The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil (review)

The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil. By Hermano Vianna. Translated by John Charles Chasteen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Notes. Index. xx, 147. Cloth, $34.95. Paper, 15.95.

This fascinating and elegant study of transformations in attitudes about race, popular culture, and national identity in Brazil suffers from a misleading title. It is not a book about samba, and to the degree that it is a mystery story it is unsatisfying, for it fails to offer a convincing explanation of the mystery to which the title refers (how samba evolved from a marginal genre of a few predominantly black neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro into the most prominent symbol of Brazilianness). What it does offer is a lucid and concise explanation of the sudden intellectual embrace, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, of miscegenation as the wellspring of a unique Brazilian cultural vitality.

This embrace depended on, first, the inversion of a century of gloomy racist lamentation over the pernicious effects of African influence on the Brazilian body politic; and second, the nimble intellectual deployment of hybridity as a basis for exclusivity--the imagination of a recombinant cultural DNA as the source of national identity required that certain sequences be privileged, and others left out, of the recombination. It is well known that Gilberto Freyre was the key thinker behind this shift and the most influential spokesman of the new exaltation of Afro-Brazilian folk and popular culture. Freyre's The Masters and the Slaves, first published in 1933, was the revolutionary statement that brought together several strains of thought, and in doing so completely recast the national debate on miscegenation.

Vianna illuminates this process largely through discussion of context--he places Freyre among a group of like-minded intellectuals and locates prior manifestation of similar ideas without losing sight of the importance of Freyre's innovations. Vianna suggests that Freyre was the most important of several "transcultural mediators"--those serving as conduits between, for example, the black samba musicians of Rio's poor neighborhoods and the white intellectuals of its salons. The other mediators he chooses to emphasize, such as the French intellectual Blaise Cendrars and the romantic troubadour Catulo de Paixão Cearense are well known, but Vianna brings verve and fresh insight to his analysis, and chooses unfamiliar episodes to illustrate his arguments (beginning with the 1926 meeting between Freyre's crowd and a group of popular musicians that serves to introduce the book).

Through this discussion of mediators, Vianna skillfully explains the intellectual transformation that partially paved the way for the adoption of samba as the national rhythm. But as he notes, intellectual transformation was only one among several coinciding processes resulting in samba's exaltation. Transformations in politics, industry and, most importantly, within the world of samba itself--the community defined by the genre's composers, musicians and producers--were also fundamental. The author mentions these processes and gives a glimpse of their workings, but offers no sustained discussion of any aspect of samba as a musical genre (rather than an amorphous cultural idea). His brief descriptions of samba composers and their work lack the nuance and insight he brings to his consideration of Freyre and cohort, giving this book an unbalanced feel. The absence of analysis of samba itself is not a consideration of space--Vianna devotes a chapter to an interesting but perhaps inapposite discussion of Brazilian rock and bloco afro. Rather, it seems a question of a lack of familiarity. In the original Brazilian publication, Vianna included a crucial caveat excusing this imbalance, explaining, "This is not a book about samba." In the translated edition, this caveat is greatly watered-down and offset by a new author's preface promising that this is, indeed, "a book about samba" (p. xviii). The promise alone will not make it so.

This criticism notwithstanding...