In this welcome addition to the historical literature on both popular culture and African diaspora performance in Latin America's largest nation, Darién 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 mestiço 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 Getúlio 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 ‘mestiço’ worlds in which they participated as urban artists to the general population of Brazil.
Davis' focus on individual, exceptional artists vis-à-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.
