THE POST–WORLD WAR II period in Brazil was a time of relative democratization after the demise in 1945 of Vargas’s authoritarian New State first installed in 1937. Internationally, the defeat of Nazism led to the global discrediting of fascist racism. After 1945, the chauvinistic right-wing movement called “Integralism” was on the defensive, and democratic, union, and black movements were on the upswing. At the same time, Brazilian left intellectuals expressed support for the decolonization of much of Asia and Africa, including in the region that most directly concerned Brazil: the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé, which ultimately achieved independence relatively late, in the 1970s. Many left Brazilian intellectuals sympathized with Indian independence in 1947, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and Algerian independence in 1962. At the same time, left intellectuals began to analyze Brazil’s status as a geopolitically “neocolonized,” “dependent,” and “peripheral” country.
The Brazilian left’s strongly nationalist political project was also marked by “the rejection of European and U.S. economic liberalism and cultural imperialism … and the construction of state-regulated capitalism and an indigenous national culture with a popular foundation.”1 In this conjuncture, Brazilian intellectuals focused on colonial aspects of the Brazilian situation. Dependency theory, to which Brazilian intellectuals were major contributors, was a product of this colonial awareness, which went in hand in hand with a critique of U.S. political and economic hegemony. While left sociologists in the United States attacked the dominant “sociology of celebration,” Marxist social scientists such as Florestan Fernandes and Octávio Ianni dismantled its rough equivalent in Brazil, what might be called the Freyrean “anthropology of celebration.” The challenge for Brazilian intellectuals of all colors was to move away not only from academic dependency on the dominant codes and lexicon of U.S. and European social sciences but also from the conservative Freyrean tradition.
At the same time, postwar Brazil witnessed a growing black consciousness movement. Building on earlier black journals such as Menelik and A Voz Negra in the 1920s, Afro-Brazilian actor/poet/dramatist/plastic artist/activist Abdias do Nascimento founded Quilombo, which published from December 1948 through July 1950. The journal came in the wake of Nascimento’s founding of the Black Experimental Theatre (BET; 1944–1968), an institution whose goal was to train black actors and fight against discrimination. Outraged by a Lima, Peru, performance of O’Neill’s Emperor Jones starring a white actor in blackface, Nascimento resolved to valorize actors of color. In a summary of the group’s goals, he wrote,
Both on a social and artistic level, the Black Experimental Theatre strives to restore, valorize, and exalt the contribution of Africans to the Brazilian formation, unmasking the ideology of whiteness which created a situation such that, as Sartre puts it, “As soon as he opens his mouth, the negro accuses himself, unless he tries to overthrow the hierarchy represented by the European colonizer and his civilizing process.”2
The goals of the BET were (1) to integrate blacks into Brazilian society, (2) to criticize the ideology of whitening promoted by the dominant social sciences, (3) to valorize the African contribution to Brazilian culture, and (4) to promote the theater as a privileged medium for these ideas. The BET also organized the National Black Conference (1949) and the First Congress for Black Brazilians (1950). The BET highlighted the theatrical aspects of African and Afro-diasporic culture, exemplified by the continent’s religious feasts, its danced liturgies, and the primordial role of performance. No more “folkloric” than Christianity, African religions deployed song and dance to “capture the divine and configure the gods, humanizing them and dialoguing with them in mystic trance.”3
Quilombo from its first issue took an uncompromising stance on racism: “Only someone characterized by a perfectly obtuse naivete or by cynical bad faith,” Nascimento wrote in the inaugural editorial, “could deny the existence of racial prejudice in Brazil.”4 The leading figures in Quilombo—Guerreiro Ramos and Nascimento—fused class-conscious Marxism with pan-Africanism. But as Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Larkin Nascimento note in their preface to the facsimile version of the journal, Quilombo was riven by tensions between the more radical black-activist insiders and the largely white guest-essayist outsiders (including Gilberto Freyre), some of whom clung to the nostrums of “racial democracy.” In the overture editorial, Nascimento anatomized the recombinant varieties of racism in the Black Atlantic. Racism can take the form, Nascimento wrote, of “depriving indigenous blacks of political and economic power over their own territory, as in South Africa, or of violently depriving them of their rights in a land which they helped build, as in the United States, or of cleverly depriving them of the psychological and mental means for acquiring the consciousness of their real condition despite formal equality, as in Brazil.”5
Quilombo published some of the most incisive black Brazilian thinkers on race (Guerreiro Ramos, Solano Trindade, and Nascimento himself), alongside progressive (white) French writers such as Roger Bastide and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as African Americans such as Ralph Bunche and George Schuyler, while also maintaining regular contact with Présence Africaine, the house organ of Négritude in France. Quilombo’s range of themes reflected this Afro-cosmopolitanism, with essays on such subjects as the relations between black Brazilian intellectuals and Présence Africaine and the achievements of African Americans such as Nobel Prize winner Ralph Bunche, opera singer Marian Anderson, and choreographer Katherine Dunham. Quilombo also published translations from French (Sartre’s “Orphée Noir” preface) and English (George Schuyler’s Pittsburgh Courier article comparing racism in the United States and Brazil).6
Abdias do Nascimento personifies the pan-Atlantic dimension of Afro-diasporic cosmopolitanism, evidenced by his in-the-flesh dialogue with such figures as Aimé Césaire, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bobby Seale, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and C. L. R. James. Exiled by the dictatorship, Nascimento taught at SUNY–Buffalo before returning to Brazil to create the United Black Movement against Racism and Racial Discrimination (in 1978) and the Institute for Afro-Brazilian Research and the Memorial Zumbi (in 1980). For Nascimento, “the construction of a true democracy necessarily passes through multiculturalism and the effective implantation of compensatory measures in order to make possible full citizenship for all the discriminated groups.”7 In 1992, year of the anti-Columbus quincentennial protests, Abdias and Elisa Larkin Nascimento contested the concept of a “Latin” America, which in their eyes “spreads only the domination of a white elite minority over the majority indigenous and African population, … resulting in a grotesque distortion of the demographic and sociocultural reality of the region.”8 As Nascimento’s career suggests, Afro-Brazilian intellectuals form an essential part of the larger “practice of diaspora” deftly anatomized by Brent Hayes Edwards. Indeed, Nascimento’s writings thread together a palimpsestic multiplicity of currents: Third World Marxism, pan-Africanism, problack Brazilian nationalism, West Indian Négritude, and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
The 1950s UNESCO studies of race constituted another key vector in the postwar shift as it took place in Brazil. UNESCO deputized an international team of scholars: Florestan Fernandes, Roger Bastide, and Oracy Nogueira were assigned to research racial relations in São Paulo; Thales de Azevedo and Charles Wagley were assigned to Bahia; and Darcy Ribeiro was to study the assimilation of indigenous people. In most cases, the research uncovered a subtle web of structural disadvantage and prejudice entrapping blacks and indigenous people. According to Peter Fry’s summary of the work of Marcos Chor Maio, the UNESCO studies produced three ideas that subsequently became academic “common sense”: (1) that understanding racial relations in Brazil also requires understanding class; (2) that racial taxonomies in Brazil are extremely complex; and (3) that, despite “racial democracy,” the strong correlation between poverty and color reflects a prejudice against those who are “darker.”9
Building on the pan-Africanist work of Nascimento and Quilombo, and on the Marxist-inflected work of the UNESCO-sponsored scholars, a black consciousness movement gained strength in the postwar period. Although the movement was partially derailed by the hostility of the dictatorship (1964–1984) to any manifestations of “subversive” Afro-Brazilian activism, the 1970s were nonetheless a time of increasing militancy. Inspired by a wide array of movements, from the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power movements to the independence movements in the Portuguese colonies in Africa and to the “Third Worldism” and “tricontinentalism” sweeping much of the world, Brazilian black activists created innumerable cultural organizations, culminating in 1978 in the founding of the MNU (Unified Negro Movement), itself a coalition of diverse groups such as São Paulo’s CECAN (Center for Black Art and Culture), Rio de Janeiro’s Institute for Research on Black Culture, and various Bahian Afro-cultural groups.10
In Bahia, the Afro-blocos Ilê Aiyê (founded in 1974) and Olodum (founded in 1979) organized blacks culturally and politically.11 Also in the 1970s, a wave of black pride began to spread through Rio and other cities. Sambista Candeia founded the Quilombo Samba School in 1975. Urban youth, especially in Rio, adopted African American symbols of black pride, such as coded handshakes and soul music, in a style dubbed bleque pau (a Portuguese pronunciation of “black power”). Shaping black Brazilian identity, soul and reggae inspired “black Rio” in Rio, “black samba” in São Paulo, and “black mineiro” in Minas Gerais. The ever more conservative Gilberto Freyre, who supported Portuguese colonial rule in Africa, denounced such movements as North American exports that would replace “happy and fraternal” sambas with a melancholy revolt.12
Many of these issues came up on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1988. For the first time, “the manifold forms of racial inequality against Afro-Brazilians became a principal theme in national debate.”13 A persistent leitmotif was the idea that “slavery has not really ended,” with Rio’s samba pageant protesting the “farce of abolition.”14 The champion samba school Vila Isabel, with its “Kizombo: Feast of the Race,” lauded Zumbi as the force behind abolition: “Zumbi’s the one / The strong shout of Palmares / Crossing land, and air and sea / Shaping abolition.” For many Brazilians, the quilombos symbolized the power of black resistance. May 13, the traditional commemoration date for abolition as granted by Princess Isabel, was replaced by November 20, celebrating the memory of Zumbi, as the “National Day of Black Consciousness.”
As suggested earlier, the seismic shift took a different form in Brazil than in France and the United States. Since Brazil was not an imperialist power, the struggle was not against Brazilian imperialism but against U.S. imperialism and the U.S.-supported dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1984. Although black activism existed, it did not take the form of massive marches to end segregation. Nonetheless, throughout this period, Brazilian scholars were producing progressive work on Portuguese colonialism, on U.S. imperialism, on Brazilian racism, and on Afro-Brazilian and indigenous culture. This work is much too vast to survey here, but a small sampling only of the work on race from the 1980s would include such texts as Nascimento’s Quilombismo in 1980; Lana Lage da Gama Lima’s Black Rebellion and Abolitionism in 1981; Lelia Gonzalez and Carlos Hasenbalg’s The Place of Blacks in 1982; Clovis Moura’s Brazil: The Roots of Black Protest and Solange Martins Couceiro de Lima’s Blacks on Television in São Paulo, both in 1983; Zila Bernd’s The Question of Negritude and Décio Freitas’s Palmares: The War of the Slaves, both in 1984; Oracy Nogueira’s Neither Black nor White in 1985; João José Reis’s Slave Rebellions in Brazil in 1986; Clovis Moura’s Quilombos, Resistance to Slavery in 1987; João José Reis’s edited volume Slavery and the Invention of Freedom and Clovis Moura’s Sociology of the Black Brazilian in 1988; Manoel de Almeida Cruz’s Alternatives for Combating Racism and Lilia Schwarcz’s Portrait in Black and White: Slaves and Citizens in São Paulo in the 19th Century, both in 1989.
It was against this longer backdrop of redemocratization, U.S. hegemony, the emergence of the black movement, and substantial scholarship on race that we find a partial backlash against multicultural identity politics in the 1990s. While many Brazilian intellectuals had pursued cognate race/colonial research (largely under others rubrics), some media journalists, rather than see the affinities linking such work to similar work in Brazil, rejected multiculturalism in terms largely borrowed from the U.S. right. Some in the Brazilian media depicted multiculturalism as flawed in its own terms and irrelevant, even dangerous, for Brazil. The hostility came especially from the dominant media and publishing establishments, which sometimes bought into, and literally translated, the U.S. conservative portrayal of multiculturalism as separatist, puritanical, and “politically correct.” Major newspapers and periodicals such as Folha de São Paulo, Veja, and Isto É were more likely to feature translations of essays by critics such as Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, and Tom Wolfe rather than the work of the multicultural writers themselves.
Contemporaneous with similar articles in France, a February 1, 1995, article in the Brazilian weekly news magazine Isto É (roughly the Brazilian Newsweek), titled “The World Upside Down,” illustrates the terms and drift of the rejection. The article’s subheading reads, “In the U.S., politically correct schools, in the name of minorities, are creating new prejudices.” Signed by former leftist Osmar Freitas, Jr., the article mocks the notion that Columbus did not “discover” America and that ancient Greece was not the birthplace of universal culture, statements that the author, without engaging the actual scholarship, regards as outrageous on their face. Conflating Afrocentrism with multiculturalism—when in fact the two projects are quite distinct and at times mutually wary—Freitas defines multiculturalism, rather tendentiously, “as a pompous name for politically correct behavior when applied to teaching and learning, especially University teaching and learning.” According to Freitas, minorities in the United States were calling for a “new segregationism.” The article cites Arthur Schlesinger’s usual equation of multiculturalism with ethnic separatism, without citing a single writer who actually calls for separatism. But by the mid-1990s, the charges of “ethnic separation” and “Balkanization” had been repeated so often that they acquired, despite the lack of evidence, a discursive density that contaminated left and right discussions of the subject.
Two entries in The Critical Dictionary of Cultural Politics, edited by Teixeira Coelho, meanwhile, reflect almost opposite takes on multiculturalism.15 The first, by Solange Martins Couceiro de Lima, sees multiculturalism in the United States as the legitimate heir of the 1960s radical and Civil Rights movements. For Lima, multiculturalism critiques melting-pot assimilationism, which the author compares to Brazilian-style “racial democracy,” as an ideology that sees minorities as progressing toward a single white-dominant national identity. For Lima, it is the strength of the assimilationist racial democracy ideology that makes multiculturalism seem alien in Brazil. The second entry, by Teixeira Coelho himself, in contrast, basically translates into Portuguese the U.S. conservative view of multiculturalism as “discriminatory,” “politically correct,” and even “totalitarian.” The “obsession” with race makes the movement itself racist and emblematic, for Coelho, of a “culture of victimization.” As occurred with some French critics, the argument gets linked to anxious projections about Anglo-feminism. Like Todorov in France, Coelho symptomatically slides from “multiculturalism” to “sexual harassment,” recycling the right’s anecdotal claims about “tragic” situations in which perfectly innocent (male) professors lose their jobs due to unfair accusations by hysterical females. All of Coelho’s terms of abuse, hurled at the “demagogues of diversity,” are drawn from the U.S. far-right lexicon. The bibliography features no actual multiculturalists at all but only two of the project’s critics: Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue (1995) and Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1995).
In Brazil, multiculturalism was sometimes portrayed as an unwelcome U.S. export, at times for the same reasons as for the French but usually for reasons specific to Brazilian cultural politics. In Brazil, unlike France, the topic of race was not taboo. The concept of a multicultural society—encapsulated in the oft-repeated story of Brazil as a mélange of three races—had long been the normative view. The question was not whether Brazil was de facto multicultural but rather what kind of race-related project was appropriate. Was multiculturalism pertinent or just one more “out-of-place idea”? For some people, it was the North American ideological correlative to the “racial democracy” that emerged in Brazil in the 1930s. For Italo Moriconi, “multiculturalism has been the state ideology since Vargas, but the problem is the gap between the official discourse and the quotidian reality of racist violence.”16 Yet “racial democracy” is not an exact equivalent to multiculturalism. While “racial democracy” was a top-down concept forged by the Brazilian state in alliance with establishment intellectuals, multiculturalism was never an official ideology embraced by the U.S. political establishment. The equivalent to “racial democracy,” in this sense, would be the mythology of the American “melting pot” or of “equal opportunity.”
Some Brazilian scholars have examined the crisscrossing movement of ideas about multicultural identity politics between France, the United States, and Brazil. In Atlas Literaturas (1998), Leyla Perrone-Moisés, whose indispensable work on Franco-Brazilian cultural relations we have already cited, offers the high-literary version of the antimulticultural backlash. Based on Fulbright-supported research undertaken at Yale, her book denounces identity politics in an idiom largely drawn from the U.S. conservative lexicon. The “politically correct” tendency to analyze texts in terms of “race, gender, and class,” she laments, threatens the study of literature as an autonomous discipline. In tones reminiscent of Yale’s own Harold Bloom, she regrets that “Western ideology” has been disqualified as “sexist, imperialist, and bourgeois.” The PC squads, she reports, have thrown Twain and Melville out of the curriculum, Twain because of his writings on slavery and Melville because he was “anti-ecological.”17 She cites no one who actually censors Twain or Melville, and in fact both writers are often seen as multicultural heroes, Twain (by Susan Fishkin, for example) for his questioning of slavery in Huckleberry Finn and for his opposition to U.S. imperialism (for example, in the Philippines) and Melville (by Eric Sundquist) for his multiracial Pequod and his incisive chronicling of slave revolts in “Benito Cereno.”18
Perrone-Moisés’s Franco-diffusionist approach figures good ideas as emanating from Europe and then degenerating during their transatlantic passage. Along the classical Latin/Anglo divide, she sees good French ideas as “out of place” in the United States, but not in Brazil. She credits the French poststructuralists with generating the “good ideas” that transformed the U.S. academy, while she elides (1) the contribution of Third World Francophone thinkers such as Césaire and Fanon to “French” poststructuralism itself; (2) the role of Native American, African American, Latino, and progressive white intellectuals in transforming the U.S. academy; and (3) the role of North American scholars in reenvisioning and indigenizing French theory itself. Misidentifying the Parsi-Indian-English now U.S.-based Homi Bhabha as “a Turk” and the “founder” of postcolonial studies, a status usually attributed to Said, Perrone-Moisés declares postcolonial theory symptomatic of a puritanical and Manichean American culture.19 In fact, of course, the postcolonial intellectuals in question are highly cosmopolitan figures, whose work reveals a deep abhorrence for Manichean notions and an affection for a fluid tropology of “slippage,” “hybridity,” and the “in-between.” By transforming three diasporic postcolonial intellectuals, of Palestinian and Indian background, into stereotypical Anglo-Saxon puritans, merely on the basis of their U.S. location, Perrone-Moisés denies the transnational complexity of the circuitries of ideas. (We return to Perrone-Moisés in chapter 9.)
Given the fundamental asymmetries of knowledge and power shaped by neocolonial hegemony, some Brazilians understandably resisted multiculturalism precisely because it was seen as “American.” At a time when IMF and World Bank–style globalization, for many Brazilians synonymous with “Americanization,” was exacerbating inequality both within and between nations, resentment inevitably spilled over against anything associated with the United States. Although both Brazilian and French responses to multicultural identity politics can be seen as defensive of the national terrain, the context and trajectories were quite distinct. Two major differences distinguish the Brazilian reaction from the French. First, while many French intellectuals in the 1990s saw multiculturalism as a dangerous antirepublican import, Brazilian intellectuals did not speak in the name of the Brazilian republic. They were more likely to see multiculturalism as a constitutive feature of Brazil, as something Brazil already had and did not need North Americans to name for them. If for the French, the question was “How can we import something so alien and contrary to the values of the republic?” for Brazilians the question was “Why import something we already have?” In the academy, as Italo Moriconi points out, the critique of multiculturalism in Brazil “usually comes wrapped as resistance to ‘American imperialism.’ The idea is that if anyone is going to offer lessons to Brazilians, it will certainly not be Americans.”20
Despite some overlap with French attitudes, the Brazilian anxieties had their own sources. For Marxists, it was the culture in “multiculturalism” that was disconcerting, signaling for them a “superstructural” distraction from more consequential “infrastructural” matters of class and political economy. The anti-imperialist left worried about new modes of hegemony on the part of the Colossus to the North, now transmitted through its academic/artistic projects. For many Brazilians, endorsing multiculturalism (perceived as American) would mean throwing the baby of Brazilian cordiality out with the bathwater of racism. Brazil, they feared, would become a more harsh, rigid, judgmental, and puritanical place, rather than the fluid, flexible, gregarious, sensual, and caressing place that Brazilians (and others) know and love.
The occasional Brazilian left rejection of multiculturalism and cognate projects carried with it a number of ironies, however. First, in opposing race/multicultural projects, some on the Brazilian left took up arguments associated in the United States with the far right. Second, while the U.S. right wing saw such projects as a challenge to Anglo-hegemony, some Brazilian (like French) intellectuals saw them as themselves Anglo, as in that oxymoronic phrase “Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism.” (If a movement is essentially Anglo-Saxon, it is by definition not multicultural.) Third, left Brazilians were rejecting a project that constituted a “Latinization” or “Brazilianization” of North American self-conceptualization, in that it opted out of the binary “race relations” model to highlight a rainbow spectrum of ethnicities as constitutive of the nation. What could be more Brazilian in style than to conceive of the United States as a fundamentally mixed nation? Caetano Veloso’s description of the United States as “inevitably mestizo,” in this sense, corresponds to Albert Murray’s description (in his 1970 book The Omni-Americans) of the American culture as “incontestably mulatto.”21 Fourth, such intellectuals were rejecting a project that aimed to open up space in the American media and in schools for Latin American curricula, faculty, and scholarship, part of an attempt to reverse the asymmetrical flows of cultural knowledge between North and South.
The intertext of these debates partly lies in the vast cross-national corpus of comparative writing that focuses on Brazil and the United States. The sheer volume of this corpus, which swells with every passing year, is remarkable. These comparisons are asymmetrical and power laden, of course, since Brazilians have historically made the comparisons from a position of relative geopolitical weakness, while Americans have made them from a privileged position of taken-for-granted power. Brazil-U.S. comparisons take place against the larger ideological frame of the widely disseminated Hegelian and Weberian comparisons of South America and North America. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel, for example, contrasted a prosperous, orderly, and unified Protestant North America with a militarized, disorderly, and disunited Catholic South America.22
In the case of Brazilian thinkers—from Gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda to Vianna Moog and Roberto DaMatta—contrasts between Brazil and the United States have sometimes come close to the very heart of debates about Brazilian identity, at times forming an integral part of a specular process of national self-definition. Sociologist Jessé Souza discerns a stubborn pride behind the obsessive comparisons: “Explicit or implicit comparison with the United States is the central thread in practically all of the 20th-century interpretations of Brazilian singularity—because we perceive that only the United States is as great and influential as we are in the Americas.”23 For many Brazilian intellectuals (and for many American Brazilianists), then, the inevitable historical comparison has not been with the mother country Portugal or with a European country such as France or even with a Spanish-speaking neighbor such as Argentina but rather with the United States. Because of this predominance, some have called either for South-South comparisons or have questioned the Eurocentric premises of the comparative paradigm itself.24
Although cross-cultural comparisons are often narcissistic, in the case of Brazil they have sometimes entailed ambivalence and even self-rejection, whether about Brazil’s supposedly derivative culture or about its inadequate political institutions. Indeed, playwright Nelson Rodrigues famously called Brazilians “upside-down Narcissists” who spit on their own mirror image. In the wake of the Hegelian (and later Weberian) dichotomies of dynamic North and indolent South, many Brazilian intellectuals searched for culturalist explanations for Brazil’s putative “failure,” in comparison, usually, with the United States or Europe. In an animal fable of inferiority, Brazilian historian João Capistrano de Abreu claimed that Brazil’s most appropriate national symbol would be the sad-eyed and lazy jaburu bird.25 In contrast to later stereotypes of Brazil as the site of paradisal jouissance, Paulo Prado, in Retrato do Brasil (1928), portrayed Brazil as a melancholy mélange of “three sad races.” Contrasting what he saw as Brazil’s libidinous languor with the United States’ hygienic dynamism, Prado blamed Portuguese colonialism for creating an ethos in which manual labor was scorned, culture was ornamental and derivative, and malandragem (roughly, quick-witted street-smart improvisations) was the cultural norm. Portugal, in this discourse, became a kind of bad father in a postcolonial family romance, with some Brazilians suggesting, only partly in jest, that Brazilians would have been better off with a more worthy European progenitor such as Holland.
Eduardo Freire answered Prado in a book whose title says it all: The Brazilian Is Not Sad (published in 1931). Although Brazil does not exercise power in the larger world, Freire argued, its culture is vibrant, capacious, and harmonious. In the same period, Brazilian modernists such as Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade also highlighted Brazil’s positive cultural features. And decades later, José Guilherme Merquior recast what had been seen as tropical deficiencies into cultural strengths by arguing that Brazilian “carnivalism” inoculated the country from the deadening rationalization, puritanism, and disenchantment typical of the relentlessly productivist Occident.26
Over the span of history, comparisons have served diverse, even contradictory, purposes, sometimes working to denigrate Brazil as lawless, corrupt, and inefficient and sometimes to exalt it as tolerant, sensuous, and pacific. Even the phrase “racial democracy” was comparative in origin, intended as a contrast with the non-racially-democratic United States. It is not always easy, in these comparative discourses, to separate actual cultural differences from clichés about a presumably unified national character. What matters is the very centrality of cross-national comparison and how it has impacted the reception of the race/colonial debates. Within the fraught dialectics of attraction/repulsion, even strong statements of difference—“We are not at all like you!”—are nonetheless addressed to a privileged interlocutor, whether defined as imperial nemesis or as ideal ego. While comparison can illuminate national self-understanding by drawing distinctions, it can also obscure transnational relationalities between those such as indigenous or Afro-diasporic peoples who have historically had a more ambivalent relation to the nation-states of the Americas and who are therefore less invested in certain nationalist exceptionalisms.
Despite the limitations of a methodology that too often lapses into overdrawn national contrasts, comparative race studies have nonetheless made a signal contribution to the understanding of variant modalities of slavery and discrepant conceptualizations of race.27 These studies have highlighted many commonalities between Brazil and the United States. In both, the historical inertia of colonialism and slavery, and an abolition negotiated on white ruling-class terms, shaped racialized hierarchies even under a free-labor regime. In both, the ruling elite favored European immigrants over blacks, a fact perhaps more obvious in Brazil only because European immigrants arrived en masse in the immediate aftermath of emancipation, rather than decades later, as in the United States. And in both countries, self-exculpatory myths “covered” the reality of racialized oppression: in the United States, myths of the “American dream” and “equal opportunity”; in Brazil, the myth of “social harmony” and “racial democracy.” Comparatists have also underlined points of contrast: (1) racism in Brazil has been less virulent, explicit, and phobic than in the United States; (2) Brazilian history has not been marked by lynchings, race riots, and so forth; (3) Brazil has generally rejected legal segregation, although an informal segregation, premised on blacks’ “knowing their place,” did sometimes exist; (4) the Brazilian situation encouraged a paternalistic dependency on white elites (padrinhos), in contrast to the North American racial segregation that ironically favored the development of parallel institutions—black colleges, the black church, an independent black press, sports organizations.
At the same time, not all the historical comparisons work to Brazil’s advantage. Brazilian slavery began earlier than U.S. slavery and lasted longer; it was national rather than regional; and Brazilian society has been structured in depth by the relations between the Big House and the Slave Quarters, in ways that still leave traces in the everyday social dynamics of Brazilian life. In a kind of shifting of figure and ground, just as a barely concealed class subtext lurks behind racialized injustice in the United States, so a barely concealed racial subtext lurks behind the everyday social inequities of Brazilian life. The cliché that blacks are discriminated against only because they are poor, meanwhile, forgets that the nonblack poor do not carry the stigma generated by racialized slavery and white-supremacist ideology and that the perception of blackness as an index of poverty (and thus powerlessness) is itself an oppressive burden in a stratified society. In this sense, racism can be seen both as a kind of salt rubbed into the wounds of class and as a wound in itself.
Another leitmotif in comparative discussions is the contrast between the Brazilian racial spectrum and the U.S. bicolor system based on the “one-drop rule.” This strange “rule,” which rarely enunciates itself as a rule, has played a deeply pernicious role in American life. Originally, it gave expression to “the virulent racist sentiment that pervaded white society in the early twentieth century, [which] reinforced the low regard in which European Americans held African Americans and the stigma they attached to African ancestry.”28 Rendered official only at the end of the 19th century, the one-drop rule codified into law what had become—at least for whites—the racial common sense. The idea that all Americans fall on one side or the other of an imaginary racial line leads to situations of labyrinthine incoherence, which is why a tremendous effort was required to make it stick. There was nothing natural or inevitable about its (always partial) triumph.
Indeed, the United States, like Brazil, began as somewhat miscegenated, although hardly to the same degree. During the 17th century, the distinction between white indentured servants and black slaves, for example, was often blurred. The two groups shared similar working conditions and sometimes jointly resisted bondage by escaping together. Even in the 18th century, the shortage of women in both communities led to indentured or free whites marrying African slaves, sometimes the only women they knew, and white female servants accepting offers of marriage from black men, both slave and free.29 In the U.S. “Lower South,” also known as “Latin North America,” the situation was closer to the Brazilian model, including in terms of liaisons between white men and native women. The earliest laws did not forbid interracial unions, and when such laws were enacted, it was precisely because interracial unions were so common.30
In the long term, the United States became much more miscegenated than is commonly recognized. The country’s largest minority, Latinos, are mixed almost by definition. The majority of Native Americans intermarry with other ethnic groups. DNA testing has shown that one-third of African Americans have partial white ancestry. Black public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his research discovered that more than 50 percent of his genetic material is European.31 But such statistics are not something about which to be either “proud” or “ashamed.” In the case of African Americans, the miscegenation could often be traced back to a rape by an empowered white. Although racial mixedness clearly existed in both countries, however, it was more harshly stigmatized, both legally and culturally, in the United States. The difference, then, did not have to do with the sheer fact of mixing but rather with (1) its extent and (2) its ideological drift and judicial definition. The African Americans who “passed over” to the white side, for example, did so by denying their mixedness. At the same time, Brazilian-style mixing began earlier, on a more massive scale, with the intermarriage of Portuguese and indigenous people. In Brazil, the mixing accrued to the nation itself, while in the United States, the mixing was separated off, officially quarantined, at least until the advent of the multiracial movements of the last decades. What we find, then, is two complementary forms of denial: a segregationist U.S.-American model that downplays interracial mixing and intimacy and an assimilationist Brazilian model that downplays the hierarchies that structure intimacy.
An analysis of the question of political and economic power results in a paradox. In the United States, which is clearly more segregated in terms of the one-drop rule and informally segregated residential neighborhoods, blacks have nonetheless exercised considerable power as political figures, business executives, military leaders, artists, and entertainers. While not racially segregated in the U.S. or South African manner, Brazil, meanwhile, has its own subtle forms of social segregation, in the perverse urban dialectics of the ghettoized and the gated and in the self-segregation of the rich, who retreat behind “walled islands of wealth that become girdled by new favela settlements.”32 Many blacks feel imprisoned in what samba composer/historian Nei Lopes calls “invisible bantustans,” from which they can escape only thanks to a very special kind of passport: that by which one abandons one’s black identity.33 The social separation takes place not only within the urban geography of the divided city but also within the shared space of apartment buildings, with their two entrances, two elevators, and two independent circulation systems, where “the organizing principle is controlled separation to ensure minimal informal contact between the servant and master classes.”34 Brazil is also segregated in terms of power, in the sense that the higher echelons of the military, the diplomatic corps, the legislature, the judiciary, corporate boardrooms, and the university are all very white. Even in Salvador, Bahia, where blacks and people of mixed race compose the overwhelming majority, and where Afro-Brazilian popular culture is vibrant, the political and media elite remains white dominated. On the other hand, the ruling PT party has nourished black advances and a cautious Affirmative Action, and the 2010 presidential election featured, with remarkably little fanfare in the media, the first self-declared black woman presidential candidate, the Green Party’s Marina Silva, who won 19 percent of the vote.
Another historical difference is that in Brazil, those who oppress people of color, going back to “mulatto slave-catchers,” might also be themselves people of color. Some major historical instances of state repression—of the maroon republic of Palmares in the 17th century, of the millenarian rebellion in Canudos in the 19th century, and of the Carandiru prisoners in the 20th century—have not simply pitted black against white; rather, people of color have fought on both sides, even if an overarching chromatic hierarchy still structures the whole. This difference becomes evident when one compares two 1990s secret video recordings of police brutality: the Rodney King beating in the United States and the recorded beatings in two Brazilian favelas (Diadema in São Paulo and City of God in Rio). While most of the police officers beating Rodney King were white, in Brazil both the police and their victims were mixed, yet in both cases race was a factor in the brutality. In Brazil, some of the police officers were black or of mixed race, but the leader-killer (nicknamed “Rambo”) was white. The victims, meanwhile, were largely black or mestizo, defining the confrontation as, if not directly racial, at least highly racialized. Yet the beatings in both instances were entirely gratuitous, and the Brazilian case became a cold-blooded murder of a completely innocent man. The body language of the favela residents conveys a sense of resignation, as if such abuse were a taken-for-granted quotidian routine.
The same social problems that plague the United States—police brutality, a cruel prison system, class inequality, and so forth—also plague Brazil. The Brazilian police murder literally thousands of “marginals” every year, most black or of mixed race. A Globo editorial on April 4, 2006, pointed out that the police (municipal and federal) in Rio de Janeiro alone “kill more people than are killed by the police in all of the United States.” A December 2009 Human Rights Watch Report titled “Lethal Force” revealed that police in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo killed more than eleven thousand people between 2003 and 2009, often disguising summary execution as “resistance to arrest.”35 Thus, we find a commonality of racialized domination, expressed in distinct ways, in which the coefficient of class versus race and gender might vary but each modality has minor echoes in the other country.
At the same time, it would be inaccurate to see Brazil as a mirror image of the United States, where exactly the same racism exists but in veiled form. Many comparatists emphasize the relatively less stressful manner of living race in Brazil, evoked in such affect-laden words as “cordiality” and “gregariousness.” The cold statistics of racial advantage, in this sense, do not convey imponderables such as affection, solidarity, and emotional comfort zones. Atmospherics lubricate social relations and shape the daily texture of existence, even if they are not amenable to statistical proof. The fact of greater miscegenation also makes black Brazilians less easily otherizable, more an assumed part of the social totality. As long as one speaks of epidermic appearances (“We are all mixed”) or of atmospherics, the Brazilian situation seems much more “livable” than the American. It is when one poses the crucial question of economic, political, and cultural power that the situation seems less than ideal.36
Over the past half century, the myth of racial democracy has severely frayed. Recently, Brazilian scholars have highlighted the ways that various ethnic groups in Brazil have, as Antonio Guimarães puts it, “carefully distanced themselves from the racial democracy model … [whereby] middle-class whites looked for a second nationality in Europe, the United States, or created a regional xenophobia in the Europeanized south; the black in search of roots constructed an imaginary Africa, or saw the United States as an Afro-American mecca, while the misnamed ‘Indians’ identified with their group of origin or with Indians in general.”37 The rearticulation of the black movement, the emergence of the feminist and gay movements, the growth of non-Catholic religions, the flourishing of indigenous movements, and the celebration of immigrant hybridity have all pointed to the centrifugal fracturing of cohesive myths of a unified Brazil.
A recent polemical book, Antonio Risério’s The Brazilian Utopia and the Black Movements, is framed, revealingly, by the author’s discomfort with the black movement in Brazil. Writing from a position of a man besieged by “politically correct” critics, Risério argues,
Today we have a serious problem here in Brazil. The discussion and the debate are constantly becoming more suspect and cursed. There is no room for criticism, only for adhesion or denunciation. Almost all of the people who speak of dialogue do not really believe in it. If I criticize feminists, I’m macho. If I don’t like some form of popular culture, I’m elitist…. If I have objections to the black movement, I’m a racist. And so forth.38
The discourses of “minorities,” Risério continues,
have been incorporated literally. And thus they stayed, undiscussed and unquestioned. A religious attitude emerged. Women, gays, Indians, blacks, lesbians, etc. were all in the right. They were the humiliated and offended ones, the victims of oppression and prejudice, the ones who spoke of their pain and resentment, their anxieties, projects, and demands. The role of the others, the “majority,” was to listen to them and support their struggles. As if the majority was guilty and were there to expiate a racist and macho past … since only women could speak for women in a macho world, since only blacks knew what it meant to be black in a racist society, since only minority people could speak for minorities, etc.39
A brilliant advocate and analyst of Afro-Brazilian culture and coauthor (with Gilberto Gil) of a major book on slavery and negotiation, Risério shares with some Brazilian, French, and American critics of identity politics a feeling of displacement and a ressentiment about the putative impugning and silencing of white men. Black Brazilian activists, for Risério, have overinvested in the idea that the camouflaged form of Brazilian racism is worse than overt U.S. racism because it is harder to fight. Those whom Risério derisively calls the “neo-negros” have adopted the binary black/white U.S. model in a miscegenated Brazil where that model simply does not fit. The identification that some black Brazilians feel with blacks in the United States irritates Risério, which is hardly surprising since diasporic minority movements challenge nationalist framings. Risério dismisses these identifications, typical of the Black Atlantic, as merely a byproduct of the dissemination of the U.S. racial model, now spread by American foundations and by Brazilian black elites influenced by the American academy. His position is close to that adopted by Bourdieu/Wacquant in their critique of Hanchard’s Orpheus and Power—discussed in chapter 9—even though Risério is infinitely more knowledgeable about the debates and about Afro-Brazilian culture than are Bourdieu/Wacquant.
Risério’s text betrays an acute anxiety about the status of individuals who are socially positioned as white, who identify with Afro-Brazilian culture and with black people, yet who feel a certain malaise when a black movement names the power structure as white. Terms such as “whites” and “white power structure,” by naming the color of power, position even sympathetic and knowledgeable whites ambivalently vis-à-vis black subjects. Both in the United States and Brazil, the black movements dared to go beyond the question of prejudice to pose the question of racially coded power. As a consequence, whites became “raced,” no longer universal floating human beings but rather a group with a precise relation to a power structure. For a North American reader, Risério’s lament has a familiar ring. It recalls the complaints of liberal-leftist veterans of the Civil Rights struggles who felt eclipsed by the rise of the Black Power movement and later by identity movements. If Risério at times sounds like the disenchanted white American leftist, at other times, his resentment makes him sound like an American right-winger, as when he tries to discredit the reparations movement by reminding his readers, as Dinesh D’Souza might, that some freed slaves acquired slaves themselves, a point that, while not completely false, is marshaled tendentiously.
If Risério loves Afro-diasporic culture, he loves it mainly in its Afro-Bahian “Nago” form. Thus, “African” for Risério means acarajé, capoeira, and the orixas. If we follow out the logic of this approach, the vast majority of Africans themselves, and the thousands of contemporary Africans who have emigrated to the United States, would not qualify as truly “African.” In line with his regionalist, nationalist, and Yoruba-centric delineations, Risério disparages African Americans as alienated and de-Africanized.40 Blind to their endless activism, Risério contrasts black American “passivity” with the rebelliousness of black Brazilian maroons. And here we come to his most provocative claim: “For the simple, strong, and profound reason that Negro-African cultures came to impregnate and nurture, progressively and in a seductive way, the whites of Brazil, thus coming to constitute their codes and symbolic repertoires … to the point that we feel free to say that Brazilian whites are, for the most part, more ‘black,’ or more precisely, more ‘African’ than black Americans.”41 Risério here gathers into himself the various credit lines of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu) and, we would add, “racial capital.”42 On the one hand, he enjoys the cultural/racial capital of whiteness—he grants that he has never suffered racial ostracism “in his skin”—while also claiming the cultural capital associated with intimate knowledge of African cultural codes. That insider knowledge, in his view, makes him “more African” than African Americans, whom he assumes to be ignorant of the orixas and mired in soul-deadening Protestant pietism.
Risério’s claim is premised on a separation between culture and history. Without making primordial claims about any “essential black subject” (Stuart Hall), certain incommensurabilities of experience, rooted not in blood but in the memory of slavery and the experience of discrimination, inevitably create a certain gap in perspectives and sensibilities. It is one thing for those who are socially identified as white to appreciate the cultural practices of Afro-diasporic people, and even to live them virtually as their own, and to identify with the victims of slavery and discrimination; it is quite another to be the literal heirs of that history and to have been discriminated in one’s flesh due to one’s visible, epidermal difference. Even a deep knowledge of African culture does not completely fill that gap.
Although Risério argues for a kind of Brazilian exceptionalism, what has struck us repeatedly while researching this book is how a claim about one country can easily be extended to another country, even when the authors claim to be stressing some national uniqueness. Risério, for example, offers extremely evocative descriptions of Brazilian cultural diversity, as in the following passage:
Brazil is an anthropological mosaic. A world made of many worlds, each with its own physiognomy, its distinctive traces. That is what allows us to speak of a Brazilian reality, but also of Brazilian realities, in the singular and in the plural. Because what we constructed, in our segment of the planet, was a country of foci, or cultural poles or spaces for special matrices of a differentiated population, as a consequence of—and as a response to—diverse social historical processes and dissimilar ecological circumstances…. Our singularity is made up of many singularities, visible in the internal variations of our culture. But this rich internal diversity, unlike what one might think, given the huge territorial dimensions of the country, did not result in a chaotic mess or a bizarre collage of mutually alienated and separate elements.43
Risério’s richly textured portrait eloquently describes the fantastic cultural cornucopia that is Brazil. Yet many of his formulations—“anthropological mosaic,” “worlds made up of many worlds,” “multiple foci,” “internal variations”—are conceptually apt descriptions of many national cultures. Most nation-states in the Americas, as invented collectivities, have tried to forge a fragile coherence out of “bizarre collages” of native, European, African, and Asian peoples, partly through the enforcing power of the state. The U.S. “E Pluribus Unum,” the Mexican “Raza Cósmica,” and the Brazilian “fable of three races” were all attempts to muster a semblance of order out of a “chaotic mess.” But these bricoleur identities are not merely celebratory; they also mask real conflicts. In all of the Americas, indigenous concepts of land ownership, for example, still collide with Euro-dominant conceptions. Stressing the uniqueness of single nation-states edits out the analogies linking all of the colonial-settler states of the Americas.
Some of the most perceptive commentaries on comparative racial politics come, not surprisingly, from intellectuals familiar with both national contexts. Hermano Vianna, author of illuminating books on samba and popular culture, speaks of his encounter with multicultural identity politics during his doctoral research in the very segregated city of Chicago. Feeling at first like “an anthropologist doing field-research in a remote village of New Guinea,” Vianna soon realized that the discussion was very serious and profound. On his return, “full of respect for [his] American colleagues,” he reports that he “could not bear to see such a serious and emotionally charged debate treated as a kind of joke in Brazil.” For Vianna, the United States “was performing a service for humanity with this anthropological experiment,” one that “deserves our respect, collaboration, and constructive critique.” Whereas other Brazilian analysts regarded multiculturalism as a ready-made product packaged for export, Vianna regarded it as an audacious experiment:
Seeing all the suffering provoked by that movement (certainly much less serious than that caused by centuries of discrimination and racism, but still suffering) I confess that I felt relieved to not be from the U.S…. and for having the opportunity to leave, since I was feeling suffocated (including because I was classified as “Hispanic,” something I never imagined, despite my love for the culture of the Chicanos and Puerto-Ricans of Chicago). But I was thankful to North Americans for going through all that pain, in such a demanding and in my view, such a radical manner. Who knows if important lessons would emerge for other peoples, lessons which could be adopted world-wide, since we would know what worked and what did not. Since it is obvious, even for the most politically correct Americans, that aspects of this experiment—like any other experiment—will not work out.44
Vianna’s account shows respect for the multicultural project as a brave social experiment (along with an awareness of its limitations) as well as an appreciation of the Brazilian difference (and awareness of its limitations).
At the same time, Vianna’s terms are perhaps exaggeratedly Christological, as if Chicago academics were taking on the racial sins of the world. While Vianna recognizes the “unbearable heaviness” of these discussions, he perhaps misses another element, to wit, a certain exhilaration and sense of joyful discovery not only in liberatory ideas but also in new forms of coalitionary conviviality. The selective emphasis on pain reflects a reaction of a Brazilian accustomed to a “lighter” approach, where the “lightness” is at once an unselfconscious social code and, at times, a way of artfully dodging confrontation through practices and discourses of flexible accommodation. It is in this context that Vianna emphasizes the social functionality of Brazilian humor and its deriding of some American movements. Although Vianna does not mention it, feminism too was initially disqualified on the basis of jokes, going back to the naming of a seasonal flu after Betty Friedan because her arrival in Salvador, Bahia, happened to coincide with the flu’s onset. While carnivalizing North America power, such humor can also serve to marginalize egalitarian ideas.
In the end, Vianna calls for a relational study of the ways that “different peoples experiment and try out things so that they can subsequently be compared, exchanged, and mixed by others.”45 He does not categorically defend Brazil as a “racial democracy,” however. One can affirm Brazilian miscegenation, he points out, and yet still not believe that Brazil is a racial democracy. At the same time, he sees U.S.-style multiculturalism ultimately as “out of place” in Brazil because it risks costing Brazil its “trump card”—the “mixing of differences.”46 Yet one wonders if the mixing of differences remains such a “trump card” when it has become the norm in much of the Atlantic world. Nonetheless, Vianna’s praise for Americans’ courage offers an ironic twist on a theme from the period of the UNESCO studies. In the 1950s, Brazil’s “racial democracy” was seen as a model for a world then emerging from the battle against Nazism. But now the terms of discussion have shifted dramatically. The present-day United States is not regarded, as Brazil was then, as a “racial paradise”; rather, it is the place where the “racial hell” is being openly confronted, in an atmosphere of pain and suffocation. While it was the Brazilian socius itself that served as model in the early 1950s, now it is not the United States itself but rather U.S. self-critique that provides the model.
Drawing on British cultural studies and postcolonial studies, Brazilian sociologist Sérgio Costa skillfully negotiates between the various positions in The Two Atlantics: Social Theory, Anti-racism, Cosmopolitanism. Most Brazilian intellectuals, Costa points out, no longer dispute the existence of racism but only the best methods for dealing with it. For him, the Brazilian academic debate has polarized into two antiracist camps: the “integrationist antiracist camp” and the “racially defined antiracist camp.” The integrationist camp places excessive faith in culture, neglecting material inequalities, while the race-conscious camp is overly tied to a specific (African American) model. “The concrete historical form taken by the struggle to create a just social order in the United States, with its successes and failures,” he reminds us, “constitutes only one possibility [with] no guarantees that it will produce good results everywhere.” Both groups neglect the “postnational and transnational dimensions” of the debate, since national frontiers no longer demarcate an adequate analytical unit for sociological investigation in an era when social, cultural, and political processes exceed such borders.47
Nothing better illustrates the dysfunctionality of forcing cultures into sealed national compartments than Brazilian popular music. As a cosmopolitan orchestration of vernacular and erudite musical idioms, Brazilian musi reflects, and reflects on, Brazil’s constitutive multiculturality. Part of an endlessly creative multidirectional movement of ideas flowing back and forth around the Atlantic, Brazilian music generates such hybrids as jazz-samba, samba-rap, samba-reggae, reforengue (a blend of rock, merengue, and forró), and belly-samba (a blend of samba and belly-dance). Incorporating a broad variety of musical styles—the melisma of African American singing, the deep-breath South African choral style, the whiny steel guitar of country music, the thump of funk, and the offbeat syncopation of reggae—into an overall Brazilian ensemble, it displays an anthropophagic capacity to devour a wide range of influences. It is this other-absorbing capacity, paradoxically, that defines Brazilian music as Brazilian.
U.S.-American and Brazilian music resemble one another to some extent, not only because of mutual influence but also because of common roots. Thus, we find clear parallels between chorinho and ragtime, between cool jazz and bossa nova, between funk and axé music. As syncretic products of the African-European encounter in the New World, the music of George Gershwin, Aaron Copeland, Duke Ellington, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Antonio Carlos Jobim all mingle the popular and erudite, the European and the Afro-diasporic.48 While U.S. jazz musicians have occasionally referenced Africa, Brazilian popular music demonstrates a much deeper familiarity with Afro-Brazilian religious culture, whether in the incorporation of Candomblé rhythms or in lyrical allusions to iaô (initiates in the West African religions), terreiros (the Candomblé temples), acarajé (religiously consecrated food), and the orixás (Oxum, Iemanjá). Even Carmen Miranda’s fluid way of dancing and singing recalls the way that Oxum, the goddess of love and wealth, lifts her arms and proudly exhibits her adornments.49 African references animated the “Afro-sambas” of Vinicius de Moraes and Baden-Powell in the 1960s, the sambas of Clara Nunes and Martinho da Vila in the 1970s, and the work of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Carlinhos Brown, and Maria Bethânia throughout their careers.
But what is most germane for our purposes here is the extent to which Brazilian music directly thematizes multicultural, diasporic, and indigenous issues, not only through lyrics but also through percussion, melody, harmony, and performance. Prior to the 1960s, Brazilian popular music thematized race and multiculturality in a light and sometimes prejudicial mode, as in “Nega do Cabelo Duro” (Black Woman with the Bad Hair), or in a more serious patriotic mode, as with Ary Barroso’s portrait of Brazilian culture as a multicultural stew in “Aquarela do Brasil” (known in the United States as “Brazil”). Many sambas directly thematize race. The 2009 Carnival, for example, brought samba tributes to Barack Obama. One song played on the sonorous links between Obama’s name and the Yoruba expression Oba (a kind of viva): “African voices, sing your strength / Obamala / Now, my love, the White House is black.” Another Carnival song declared, “There’s a black guy in the White House / Prejudice has gone to Baghdad [an expression meaning “went far away”] / Bye-bye, Bush.” Some Brazilian songs stress themes of cross-racial identification and transformation, a theme also common in U.S. popular culture.50 Thus, the phenotypically white singer Joyce sings, “I’m a mulata,” and Caetano Veloso punningly sings “sou mulato nato” (I’m a born mulatto), while Moraes Moreira allegorizes Brazil, à la Freyre, as “the three graces of Brazil,” that is, three feminine figures allegorizing the Amerindian, the African, and the European. (Scholars have rarely studied these cross-ethnic identifications in a transnational manner; one might compare, for example, the pro-Amerindian symbolism of the “Black Indians” of New Orleans Carnival and that of the largely black “Comanches” and “Apaches” of Carnival in Salvador, Bahia).
Rappers, for their part, foreground race and resistance through their very names. The young organizers of the “bailes funk” (funk dances) invoked “Black Power” and “Revolução da Mente,” after James Brown’s “Revolution of the Mind.” Bahians called themselves “browns” in homage to Brown, and a number of Brazilian musicians—notably Carlinhos Brown, Mano Brown, and Berimbrown—named themselves after the Godfather of Soul. “Berimbrown” mingles an homage to Brown with the berimbau, the African gourd-and-bow instrument used in capoeira. One Berimbrown song performs a historical counterpoint by linking Jorge Velho, the Portuguese military leader who crushed the 17th-century maroon republic of Palmares, to the present-day racist police. What George Yúdice has called the “funkification” of Brazil has been proceeding apace for decades, with funk and rap and jazz entering the very bloodstream of Brazilian popular music, just as bossa nova entered into the bloodstream of U.S. popular music decades earlier. Popular musicians such as Ed Motta, Berimbrown, and Phat Family, for their part, have Brazilianized soul, funk, and rap. The rap groups, meanwhile, also interact with civil society, whether through “Rap in the Schools” projects or through the group Banda AfroReggae’s concept of batidania—a neologism, roughly translatable as “percussive citizenship”—the rough equivalent of “one nation under a groove.” The video Batidania: Power in the Beat (1998) shows, as Yúdice puts it, “that music and performance are acts of citizenship,” a way of opening up “public spheres.”51
Critical race analysis can take many generic forms: political speech, the religious jeremiad, academic research, and popular music. Rappers in the 1980s echoed the scholarly disenchantment with the ideology of racial democracy. The Urban Discipline song “High Tech Violence” informs us that the police “go up into the favelas / invade your home / without shame / and the treatment you receive / will depend on the color of your skin.” Rappa makes contrapuntal links between past enslavement and present-day incarceration in “Every Police Wagon Is Reminiscent of a Slave Ship.” “Journal of a Prisoner” by the rap group Racionais MC’s, led by Mano Brown, memorialized the 1992 massacre of 111 prisoners in Carandiru prison. In “Pavillion Number 8,” some of the prisoners themselves penned rap lyrics about the massacre. Rap has thus become a musical testimonial registering social oppression. At the same time, the sounds themselves—hard, machine-gun-like—signify on the good-natured sweetness both of middle-class bossa nova and of favela-based classical samba.
Brazilian artists have been fecund in innovative and subtly anticolonial aesthetic coinages, whether literary, painterly, cinematic, or musical, among them “anthropophagy” (Oswald de Andrade), the “aesthetics of hunger” (Glauber Rocha), the “aesthetics of garbage” (Rogério Sganzerla), and “Tropicália” (Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso). Most of these aesthetics revalorize by inversion what had formerly been seen as negative, especially within colonialist discourse. Thus, cannibalism, for centuries the very name of the abject savage “other,” becomes with the Brazilian modernists an anticolonialist trope and a term of value. At the same time, these aesthetics share the jiujitsu trait of turning strategic weakness into tactical strength. Anticipating the postcolonial and postmodern stress on cut ’n’ mix and sampling aesthetics, such movements have appropriated existing discourses for their own ends, deploying the force of the dominant against domination.
The Tropicália movement inaugurated in 1967, led musically by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, brought these trends into the mass-mediated arena. Updating the ideas of modernist Oswald de Andrade, the movement drew on the favored modernist trope of “anthropophagy,” the Global South’s version of “inter-textuality” as seen from the standpoint of neocolonial power relations. Like the modernists, the Tropicalists eagerly cannibalized artistic movements. While the modernists devoured Dada and surrealism, the Tropicalists, as Caetano himself liked to put it, devoured Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, all part of a “sampling” aesthetic later seen as a proleptic form of postmodernism. Cannibalizing foreign influences from a position of national pride, the Tropicalists easily absorbed rock, rap, reggae, country, and salsa into a very Brazilian synthesis.
A striking feature of Brazilian popular music is its naked intellectual ambition. “Pop star intellectuals” such as Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, and Zé Miguel Wisnik write books and compose music that comment on the burning questions of the time. As a multiart movement, the Tropicália movement dynamized and reorganized the cultural field, while actively intervening in the debates about race and national identity. Whatever the vicissitudes of their sometimes problematic prise de positions, Gil and Caetano are major commentator-theoreticians on race in Brazil, both as incisive critics of racism and as celebrants of Brazilian conviviality. They perform those theories in very diverse genres and media, ranging from music, books, and interviews to happenings and public policies. Journalistic critics of the English translation of Caetano’s memoir Tropical Truth were surprised to encounter a pop star who could write knowingly about European, American, and Brazilian culture, in a text in which names like Ray Charles and James Brown brush up easily against names like Stockhausen, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze. Both Caetano and Gil (onetime minister of culture in the Lula government) constitute Orphic intellectuals, or to coin a variation on Gramsci’s “organic intellectual,” “Orphoganic” intellectuals; they write books in one moment and lead dancing crowds in another. While performing popular culture, they also theorize it. In a multimedia intervention, they enact the cultural debates in visual, sensuous, written, lyrical, percussive, and even institutional-political form.52
The Tropicália movement was born, in a sense, in an audiovisual epiphany of Africanness. According to the Tropicalists themselves, one of the works of art that helped crystallize the movement was Glauber Rocha’s 1967 film Terra em Transe, with its superimposition of the music of Candomblé with aerial views of the Atlantic coast. Caetano, who once described himself as a cross between Rocha and João Gilberto, delineated the film’s impact on the movement. “That whole Tropicalist thing,” as Caetano famously put it, “became clear to me the day I saw Terra em Transe. My heart exploded during the opening sequence, when, to the sound of a Candomblé chant, an aerial shot of the sea brings us to the coast of Brazil.” Without that “traumatic moment,” Caetano writes, “nothing of what came to be called tropicalism would have ever existed.”53 Tropicália was born, then, quite literally under the sign of the Black Atlantic.
As a musical “bard” of that same Black Atlantic, Gil has offered scintillating odes to Afro-Brazilian diasporic culture, whether to the orixas of Candomblé, as in “Iemanjá,” or to Macumba, as in “Batmakumba” (a play on Batman and Macumba) or to Umbanda in “Umbanda Um.” Gil’s 1973 musical homage to the Bahian Afro-musical group Filhos de Gandhi helped reinvigorate that group. His “ChuckBerry Fields Forever,” meanwhile, links both the Beatles and Chuck Berry to the cane-fields of slavery, while “Quilombo, the Black Eldorado” memorializes the longest-lasting maroon republic in the Americas. A very cosmopolitan Gil composed “A Prayer for Freedom in South Africa” (1985) and created a theme song, “Touche Pas à Mon Pote,” adopted by French antiracists. Although such music might not instigate a revolution, it can provide the sound track for social change.
Tropicália’s contribution was both thematic and aesthetic. In its cultural proposals, it offered (1) a critique of the conservative cultural politics of the orthodox left; (2) an emphasis not on harmony and cordiality but rather on unharmonizable contradictions; (3) a simultaneous openness both to the “lowest” reaches of Brazilian popular culture and to the high reaches of the transnational avant-garde; (4) the parodic interrogation of Brazil’s foundational myths and icons; (5) the audacious taking on of momentous historical questions such as slavery, syncretism, and transcultural relations; (6) a transtemporal and contrapuntal aesthetic; and (7) a refusal of the norms of correctness in favor of the transformation of the very criteria of taste. Rather than aspire to technical correctness, the Tropicalists preferred to make productive “mistakes” while forging a new revolutionary set of criteria rooted both in the avant-garde and in popular culture.
While Tropicália takes the entire world as its province, it does not create “world music,” that bland concoction that channels music from the Global South into Northern markets, touching lightly on ethnicity while dodging painful issues of appropriation and racism. At its most radical, Tropicália nourishes a full-throated dissonance. In this sense, it echoes and instantiates some of the part serious, part tongue-in-cheek principles of the movement (led by Ned Sublette) called “Postmamboism” (from Kikongo imbu, as “word,” “law,” “song,” or “important matter”) as the “portable theory that places music at the center of understanding and uses music to interrogate other fields of study.” Although applicable to other musics, Postmamboism “begins with the study of African and African diaspora musics, given their historical centrality to the music of the world and their deep connection through slavery, neoslavery, and liberation struggles and expands to fundamental questions of colonialism, capitalism and civilization.”54
Here we look closely at specific songs addressing diasporic flows around the Atlantic. The Caetano CD Noites do Norte, for example, constitutes a musical meditation on slavery and its sequels, moving from the Nigeria of “Two Naira Fifty Kobo” and the Angola of “Congo Benguela Monjolo Cabinda Mina” to the Brazil of “slave auctions” and “sugar cane fields forever,” as well as to the call for revolt with “Zumbi” and later the ambivalent abolitionism of Joaquim Nabuco in “Noites do Norte,” on to blacks celebrating abolition in “13 de Maio.” The musical genre chosen for each song—an animated samba de roda for “13 de Maio”; a melancholy-romantic lied style for the musicalization of Nabuco’s reflections on slavery; and stylized dissonant-modernist rap music for “Haiti”—conveys a social intonation and perspective.55 In short, the CD reaches back in time and outward in space to compose a veritable musical essay on the history of the Afro-diaspora.
The song “Haiti,” in its treatment of the theme of police brutality, conveys in poetic form a sense of the intersectionalities of race and class in a country like Brazil, a sense of how race becomes “the modality in which class is lived” (Stuart Hall).56 The lyrics recount an episode in which Caetano himself played a role. Just as he was being presented with a “Citizenship Award” on a stage overlooking Salvador’s historic Pelourinho Square, Caetano saw mostly black police beating up a mostly black or mestizo or poor white crowd. The song begins,
When you are invited to go up to the roof
Of the Jorge Amado Foundation
And see from above the line of soldiers, almost all of them black
Hitting on the nape of the neck
Black hustlers, mulatto thieves, and others almost white
But treated like blacks
Only in order to show to the others almost black
(and they are almost all black)
And to the almost white but poor as blacks
How it is that blacks, poor people, and mulattos are treated
Caetano begins by acknowledging his own privileged position as honored citizen and middle-class observer—he is not the one being beaten. At the same time, his lyrics ventriloquize, in what Bakhtin would call “double-voiced discourse,” a racist voice expressive of the doxa about how blacks are “supposed to be treated.” The song treats race in a conjunctural and antiessentialist manner, since even poor and marginalized whites can be treated like blacks. Yet blackness remains the default position of oppressability, the “floor” of social deprivation.
Caetano’s music generally orchestrates counterpoints of musical genres, each with their own social overtones. “Haiti,” in this sense, encodes cultural tensions and syncretisms in the manner of “national allegory,” not only through lyrics but also through melody, harmony, and percussion. The song stages the power relations between Europe and Africa, between the cello and the surdo, between melody and percussion, between the Big House and the Slave Quarters. The European-derived cello is used in an Africanized way, as a percussive instrument, and it yelps with anthropomorphic pain just as the lyrics mention the police blows on the nape of neck of the persons being beaten. The décor of the performance on the DVD, with a hint of a fencing in the black percussionists, evokes a mild Brazilian separationism.
And it doesn’t matter if the eyes of the entire world
Are at that moment focused on that Square
Where slaves were punished
And today a drumming, a drumming
With the purity of uniformed schoolchildren on parade day
And the epic grandeur of a people in formation
Attracts us, amazes us, and stimulates us
All that has no importance
Not the lens from the Fantastic Show
Not the Paul Simon CD
No one, no one is a citizen
And if you go to the party in Pelourinho
And if you don’t go
Think about Haiti, pray for Haiti
Haiti is here, Haiti is not here
The song’s refrain—“Haiti is here, Haiti is not here”—signifies on a famous phrase from Brazilian literary critic Sílvio Romero. Almost a century after the Haitian Revolution, on the eve of abolition, Romero, still frightened by what was for him the “spectre” of the Haitian Revolution, said that “Brazil is not, and should not become, a Haiti”—that is, there should be no revolution and no end of slavery. The song lyrics link Brazil to Haiti as a double site, both of a black revolutionary past and of a neocolonized present place where black police beat up black people. The lyrics also recall the legacy of slavery and the pillory as the site of disciplinary punishments—Pelourinho, after all, refers to the pillory used as part of a disciplinary spectacle during slavery. But now the whipping post has given way to mass incarceration and police murder, where “no one is a citizen.” (Here Caetano plays with the double, even opposite meanings of cidadão [citizen] in Brazilian Portuguese, both as the bare-life unprotected rights-less individual and as the societally endowed rights-bearing person.) At the same time, the lyrics and the percussive style evoke the sounds of resistance in the drumming of Afro-blocos such as Olodum, whose “epic grandeur dazzles us.” Yet such culturalist strength is ultimately insufficient when citizenship is so fragile and “no one is a citizen.” And it does not matter that Lente Fantástico (a Globo network program) visits Salvador or that Paul Simon collaborates with Olodum to make The Rhythm of the Saints.
The music is interrupted by a dramatic announcement concerning the 1992 massacre of prisoners at Carandiru prison:
And when you hear the smiling silence of São Paulo
During the Massacre …
111 defenseless prisoners, but prisoners are almost all black
Or almost black, or almost white almost black because so poor
And poor people are like rotten people and everyone knows how blacks are treated
And when you take a trip around the Caribbean
And when you fuck without a condom
And offer your intelligent contribution to the embargo of Cuba
Think about Haiti, pray for Haiti
Haiti is here, Haiti is not here
The effect of the pause in the music is of an eruption of the real into a musical entertainment, as if to say, “We interrupt this performance to announce a catastrophe.” The show must not go on. The song is declaimed, moreover, in a Brazilian variation on the rap style associated with black Americans but also linked to Brazilian traditions such as embolada, repente, and “talking sambas.” In its principled incivility, the rap style “breaks” with the gentler harmonies of bossa nova and the suave discourses of “racial democracy.” The aggressivity contrasts even with the sweetness of Caetano’s song about surfers (“Menino do Rio”), whose refrain—“Hawaii, be here”—the song both echoes and transforms. Here relations are no longer cordial, and the music is no longer sweet; instead we find the politicization of avant-gardist dissonance.
The music video of the Gilberto Gil song “Mão de Limpeza” (Hand of Cleanliness) also deconstructs the racial doxa, this time by resignifying and carnivalizing what would usually be seen as a hopelessly compromised performance mode of blackface. As performed by Gil and Chico Buarque, the song’s lyrics satirically upend a racist Brazilian proverb:
They say that when blacks don’t make a mess at the entrance
They make it at the exit
Imagine!
But the slave mother spent her life
Cleaning up the mess that whites made
Imagine!
What a damned lie!
Even after slavery was abolished
Blacks continued cleaning clothes
And scrubbing floors
How the blacks worked and suffered!
Imagine!
Black is the hand of cleanliness
Of life consumed at the side of the stove
Black is the hand that puts food on the table
And cleans with soap and water
Black is the hand of immaculate purity
They say when blacks don’t make a mess at the entrance
They make it at the exit
Imagine!
What a damned lie!
Look at the filthy white guy
Gil’s song provokes a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt; it estranges the racist common sense, asking us to imagine how anyone could ever have associated blackness with dirtiness. Within a Brechtian “separation of the elements,” the gaiety of the music exists in tension with the gravity of the topic. The visuals, meanwhile, recuperate an “incorrect” stereotype within an anti-illusionistic chromatic schema that plays on and subverts the black/white dichotomy. The phenotypically white singer Chico Buarque appears in blackface and is dressed in black, while the black Gil appears in whiteface and is dressed in white. In cultural terms, the references are both to the boneca de pixe (tar doll) tradition in Brazil and to the racist North American tradition of minstrelsy. In the United States, the practice of blackface has been highly fraught, as evidenced by the confused reactions to the satirical use of blackface in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.57 “Mão de Limpeza” reconfigures the old racist representational practice by counterpointing blackface with whiteface. Historically, blackface was unilateral—there was no whiteface—and white spectators often took the representation as “authentic.” But here the choice of performance mode comes not from white media entrepreneurs but from the black artist himself. In a sly Brazilian rewrite of the costumed inversions of Genet’s Les Nègres, the song overturns the racist binarism that equates blackness with dirtiness; blackness now connotes immaculate purity, while whiteness connotes the dirtiness of the branco sujão (filthy white guy). At the same time, the stylized performance itself implies the transcendence of the black/white binarism emphasized by the mise-en-scene: the two singers are obviously friends having a splendid time while playing at a kind of carnival. The racism of the proverb does not mean that whites and blacks cannot be friends or fight together against racism.
Already in the 1980s, Gil was commenting musically on the favored postcolonial theme of cultural hybridity. Gil’s “From Bob Dylan to Bob Marley: Samba Provocation” poetically addresses the intercultural transit of ideas back and forth across the Black Atlantic, in this case between Brazil, Jamaica, North America, and Africa. The song’s subtitle designates it as a “provocation samba,” a play on the Vargas-era “exaltation sambas” that lauded Brazilian heroes. The “provocation” here is to exalt not the nation-state but rather Afro-diasporic hybridity. The lyrics go as follows:
Soon after Bob Dylan converted to Christianity
He made a reggae album as a form of compensation
He abandoned the Jewish people
But returned to them while heading in the wrong direction …
When the peoples of Africa arrived in Brazil
There was no freedom of religion …
As a result, Africans in Brazil adopted Our Lord of Bomfim
An act both of resistance and surrender
The refrain:
Bob Marley died
Because besides being black
He was Jewish
Michael Jackson, meanwhile
Is still around
But besides becoming white
He’s become very sad
The song explores the “roots” and “routes” of Afro-diasporic culture, ranging easily, in a musical version of magic realism, over five centuries and diverse continents, orchestrating a creative counterpoint between the early 16th century—“when Africans arrived in Brazil”—and the late 20th-century era of Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Michael Jackson. The allusion to a putative Dylan reggae album through which he returned to the Jewish people clearly references Rastafarianism as an Afro-diasporic religion imbued with Jewish symbologies (the “Lion of Judah,” “Babylon,” and so forth); Dylan, leaving Judaism, returned to it through the sacred music of Jamaica. “When the peoples of Africa arrived in Brazil,” Gil goes on, “there was no freedom of religion.” Significantly, Gil’s lyrics speak not of “blacks” but of the “peoples of Africa,” since the reifying totalization of “blacks” was itself the product of colonialism and slavery. The values of religious freedom and tolerance, the song reminds us, did not extend to African or indigenous religions in the Americas. Given this lack of freedom, “Africans in Brazil adopted Our Lord of Bomfim, an act both of resistance and surrender.” The final refrain indexes two forms of syncretism, one in the form of the music of Bob Marley and the other in the more melancholy and compromised form of Michael Jackson: “Bob Marley died / Because besides being black / He was Jewish / Michael Jackson, meanwhile / Is still around / But besides becoming white / He’s become very sad.” In sum, the song allegorically contemplates one set of times and spaces through another set of times and spaces, in a suggestive contrapuntal haunting across national and epochal boundaries.
If Gil’s “provocation samba” relationalizes blackness and Jewishness, Caetano’s 1977 song “Um Índio” places in relation the indigenous past, present, and future. “An Indian” not only is written in the prophetic genre but also turned out to be literally prophetic of the indigenous resurgence that has been taking place since the 1970s throughout the Red Atlantic. Some of the lyrics go as follows:
From a shining colored star will descend an Indian
From a star that spins with dazzling velocity
A star that will lodge in the heart of America in an instant of clarity
An Indian preserved in his full physical presence
In solid, in gas, in atoms, words, soul, color, in gesture, in smell, in shadow, in light,
in magnificent sound
As a spot equidistant between the Atlantic and the Pacific
The Indian will descend from a resplendent object
And the thing that I know he will say I do not know how to say explicitly
And what is to be revealed at that moment to the people
Will surprise everyone by not being exotic
And by its power to have always remained hidden
When in fact it was obvious
With uncanny prescience, “Um Índio” sets to music the theme of the transnational flow of ideas around the figure of the Indian. Encoding indigenous ideas about stars and astronomy, and specifically the idea that culture heroes become constellations, the Indian pictured arrives in the guise of a visitor from another planet, in a spaceship reminiscent of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The song portrays a Columbus-like “discovery” in reverse, in terms that recall both native legends and blockbuster science fiction. But this time the “god who arrives from afar” is not European but indigenous, foreshadowing a passage in Tropical Truth in which Caetano speaks of “another discovery, this time mutual, in which the heart inclines more toward the Indian than toward Cabral.”58
The song scrambles various genres (prophecy, science fiction, Indianist poetry), while at the same time resuscitating the Enlightenment topos, found in Raynal and Diderot, of the “New World Avenger,” the Indian or black Spartacus who comes to redeem suffering peoples. The reference to the “most advanced of technologies,” meanwhile, subverts any primitivist nostalgia by calling up not only Oswald de Andrade’s “indio tecnizado” but also contemporary Indians who use technology to outwit the powerful, for example, the activist-politicians such as Juruna with his tape recorder registering political promises, since “politicians always lie to the Indians.”
“Um Índio,” in this sense, brings together many of our themes. The song’s transnational references draw on the taproot of indigenous culture (the reading of the night’s starry face for signs and omens), on 19th-century Indianism (Peri), as well as on 20th-century modernism. Ever the overturner of hierarchies, Caetano imagines the redemptive figure of the Red Avenger in pop-cultural terms, as a multiracial amalgam of postmodern culture heroes: first, Muhammad Ali, African American boxer and war resister who converted to Islam and whose transnational genealogy goes back to Africa, through an imposed European (slave) name—Cassius Clay—and finally to an Arabic/Islamic name; second, Peri, the pure romantic Indian from Alencar’s Indianist novel O Guarani, valued here for his passion but not for his role as collaborator; third, Bruce Lee, an Asian master of a millennial martial art, with an Anglo-American name; and finally, the axé (Yoruba for “energy”) of the afoxé (Africanized Carnival percussion group), composed mainly of black people from Bahia, which named itself “Sons of Gandhi” in 1948, a year after Indian independence, in an homage to a pacifist Indian leader (Mahatma Gandhi) by a Carnival bloco whose costumes were modeled on the imperial film Gunga Din.
These Tropicália songs offer a relational perspective on cultural crossings around the Black and Red Atlantic. They suggest the socially anticipatory power of music to provide metaphors and models for a more equal society. Tropicália shows how music can transfigure historical relationalities by staging multicultural conflicts and connections in ways that complement the methods of written history and the social sciences. Artists such as Caetano and Gil display a chameleonic ability to move easily between various cultural repertoires, to negotiate multiple worlds in a ludic dance of identities reminiscent of Carnival and Candomblé. They “perform” the cultural debates in visual, sensuous, and percussive form. Artistic practices here are not mere mirrors of identity; rather, they are communicative events that shape, critique, and fashion new forms of identity and identification. Music and art create new registers of feeling and new forms of social subjectivity. In the music of Tropicália, one hears not only the musical memory of pain and discrimination but also proleptic tones of a social utopia, communicating a visceral and kinetic sense of what freedom and equality might feel like in a society shorn of its oppressive features.
In this light, it is worth contemplating the political productivity of popular music as a source for mobilizing socially collaborative tropes such as polyphony, polyrhythms, call-and-response, and counterpoint. One could conceive of a transnational orchestration of a coalitionary “movement of movements,” the political equivalent of a jazz-like ensemble—Wynton Marsalis’s “jazz democracy”—a def-poetry jam of strong and diverse voices, or a Carnival of blocos and samba schools. The norm of a single nation or culture implies marginalization of other subnations or parallel nations within the “multination state.” But in musical polyphony, the flute does not “win” over the guitar, nor the trumpet over the bass, nor melody over percussion. Tropicália, in this sense, shows music’s capacity to give pleasurable, kinetic shape to social desire, to mobilize feeling in a mass-mediated form. In terms of our more immediate purposes in this book, it exemplifies an artistic form of thinking that goes beyond fixed and monolithic notions of culture to explore the linked analogies of the cultures of the Rainbow Atlantic.
Race studies, (multi)cultural studies, and to an extent postcolonial studies have been a much more accepted part of Brazilian scholarship than they have been in France. Brazilian scholarship constantly engages, for example, the mantra of race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire. The Brazilian equivalent of the Modern Language Association, ABRALIC, at its 2000 conference in Salvador, Bahia, featured four frequently cited figures in race and postcolonial studies: Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Robert Young. Most young Brazilian academics in the humanities are comfortable—some critics would say too comfortable—with estudos culturais (cultural studies) while slightly more ambivalent about multiculturalism, both for the pretentiousness of the “-ism” and for its perceived North American provenance.
It would be inaccurate to see this efflorescence of scholarship as in any way an epiphenomenon of Anglo-American influence. First, (multi)cultural studies is a worldwide current with many points of origin, part of a broader democratization of culture that moves from Arnoldian elitist conceptions of culture as the “best that has been thought and written” to anthropological conceptions of culture as the way everyday people live and think. Second, Brazilian (multi)cultural studies build on Brazilian intellectual traditions: 1920s modernism with its appeal to popular culture as a source for art; the 1930s Freyrean exploration of such varied phenomena as cuisine, folklore, and sexuality; and Tropicália and Cinema Novo in the 1960s, with their rejection of the high-art/low-art hierarchy. Many of the artistic movements had in common an aesthetic based on the erudite reelaboration of popular materials, such as samba and cordel literature, and the indigenization of out-of-place ideas. The ground for “cultural studies,” then, was richly prepared in Brazil; the phrase merely provided a rubric for energies and movements already well under way in the moving depths of the culture.
Recent years have also featured a remarkable surge of Brazilian scholarship on race and racism, generating such titles as Racism in Brazil; Racisms and Anti-racisms in Brazil: Ethnic Pluralism and Multiculturalism; Removing the Mask: Essays on Racism in Brazil; Media and Racism; Media and Ethnicity in Brazil and the U.S.; Negritude, Cinema, and Education; Multiculturalism: The Thousand and One Faces of Education; The Social Psychology of Racism; Race as Rhetoric; The Persistence of Race; and Racism: Explained to My Children. The collection Removing the Mask: Essays on Racism in Brazil, edited by Brazilian Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães and American Lynn Huntley privileges comparative, diasporic, and transnational perspectives. The trope of the “mask” in the title is itself Afrodiasporic, simultaneously evoking Du Bois, Fanon, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, whose poem “we use the mask that laughs and lies” serves as epigraph to the volume. Part of the Comparative Human Relations Initiative, linked to various Brazilian institutions along with the Southern Education Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Institute for the Development of South Africa, the volume proposes a comparative study of race in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa. Despite nuances (more or less mixing, more or less tension), the three countries share salient points: historical legacies of colonialism and slavery, racially diversified populations, discrimination toward blacks, and rationalizations that explain away inequality.
Helio Santos speaks in his essay of various aspects of racial subordination in Brazil: the absence of blacks in advertising and television commercials; police abuse of “nonwhite subcitizens”; the denial of black historical agency in conventional pedagogy; and the left’s dismissal of race as less urgent than class. He salutes the various manifestations of black activism in Brazil: the Palmares Cultural Foundation; the black movement within the Catholic Church; the nongovernmental organization Geledes (Institute of the Black Woman); the Afroblocos in Salvador, Bahia; the Black Culture Research Institute; and so forth. In “Reflections on the Black Movement in Brazil, 1938–1997,” Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Larkin Nascimento trace the history of black activism in the 20th century, going back to the 1910 “Revolt of the Whip” (the struggle against corporeal punishment in the navy led by the “Black Admiral” João Cândido). The authors cite various cases of discrimination against African American notables (anthropologist Irene Diggs, choreographer Katherine Dunham, singer Marian Anderson), along with an “International Seminar on African Culture,” sponsored by UNESCO and the Brazilian government, to which no blacks were invited.
Another 2002 collection, titled Race as Rhetoric: The Construction of Difference, edited by Yvonne Maggie and Claudia Barcellos Rezende, features Brazilian, American, Belgian, South African, British, and Italian scholars. In the preface, Peter Fry argues that “racial democracy” is not a “mask” for racism but rather a “utopian projection.”59 Anthropologist Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha, meanwhile, unpacks the racial politics of the putatively democratic space of Rio’s famous beaches. She focalizes the media portrayal of the October 1992 Arrastão (dragnet), when hundreds of young favelados and suburbanos (residents of the poorer Northern Zone of Rio) frightened the usually dominant middle-class whites from Ipanema. “The arrival of summer,” in Cunha’s words, “foreshadowed chaos and violence through the explosive combination of young ‘suburbanos,’ theft, music, and confusion on the burning sands of a crowded Ipanema beach.”60 For Cunha, the media represented the incident as “a sample of the danger posed by the out-of-control horde uninhibitedly defying the subtle borders of Carioca sociability.”61 While a deracialized vocabulary described the participants as “vandals,” “marginals,” and “gangs,” any telespectator could easily see that most of the participants were nonwhite. “The question of color was omnipresent, but in a mode of denegation.”62 In the next chapter, we will further explore the issue of denegation in relation to reparations, Affirmative Action, and whiteness studies.