White Face, Black Mask: Africaneity and the Early Social History of Popular Music in Brazil by Darién Davis (review)

“In a country where miscegenation played a significant role in most family histories, who qualifies as Afro-Brazilian and what constitutes ‘Afro-Brazilian contribution’ to popular music?” (1) This question, posed on the first page of Darién Davis’s study of Brazilian popular music during the first half of the twentieth century, is more complex than one might imagine. Should the criteria be based on color and phenotype? Or musical genre and performance style? How might we understand the role of white artists who achieved fame and fortune performing “black” music? How does “blackness,” or as Davis prefers “Africaneity,” figure into discourses of national culture alongside the more familiar tropes of mestiçagem? What are the particular configurations of race and gender in the represenation of Afro-Brazilian culture, both at home and abroad? And how have these artists been memorialized and remembered?

Davis tells a now familiar story of post-abolition Rio de Janeiro and the rise of popular genres such as choro, maxixe, and eventually samba in the working-class neighborhoods near the city center. He focuses on the key role of well-known “black pioneers” such as Pixinguinha, Donga, João da Baiana, but also highlights the contributions of elite white artists such as Chiquinha Gonzaga, a brilliant composer of polcas, choros, and carnival marchas, as well as light-skinned mulatos (or mestiços) such as the piano genius, Sinhô. As others have previously shown, samba emerged in predominantly black working-class urban milieu, but flourished in multiracial and socially diverse contexts. Davis notes that “white popular singers with strong, legitimate, and intimate connections to Afro-Brazilian cultural roots would become the most important cultural icons” (xvii). Celebrated by modernist artists and intellectuals (often oriented by the Parisian vogue for primitivism) and endorsed by the state, samba was consecrated as a symbol of national identity in the 1930s. Stylized and orchestrated forms of samba artists attracted a mass audience thanks largely to the remarkable expansion of radio and considerable institutional support from local and national governments during the nationalist-populist Vargas era. Davis quotes sambista Ismael Silva, who once remarked that “samba does not recognize any racial distinctions, but does show that its colors are yellow and green” (15).

Yet Davis is keenly attentive to the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of discrimination that impeded the careers of black artists as white performers such as Carmen and Aurora Miranda, Francisco Alves, and Mário Reis found adoring audiences on the national stage. The popularity of black popular music typically did not bring material rewards or career opportunities to Afro-Brazilian artists. Davis observes that mulato artists such as Dorival Caymmi, Orlando Silva, Aracy Cortes, and Araci de Almeida, found greater opportunities than dark-skinned performers, but were still not as successful as white performers, especially those from the working or lower middle classes. This will be a familiar story to North American readers who are aware of the history of popular music in the U.S. and its own forms of racial privilege and proximity. Indeed, Davis draws an unusual, but interesting comparison between Elvis Presley and Francisco Alves, Brazil’s “King of the Voice” during the thirties and forties, who grew up in a working-class community (he was raised in Rio’s bohemian quarter, Lapa) in close proximity to black culture (94).

Carmen Miranda, of course, went on to become a Hollywood star in the 1940s with a performance style that drew heavily from Afro-Brazilian performance and sartorial styles, while also satisfying North American expectations for a hot-blooded, comical Latina stereotype. One of Davis’s more remarkable claims is that Miranda “actually performed in blackface” with her vocal style, dress, and gestural vocabulary (79). It seems, however, that a distinction should be made here. It’s one thing to emulate distinctive performance qualities popularly associated with...