Lisa Shaw

Afro-Brazilian popular culture in Paris in 1922: Transatlantic dialogues and the racialized performance of Brazilian national identity

Abstract This article interrogates the presence of Afro-Brazilian popular culture in Paris in 1922 in the context of bi-directional transatlantic currents between performance spaces in the French capital and in the city of Rio de Janeiro during this era. It focuses on a group of predominantly Afro-Brazilian musicians, the Oito Batutas, who performed in Paris between February and August 1922. This article highlights how transatlantic dialogues informed the performance of Brazilian “race” in Paris and Brazil in the 1920s. Via an examination of the impact that the Parisian sojourn and the cultural interactions it led to had on the Oito Batutas, both in terms of their musical repertoire and their visual style, it situates their self-representation in Paris within dominant discourses of the era surrounding black US musicians and the African continent. Taking as its point of departure Hermano Viannas acknowledgement of the varied agents associated with sambas consecration as “national” music, the wider ambition of this article is to bring to light the central role played in this process by transatlantic currents. It argues that it was only thanks to dialogues with “black” Paris that Afro-Brazilian cultural forms, like the samba, were accepted by the Brazilian elite as quintessential elements of a homogenizing “national” culture in the 1930s. This article thus seeks to broaden our understanding of how an “Atlantic” perspective, and more specifically a focus on the Paris-Rio axis, can explain and nuance the shifts in racial self-definition that took place in Brazil in the 1920s, paving the way for sambas canonization as “national” rhythm during the regime of President Getúlio Vargas (between 1930 and 1945).

The teatro de revista in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s: Transnational Dialogues and Popular Cosmopolitanism

Este artigo examina o teatro de revista carioca dos anos 20 desde uma perspectiva transnacional, reconhecendo o Rio de Janeiro da época como um nexo sumamente importante dentro dos circuitos transatlânticos e inter-americanos de tradições performativas. Argumenta que as transformações testemunhadas quanto ao formato e às convenções do teatro de revista logo após a Segunda Guerra Mundial foram ocasionados pelo movimento de pessoas e ideias possibilitado pelo fim do conflito. A tese central é que o teatro de revista dos anos 20 se inspirou no cosmopolitanismo popular adquirido pelos seus criadores através de tais viagens e contatos com outros membros de uma comunidade transnacional imaginada.

The celebritisation of Carmen Miranda in New York, 1939–41

This article considers the process of celebritisation that Carmen Miranda rapidly underwent after arriving in the United States for the first time in 1939. It focuses upon the period she spent in New York (1939–41), performing on Broadway, prior to her move to Hollywood, and examines how she negotiated her move from Brazil to North America via a conscious process of auto-exoticisation, knowingly appropriating the self-tropicalising agenda of the regime of Brazilian president, Getúlio Vargas (1930–45), as exemplified in the Brazilian Pavilion at the Worlds Fair in New York of 1939–40. It analyses her celebrity text by examining intertexts such as press releases, interviews and reviews published in newspapers and magazines, and interrogates the impact of her involvement in product endorsement, chiefly in the area of womens high-street fashion. It aims to show the extent of her agency in the construction of her celebrity text, focusing in particular upon how her ethnic identity shifted in the move from South to North America, and seeks to offer a historical, evolutionary perspective on the concept of the bicultural celebrity. It concludes that she can be seen as one of the earliest examples of the transnational star, not simply famous in more than one national context but actively employing her inter-hemispheric, no-mans-land position in order to carve out a niche for herself in the US imaginary.

The Transnational Journey of the Celluloid Baiana: Round-Trip Rio-LA

This chapter will consider how a form of regional dress favoured by Afro-Brazilian women from the city of Salvador in Brazil’s North East was adopted by both Brazilian film-makers and Hollywood in the 1930– 1960 period as a signifier of national and pan-Latin American identity, respectively. It will begin by tracing the cultural origins of the baiana costume and how it was first transformed for the screen in Brazil. It will then examine how Hollywood employed the stylized baiana costume of tutti-frutti turbans and frilly skirts, which would become Carmen Miranda’s cultural straightjacket. Miranda as the archetypal screen baiana came to personify Latin America in the context of President Roosevelt’s ‘Good Neighbour Policy’. Projected back to Brazil, Hollywood’s representation of Brazil/latino identity began to dialogue with Brazilian attempts at national self-definition. Finally, this chapter will turn its attention to the Brazilian film industry’s vernacular variant of the musical comedy, the low-budget chanchada, which re-worked the baiana persona, and just as Carmen Miranda had done in Hollywood, whitened her skin.

Vargas on Film: From the Newsreel to the chanchada

The screen image of Vargas and the state as depicted in both the official newsreels and the independently produced chanchadas, or popular musical comedies, that came to dominate Brazilian film production between 1930 and 1960 are examined in this chapter. The newsreels logically preached a pro-Vargas rhetoric of national integration, patriotism, and work ethic, as well as seeking to foster the cult of o pai dos pobres, the father of the poor, as the president came to be known. They were exhibited before both imported and domestically produced feature-length films, the latter most frequently examples of the irreverent, carnivalesque chanchada genre. The chanchadas hinged on ironic inversions of societal norms and hierarchies, and often blatantly made fun of the elite and its political representatives. Although both the newsreels and the chanchadas of the 1930–60 period have been studied independently,1 this chapter adopts a fresh, revisionist approach to both by analyzing them within the context of a shared viewing experience. I argue that the juxtaposition of newsreels and these musical comedies would have undermined the self-congratulatory propaganda of the former, and underscored the countercultural messages and mocking tone of the latter.