Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil

Six. Bodies and Minds: Mapping Africa and Brazil during the Golden Age

6 Bodies and Minds Mapping Africa and Brazil during the Golden Age In 1943, an article titled “Scientific Chronicle” appeared in the Rio de Janeiro daily Correio da Manhã. The author sought to use “science” to pinpoint samba’s origins in Africa and to suggest how a modern society like Brazil might harness and civilize a wild and savage part of its past.1 The article was hardly the first or last inquiry into samba’s genealogy. Ten years earlier, Vagalume had presented his own account in Na roda, and during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as samba became a fixture in the cultural landscape, intellectuals and artists in diverse fields—ethnomusicology (or at least what would later become known as ethnomusicology ), literature, music, and journalism—addressed collective concerns and questions related to music, Brazil, and the origins of both: Where did Brazil (and samba) come from? How could the nation’s diverse racial and ethnic heritage be harnessed and presented in such a way that would project a unique, authentic identity that was also acceptably white, civilized , and modern? In 1941, Heitor Villa-­ Lobos printed a map that addressed these very questions. Villa-­ Lobos, one of Latin America’s most accomplished and celebrated musicians, is credited with more than one hundred major works. Known for his technical excellence and creative combination of popular and classical traditions, Villa-­ Lobos mounted massive state-­ sponsored music education programs that brought together tens of thousands of children whose voices praised in unison the nation’s glory.2 He channeled his fascination with Brazil’s national and musical origins into 147 Bodies and Minds a map that he created with the assistance of a cartographer. I came upon this remarkable document only by chance and thanks to the wonderful staff at the Biblioteca Nacional. Shelved next to a speech in which he described his lifelong quest to chart the “physiognomy” of Brazilian music and declared his respect for the “value of every popular musical manifestation ,” the map reflects Villa-­Lobos’s interest in uncovering and studying Brazil’s roots and demarcating both its internal hierarchies and its external boundaries. He titled the map, which has a dizzying collection of arrows, swirling lines, coded letters, numbers, and symbols, the “Explication of the Planispheric Ethnological Diagram of the Origin of Brazilian Music” (figure 6). While the map’s focus is Brazil, the tangle of arrows and lines sketches a global picture, tying together Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Africa. Within that schema, Europe holds a special place, defined by Villa-­ Lobos as the center of “universal culture.” The majority of the map’s arrows lead to or from the continent, which is divided into multiple nations, regions, and cities. By contrast, Africa is marked with a single label, “countries of the black race,” and appears as an isolated, nearly monolithic block. While multiple “religious” and “cultural” influences flow from, into, and within Europe, the links between Africa and Figure 6. Villa-­ Lobos’s “Explication of the Planispheric Ethnological Diagram of the Origin of Brazilian Music” (1941). Courtesy Biblioteca Nacional. 148 Chapter Six the rest of the world are limited almost exclusively to “rhythm.” Arrows flow only away from Africa. Just as Villa-­ Lobos describes Africa as home to the “black race,” Asia is home to the “yellow race,” and Europe the “white race,” but he neglects to place a racial label on Brazil or any other place in the Western Hemisphere. The “autochthonous” music of South America and of “Brazilian aborigines” is, like Africa, isolated from a dynamic international matrix. Villa-­ Lobos’s map embodies several important intellectual currents. The separation of Brazil from the rest of Latin America reflects a larger desire to distinguish the nation from other postcolonial American countries . Villa-­ Lobos draws no connections between Africa and Cuba, Haiti, or Jamaica. This elision makes sense only in the particular context of the map, which elevates Brazil while marginalizing Central, South, and North America. (The Caribbean is conveniently included as part of Central America.) Brazil’s African lineage does not link it to a larger diaspora, and instead distinguishes it from other American nations. Villa-­ Lobos shows Brazil to be distant from Africa but in control of an American monopoly of one caricatured “African” trait—rhythm—represented by the number 2. Villa-­ Lobos’s map also has characteristics common to larger projects to study Afro-­ Brazilian culture and history. Beginning...