Afro-Brazilian popular culture in Paris in 1922: Transatlantic dialogues and the racialized performance of Brazilian national identity

Abstract

This article interrogates the presence of Afro-Brazilian popular culture in Paris in 1922 in the context of bi-directional transatlantic currents between performance spaces in the French capital and in the city of Rio de Janeiro during this era. It focuses on a group of predominantly Afro-Brazilian musicians, the Oito Batutas, who performed in Paris between February and August 1922. This article highlights how transatlantic dialogues informed the performance of Brazilian “race” in Paris and Brazil in the 1920s. Via an examination of the impact that the Parisian sojourn and the cultural interactions it led to had on the Oito Batutas, both in terms of their musical repertoire and their visual style, it situates their self-representation in Paris within dominant discourses of the era surrounding black US musicians and the African continent. Taking as its point of departure Hermano Vianna's acknowledgement of the varied agents associated with samba's consecration as “national” music, the wider ambition of this article is to bring to light the central role played in this process by transatlantic currents. It argues that it was only thanks to dialogues with “black” Paris that Afro-Brazilian cultural forms, like the samba, were accepted by the Brazilian elite as quintessential elements of a homogenizing “national” culture in the 1930s. This article thus seeks to broaden our understanding of how an “Atlantic” perspective, and more specifically a focus on the Paris-Rio axis, can explain and nuance the shifts in racial self-definition that took place in Brazil in the 1920s, paving the way for samba's canonization as “national” rhythm during the regime of President Getúlio Vargas (between 1930 and 1945).