race in a post-Holocaust world.

Recasting Race after World War II will appeal to historians and scholars of American, African American, and German studies.

Bridgetower – Black Musicians and British Culture, 1807-2007

Gresham College
2007-07-02

Mike Phillips, Professor of Music
Gresham College

George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, the son of an Abyssinian slave, was hailed as a musical prodigy in the eighteenth century. Taught by Haydn, his appearance at the court in Windsor to play in front of George III led to his subsequent ‘adoption’ by the Prince Regent. Friends with Beethoven—Bridgetower was the original dedicatee of the Kreutzer Sonata and they gave the first performance together—his life offers a powerful symbolism for the creation and establishment of a black British community which has its roots in the 18th century importation and migration of slaves and ex-slaves.

Professor Mike Phillips is the librettist for the newly-commissioned opera, Bridgetower – A Fable of 1807, to be given its premier as a part of the City of London Festival on the 5th of July. He will be discussing the role of black musicians in British culture in the two hundred years since the Abolition of the Slave Trade act.

I must begin by making it clear that I am not an academic researcher or an expert on slavery or an expert on the culture and customs of the Caribbean or Africa, and I have not spent many years in the British Library digging up obscure facts about this topic.  So I am not going to get into arcane disputes about the precise number of black musicians who lived in Southwark or how often they did their laundry!  But I have read a considerable amount about the topic.  I am a novelist and a curator and I have written an exhausting number of words about the history of black people in Britain.  This is not a talk about urban rioting or reggae or calypso or gospel music or jazz, although these forms dominate the experience of recent years.  I am telling you this partly because I am going to end at the end of the 19th Century, because I only have an hour, and if I got on to the 20th Century, I would be here all night!  But in fact, because of the subject of the new opera Bridgetower, a Fable of 1807, and because in general this part of the City of London Festival has focused on the 18th Century and the early 19th Century, I will be dealing roughly with those years.

The other point is that, in general, we tend to talk about black people in Britain, or about the multiracial nature of the population, as if it was an exclusively 20th Century phenomenon.  We talk about the respective cultures as if they existed behind barriers, and we talk as if the colour of people’s skins defines their cultural prospects and abilities, a tendency which is an exact match for the strictures of 18th Century racial science, with its appalling attempts to categorise human beings in line with a preordained network of characteristics.

Even now, in this country, young black musicians still face a series of nudges in the direction of what everyone will describe as ‘their culture’, meaning steel bands and rapping.  Young black musicians who lean towards classical forms will be more or less guaranteed a difficult time—it would be easier if they wanted to do percussion.  Historically, that has meant that, by and large, black musicians in Europe have been written out of the narrative of the very landscape that they helped to shape, and we find ourselves obliged to rediscover figures like the Chevalier de Saint-George or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—people who were household names in their own time.

In that context, one of the most illuminating and reassuring aspects of looking at the lives of black cultural figures in Britain and Europe is that if you go back between the 16th Century and the 20th Century, you encounter black artists, poets, novelists and musicians who had no problems nor inhibitions in engaging in the cultural environment in which they found themselves.  In the process, they tended to affect the culture in which they lived in various specific ways.

I mentioned the 19th Century, but as far back as 1505 we have an African drummer working for James IV in Edinburgh, arranging a dance with dancers in black and white costumes for the Shrove Tuesday festivities.  Black musicians are repeatedly mentioned in pageants, fairs and at least one tournament from the 16th Century onwards.

If you come to the 18th Century, they’re relatively well-known—black musicians like Cato, who ended up as a head gamekeeper to the Prince of Wales around about 1740, and who was reputed to blow the best French horn and trumpet in his time.  In the 18th Century, Londoners were already dancing in what were called black hops, where 12 pence would get you admission…

…But I will go on to talk about George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower.  Bridgetower is an interesting person, not simply because he was born in the Esterhazy household; not simply because he was black; not because he was a child protégé, but all those things together, at the time when he arrived in Britain and during his career, had a particular kind of significance…

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The 2012 Lorraine W. Frank Lecture & Humanities Awards: Featuring Rita Dove

Arizona Humanities Council
Tempe Mission Palms
60E. 5th Street
Tempe, Arizona 85281
2012-04-12

Free & Open to the Public

In celebration of National Poetry Month, the Arizona Humanities Council is proud to present Rita Dove as the keynote speaker for the 2012 Lorraine W. Frank Lecture. Rita Dove will share poems from her most recent book, Sonata Mulattica, about a young mulatto violinist’s encounters with Beethoven.

Discussing the research that went into the book, she will reveal how she came to be uniquely suited to the task of rescuing the mixed race violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower from the shadows of history, and how history comes alive through art.

Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. Among her many honors are the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 2006 Common Wealth Award. In 1996, President Bill Clinton bestowed upon her the National Humanities Medal. From 1981 to 1989, Rita Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University. She currently is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA.

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Half-Blood Blues

Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
2011-09-03
304 pages
8.5 X 5.5 X 0.9 in
Cloth ISBN:9780887627415
Paperback ISBN: ISBN: 9781250012708

Esi Edugyan

• Winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Paris, 1940.  A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again.  He is twenty years old.  He is a German citizen.  And he is black.

Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero’s fate.  From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of  Paris—where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance—Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance.

Half-Blood Blues, the second novel by an exceptionally talented young writer, is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir

Serpent’s Tail
2011-07-14
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781846687907

Pauline Black

Powerful autobiography from the front woman of influential ska band, The Selecter

Lead singer for platinum-selling 2-tone band The Selecter, Pauline Black has been in the music business for over thirty years. The only woman in a movement dominated by men, she was very much the Queen of British Ska. She saw The Specials, Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and all the other top bands of that generation at their very best… and worst. Black was born in 1953 of Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents. Adopted by a white, working class family in Romford in the fifties, Pauline was always made to feel different, both by the local community and members of her extended family, who saw her at best as a curiosity, at worst as an embarrassing inconvenience. Weaving her rise to fame and recollections of the 2-tone phenomenon with her moving search for her birth parents, Black By Design is a funny and enlightening memoir of music and roots.

Born in Romford, Pauline Black is a singer and actress who gained fame as the lead singer of seminal 2-tone band The Selecter. After the band split in 1982, Black developed an acting career in television and theatre, appearing in dramas such as The Vice, The Bill, Hearts and Minds and 2000 Acres of Sky. She won the 1991 Time Out award for Best Actress, for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the play All or Nothing At All.

Half-Caste Woman

Noël Coward
1932

Laugh a bit, drink a bit, love a bit more.
You can supply our needs.
Think a bit, sink a bit, what’s it all for.
That’s your Eurasian creed.

Sailors with sentimental hearts, who love and sail away.
When the dawn is gray, look at you… and say.

Half-caste woman, living a life apart.
Where did your story begin?
Half-caste-woman, have you a secret heart
Waiting for someone to win?

Were you born of some queer magic
In your shimmering gown?
Is there something strange and tragic
Deep, deep down?

Half-caste woman, what are your slanting eyes
Waiting and hoping to see?
Scanning the far horizon
Wondering what the end will be.

Down along the river
The sky is a quiver
And dawn is beginning to break.

Hear the sirens wailing
Some big ship is sailing.
I’m loosing my dreams in it’s wake.

Why should I remember the things that are past
Moments so softly gone.
Why worry for the Lord knows
Live goes on.

Go to bed in daylight.
Try to sleep in vain.
Get up in the evening.
Work begins again.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief
Questioning the same refrain.

Half-caste woman, living a life apart.
Where did your story begin?
Half-caste woman, have you a secret heart
Waiting for someone to win?

Were you born of some queer magic
In your shimmering gown?
Is there something strange and tragic
Deep, deep down?

Half-caste woman, what are your slanting eyes
Waiting and hoping to see?
Scanning the far horizon
Wondering what the end will be.

Monsieur de Saint-George “The American”

Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
February 2005
352 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-312-31028-8, ISBN10: 0-312-31028-5

Alain Guédé

Translated by Gilda M. Roberts

His life is the stuff of legend: born in 1739 of a slave mother and a French noble father, he became the finest swordsman of his age, an insider at the court of The Sun King, and, most of all, an accomplished musician who came to be known as the “Black Mozart.”

His name is Joseph Bologne, though he was better known as Monsieur de Saint-George, and, because of his origins, “the American.” Alain Guédé recreates the story of this memorable individual, whose musical compositions are at long last being rediscovered and whose story will never again be forgotten.

Performative Aspects of Brazilian Music as a Means of Creating Identity in Rio de Janeiro

Universität Wien
October 2008
215 pages

Adriana Ribeiro-Mayer

In Rio de Janeiro’s multi-ethnic society with its colonial and slave-based past creating a common identity is a major problem. Standard Portuguese, as opposed to spoken “Brazilian”, is remote to many Brazilians. Therefore, music and dance, the Carnival events and Baile Funk, substitute for language-based common performances. They have become extraordinarily big events based on a “sincretized” rhythm, on the body and mostly Afro-Brazilian body movements.

With the help of “participant observation” and “ero-epic conversation” I tried to participate as closely as possible in numerous events and describe them in performance protocols. These I analyzed according to the concepts of performance theory.

Richard Schechner’s emphasis on deep structures (such as the escola rehearsals) and rules; Victor Turners shift from play to ritual; Nicholas Cook’s “process-“ rather than “product-character” of performances and the musical work, e.g. a samba-enredo, as giving performers something to perform; Erika Fischer-Lichte’s emphasis on co-presence, interaction and feed-back as well as the body and its expressions; and finally Johan Huizinga’s prediction of a shift in social play, trough rules, competition and the audience to more seriousness. All these concepts of performance theory both proved useful tools, and at the same time were put to an interesting re-evaluation when applied to these mostly Afro-Brazilian events.

Rio’s Carnival’s counter-world has to fulfill so important and different needs in a divided society that it split to be able to present opportunities for spontaneous play of the individual, e.g. in the street blocos and the Intendente Magalhães parades, and to present a choreographed show of unity and common identity, in the main sambodrome parades. Baile Funk has so far catered for the first needs, i.e. entertainment and individual expression, as it has not involved all layers of carioca society through city-wide events.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Rio de Janeiro Society and the African Influence
  • 2.1 The African Population in Brazil
  • 2.2 The African Population in Rio de Janeiro
  • 2.3 Abolition of Slavery
  • 2.4 African Cultural Heritage
• 3. Identity in a mixed Society
  • 3.1 The Situation of Afro-Brazilians today
  • 3.2 Affirmative Action? Quotas for “Black” Students
• 4. Concepts of Performance
• 5. The Method of “Participant Observation” and “Ero-Epic Conversation”
  • 5.1 Questions of Presentation
  • 5.2 Research Trips
• 6. Hypothesis
• 7. Carnival and Samba in Rio
  • 7.1 Origins of Samba and Carnival in Rio
    • 7.1.1 Samba
    • 7.1.2 Carnival
  • 7.2 The Escolas de samba
    • 7.2.1 Origins and Evolution of the Escolas de Samba
    • 7.2.2 The Special Group Escolas de Samba
    • 7.2.3 Case study “Madureira”
    • 7.2.3.1 Escolas de Samba from Madureira
    • 7.2.4 Preparation of the Parades
    • 7.2.4.1 Cidade do Samba – Samba City
    • 7.2.5 The Sambodrome
    • 7.2.6 The Competition “The Best Escola de Samba of the Year”
  • 7.3 Performative Aspects of Samba and the Escolas’ Parades
    • 7.3.1 Dramaturgy of the Parades
    • 7.3.1.1 Example: Sequence of the 2008 Portela parade
    • 7.3.1.2 Performance Protocol of the Escolas’ parade
      • 7.3.1.2.1 Preparation Events
      • 7.3.1.2.2 Rehearsals in the Quadras
      • 7.3.1.2.3 Street Rehearsals
      • 7.3.1.2.4 Portela Rehearsal in the Sambodrome
      • 7.3.1.2.5 Group A parade – Formation and Dissolution
  • 7.4 Social and Economic Aspects of the Escolas de Samba for Rio
• 8. Funk Carioca
  • 8.1 Origins
  • 8.2 Funk Carioca music
    • 8.2.1 Charme
    • 8.2.2 Proibidão
    • 8.2.3 Erotic funk
  • 8.3 Performative Aspects of Baile Funk
    • 8.3.1 The Dramaturgy of Baile Funk
    • 8.3.2 Performance Protocol Baile Funk
      • 8.3.2.1 Baile Funk in a Suburb
      • 8.3.2.2 Baile Funk in Rio downtown
  • 8.4 The Rio Hip Hop Movement
  • 8.5 Baile Funk vs. Samba Parades and Rehearsals
  • 8.6 The Social and Economic Aspects of Baile Funk
• 9. Interpretation
  • 9.1 Performance Theory applied to Samba and Funk Performances
    • 9.1.1 The Parade of Império Serrano in the Sambodrome
    • 9.1.2 Rehearsals
    • 9.1.3 Traditional parades on Intendente Magalhaes Avenue
    • 9.1.4 Baile Funk
  • 9.2 Samba and Funk’s Contribution to Rio’s Cultural Identity
  • 9.3 Examples of Samba-Enredo and Funk Carioca Lyrics
    • 9.3.1 “Bum, Bum, Paticumbum” – Samba-enredo
    • 9.3.2 “Guerreiros da Paz” – Funk Carioca
• 10. Conclusions
• 11. Zusammenfassung
• 12. Resumo
• 13. Bibliography
• 14. Glossary
• 15. Abstract in English
• 16. Abstract auf Deutsch
• Appendix

Read the entire dissertation here.