Shifting the Meaning of Democracy: Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil. By Jessica Lynn Graham (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2019) 392 pp. $85.00 cloth $39.95 paper

Abstract

This important study “analyzes the…emergence of racially inclusive nationalisms” as dominant state narratives in Brazil and the United States between 1930 and 1945. Graham looks at how this shift occurred and the way that it related to concepts of democracy and to the relations between the two countries, especially during World War II. Graham refers to articulations of inclusive race-based nationalism as “racial democracy,” which she applies to both Brazil and the United States in this period (6–7). This study focuses almost entirely on political narrative and its relationship to the political and economic context of the time. Graham does not analyze the actual conditions related to race in either country but only the political narratives of the time and how they related to each country and to the war.Both countries used these ideas to ward off charges of being undemocratic, though in different ways. The Brazilian narrative claimed that “racial harmony” and the centrality of African-derived culture made their dictatorship under Getulio Vargas “democratic.” At the same time, the U.S. narrative suggested that its political democracy essentially legitimated its tortured race relations. Brazil and the United States worked together to legitimize each other’s racial and democratic images to strengthen their wartime alliance. They collaborated on cultural productions and supported non-action-oriented forms of racial democracy. Brazil’s demarginalization of black culture, which was part of the shift to racially inclusive nationalism, was reflected, for example, in the perception of samba as “nefarious” or witchy to a view of it as a “national treasure” legitimated by the Vargas administration. Similarly, in the United States, jazz, which mainstream society in 1922 might have slighted as “so-called music,” by the 1940s had become “the best of authentic U.S. musical culture and … project[ed] an image of a racially harmonious nation.”Graham argues convincingly that the picture of racial democracy that emerges from this study is a doctrine that “was—and is contingent upon place and time” (262); both countries based their narratives on a denial of real circumstances with regard to race and democracy. She believes that this approach to national narrative continued in both countries during the Cold War, and in Brazil was used to legitimate the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 (262). These doctrines also had the effect of identifying black activists in both countries as threats to national security. In Brazil, authorities depicted shanty towns as hotbeds of communism, and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Committee on Anti-American Activities similarly accused U.S. black activists of communism. Demarginalization may have resulted in black culture becoming more visible and some black artists becoming more prosperous, but, as Graham points out, most often through the mediation of such white entertainers as Carmen Miranda or Elvis Presley.This study’s presentation of the issues of race and democracy in the United States and Brazil carefully places the issues, and how they were viewed in each country, in dramatic historical perspective.