Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil by Marc Hertzman (review)

Making Samba offers a substantial, indeed superb, contribution to the already robust literature about the birth of samba in the aftermath of slavery in Brazil and its rise to the status of national rhythm by the early twentieth century. Hertzman brings in a previously unexplored set of sources and stories about musicians, with ample details of their contracts, salary structures, and negotiations; their activism in professional associations; and their manifold encounters with police, the state, and various regulatory bodies as they struggled to define and claim music as intellectual property. In doing so he moves the analysis of samba and its relationship to Brazilian racial politics, and beyond the realm of symbolic ownership or belonging. Instead, Hertzman combines cultural, legal, and economic history to uncover new perspectives on the gritty business of “making samba,” placing Afro-Brazilian musician-entrepreneurs at its center.

Hertzman traces the musical forms that became samba from the period immediately following abolition, when the state subjected popular sectors (from which most Afro-Brazilian musicians hailed) to vagrancy laws, labor regulation, and other racialized forms of social control. He follows the slow and uneven development of a regime of author’s rights in the middle decades of the century in an era of state consolidation, taking us to the resignification of samba as “pure,” noncommercial, and non-conflictual in the turbulent context of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Individual chapters move back and forth within this chronological framework to examine specific people, institutions, and processes. Across these chapters, Hertzman presents and returns to the lives of key Afro-Brazilian figures associated with samba to provide continuity and context.

Readers might come for the music, but they will come away with new insights about racial activism and “racial democracy” in modern Brazil. Among the many lasting injustices of the transatlantic slave trade is the difficulty that people of African descent—long conceived as property—have faced in claiming material and discursive ownership of their bodies and selves, of the fruits of their manual or intellectual labor, and of their individual and group representations. In particular, across the Americas, white(r) elites often treated the cultural and creative work of Afro-descendants as “raw material” for their own creations, minimizing and even ridiculing thinkers, musicians, authors, and artists of African descent as imitative and derivative, or at best, begrudgingly recognizing their efforts as evidence of naïve “natural talent.” By building his story around the practical and philosophical challenges Afro-Brazilian musicians faced as they attempted to claim legal and discursive ownership of their works—their struggles to be recognized and remunerated as authors and respected as legitimate economic and cultural stakeholders in the modern nation—Hertzman puts his finger on one of the central dynamics shaping Afro-Brazilians’ fight for full citizenship in post-abolition Brazil.

Hertzman deftly shows how Afro-Brazilian musicians sought to navigate multiple sets of behavioral expectations that severely limited their fields of action and their chances of full belonging. Musicians had to balance definitions of cultural authenticity that called for “emotional raw black music” against their own desires to be taken seriously as masterful composers and performers and to avoid the caricatured role of the “good Negro”; similarly, anti-vagrancy campaigns targeting supposedly dissolute and improvident former slaves pushed Afro-Brazilian musicians to show themselves as professional and manly, but they had to balance these performances against too much entrepreneurialism (read as greedy and inauthentic) and too much manliness (violent and dangerous).

In almost all cases, earning cultural capital and earning financial capital were mutually exclusive propositions. Hertzman shows us how different musicians charted paths through these treacherous waters, and how their particular compromises shaped their careers. Hertzman highlights agency within constraints without glorifying these musicians as individuals or as a group. Indeed, the book exposes the relentless strains that these battles for dignified self-fashioning placed on individuals, interpersonal relationships...