Hybridity Brazilian Style: Samba, Carnaval, and the Myth of “Racial Democracy” in Rio de Janeiro

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Hybridity Brazilian Style: Samba, Carnaval, and the Myth of “Racial Democracy” in Rio de Janeiro Natasha Pravaz

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Department of Anthropology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Available online: 05 Feb 2008

To cite this article: Natasha Pravaz (2008): Hybridity Brazilian Style: Samba, Carnaval, and the Myth of “Racial Democracy” in Rio de Janeiro, Identities, 15:1, 80-102 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10702890701801841

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 15:80–102, 2008 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 online DOI: 10.1080/10702890701801841

Hybridity Brazilian Style: Samba, Carnaval, and the Myth of “Racial Democracy” in Rio de Janeiro

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Natasha Pravaz Department of Anthropology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Through ethnographic and historical inquiry, this article inspects the usefulness of the concept of hybridity for an analysis of Rio’s samba and carnaval. If differentiated from mestiçagem, the concept of hybridity can productively be put to use.

The discourse on mestiçagem is the basis for dominant narratives of national identity and celebrates samba and other Afro-Brazilian cultural forms as symbols of Brazilianness and racial democracy. Such political use of culture was initiated

by President Vargas’s appropriation of subaltern performance genres in his populist project of modernity. At the same time, as expressions of Afro-Brazilian culture, samba and carnaval are contested performances; many celebrate the “racially democratic” character of samba spaces as a core domain of Afro-Brazilian sociability.

This article traces the roots of samba and carnaval in Rio de Janeiro and examines their current import for a politics of identity by drawing from interviews and fieldwork at escola de samba Unidos da Cereja. The article stresses the methodological importance of addressing multiple practices and voices emerging in the context of samba performances. The concept of hybridity can thus describe Afro-Brazilians’ use of culture in the negotiation of power imbalances and alternative values.

Key Words: hybridity, mestiçagem, samba, Brazil

Held in a hangar-like structure fitting over two thousand persons at a time, the rehearsals of escola de samba (samba school) Unidos da Cereja begin at around 10 P.M. and go until 3:30 or 4 A.M. in the morning.1 Escolas are samba bands that parade during carnaval. The temperature at these events can reach anywhere between 35 and 40°C, helped by the sheer mass of bodies in feverish movement, dancing to the sound of 250 percussion players and a lead singer, who repeats the samba-enredo (theme song) numerous times until everyone in attendance knows it by heart. The rehearsals of escolas are largerthan-life samba night-clubs that come alive in the months leading up to carnaval, and I attended these events on a regular basis as part of my doctoral fieldwork on racialization processes within the context of samba and carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. Members of the local, usually 80

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poor, neighborhoods and middle-class fans alike attend these rehearsals, and pay considerable amounts of money for a costume to parade with their escola of choice on carnaval weekend. It is at this time of the year that the poor inhabitants of the favelas descem o morro (come down from the hills) and take over Rio’s downtown, in what has been characterized by many as a “ritual of reversal.”2 In terms of social distribution of wealth, Brazil is one of the most unequal societies in the world. Moreover, as Hasenbalg and Silva (1988, 1999) have shown, this inequality clearly expresses itself as a racial divide, with Brazilians of Native and African descent being systematically negated access to wealth and power. Recent ethnographies of the Brazilian landscape illustrate this point clearly, whether referring to urban Afro-Brazilians or rural indigenous communities, and show how these groups attempt to resist social injustices (see Goldstein 2003; Sheriff 2001; Twine 1998; Warren 2001). Rio reflects the race and class divide geographically in the Zona Sul and the Zona Norte, or South and North regions, respectively. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the previously rural Zona Sul has been progressively populated by a growing white upper-middle class, who enjoys easy access to the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana and a close view of the internationally-known morros (hills) of Corcovado and the Sugar Loaf. The Zona Norte, on the other hand, gradually expanded to encompass several smaller municipalities and is home to the largest working-class, under- and unemployed population in the country, second only to São Paulo. This region is also the hottest in the city, with the cool sea breeze blocked by the hill range separating Zona Sul from Zona Norte. The poorest among the poor who are fortunate enough to have a home live on the morros, in the favelas, on public land where no property taxes are collected. With a majority of its population of Afro-Brazilian descent, the morros and the Zona Norte are home to samba and to the city’s renowned escolas de samba.

A vast majority of the population is not only dispossessed of access to resources but also severely policed by the forces of “law and order.”3 In fact, as João Costa Vargas (2004) clearly shows, racism and police brutality go hand-in-hand in Rio de Janeiro. It was my class status and white privilege that gave me the possibility of navigating the different social realms of Rio de Janeiro’s life, a right only conferred to the urban poor of African descent in the fleeting days of carnaval. And yet, this ritual of status reversal has been progressively transformed through the commodification and spectacalization promoted by federal and municipal governments and the show-business industry since the 1930s. This process is probably what has made samba so appealing (and available for consumption) to people such as myself and to the

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vast Brazilian white middle class who claims that samba is a symbol of their national identity. Nonetheless, according to Brazilian intellectuals such as Haroldo Costa, the appeal of samba to the white middle class speaks less of cultural appropriation and more of the racially democratic nature of samba spaces, as I discuss below. This democratic sociability, albeit contested, can be read as an ethically superior domain vis-à-vis the racist character of Brazilian society at large (still dominated by the fantasy that it is “racially democratic”).

To grasp the importance of both samba and carnaval as contested expressions of both Afro-Brazilian culture and national identity, it is necessary to contextualize these practices in their local specificity, and within their socio-political history. This article traces the recent roots of samba and carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. It ethnographically examines their current import for a politics of identity by drawing from my fieldwork at escola de samba Unidos da Cereja and from the narratives of people involved in the world of samba. Analyzing the political uses of culture, I also discuss President Vargas’s appropriation of Afro-Brazilian culture in his populist project of modernity and homogeneous national identity in the 1930s. I use these ethnographic and historical materials to inspect the usefulness of the concept of hybridity in understandings of Latin American cultural processes. In particular, I argue that “hybridity” can be productively put to use, as Wade (2005) has recently argued, but that this use needs to be qualified. Pivotal to my argument is an understanding of Brazil’s discourse on mestiçagem (racial and cultural mixing) as the basis for dominant narratives of national identity. I argue that this discourse, which celebrates samba and other Afro-Brazilian cultural forms as symbols of Brazilianness and racial democracy, simultaneously celebrates fusion and difference, while also presenting an unacknowledged undercurrent of racist exclusion and contempt. Following academic and sambista alternative conceptualizations, I explore the allegedly “racially democratic” nature of samba spaces as a core domain of Afro-Brazilian sociability.

This allows me to critically inspect the concept of “racial democracy” embedded in local understandings of mestiçagem and to address John Chasteen’s question: “Does the ostensible celebration of Afro-Brazilian culture actually undermine the struggle for equity?” (1996: 45).

The multiplicity of practices and voices that emerge in the context of carnaval and samba performances needs to be explored to understand their complexity. Rather than attempting to provide a kind of “closure” (e.g., a definitive reading of carnaval as either reproductive or transformative of Brazil’s social relations), I present the multiplicity of meanings negotiated through samba practices, which draw on understandings of “authenticity,” “tradition,” and

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“origins” to make claims about identity, race, and the appropriate performance of culture.

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Democratic samba As with most things Afro-Brazilian, samba could actually be said to have a dual identity. On the one hand, it is commonly thought of as a product of Afro-Brazilian culture, with its roots in percussion-based polyrhythms such as batuque and batucada. On the other, it has been identified as a hybrid (mixed) form (Vianna 1995), owing as much to Candomblé as to more Europeanized dances such as the maxixe and its precursor, the lundu (Chasteen 1996).4 As an expression of Afro-Brazilian traditions, samba is a disputed cultural object. Santos (1999), for example, insists that it should be understood as a space of resistance and resilience and that its potential for black identity politics be explored. Taylor (1982) and Sheriff (1999), on the other hand, are more adamant about the appropriation of escolas de samba by the middle class, a move they claim perpetuates the myth of racial democracy as national identity.

Dominant understandings of samba rest on a narrative of origins linking it to urban Afro-Brazilian culture. It was in the terreiros, the religious spaces established by migrant ex-slaves from Bahia at the turn of the twentieth century, that samba as we know it today took shape. In Candomblé ceremonies, initiands known as cavalos (horses) receive divine energy by becoming possessed, “recebendo o santo” (receiving the orixás or saints), in performances where specific body movements denote the qualities of each divinity. Samba scholar José Carlos Rego (1996) states that there exist concrete links between such dances and the samba moves performed by passistas (solo samba dancers) and celebrants today. The movements of legs, arms, feet, and hips specific to each orixá appear in the choreographies of sambista veterans such as Paula do Salgueiro and Nininha da Mangueira, as well as in the movements of wing members walking together in zig-zag form, and in the comissões de frente (opening wings) of many escolas de samba (Rego 1996:6; see also Browning 1995).5 While pursuing my fieldwork, I had the opportunity to interview Haroldo Costa, author, actor, and show-business entrepreneur, whose work has ranged from analyses of carnaval and escolas de samba (É Hoje 1978, Salgueiro: academia de samba 1984 and an afterword to Eneida’s História do Carnaval Carioca 1987) and participation in escola de samba parades as a member of the jury, to studies of Afro-Brazilian living conditions through in-depth interviews (Fala Crioulo 1982), to being founder, manager, and artistic director of the internationally

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acclaimed folk dance company Brasiliana (now defunct). An intellectual and national authority in matters of Brazilian dance in general and samba in particular, Haroldo Costa was asked to write the preface to José Carlos Rego’s book Dança do Samba: Exercício do Prazer (1996), where he states the following: The deep interaction that exists between blacks and dance is well known. In hunting, love, funerary rites, in happiness or pain, the black’s emotion slides through the arms, legs and feet, becoming movements that reflect his soul . . . Samba [is] all the universe of sounds and memories that our black ancestors brought from mother Africa . . . The improvised steps in an escola de samba. . . enrich the cultural patrimony of the Brazilian people and establish a behavioural pattern that cuts through racial and social barriers. . . This [Rego’s] book helps us understand what dance represents as an important parcel in the formation of the Brazilian way of being (Costa 1996: x).

The relevance of Costa’s words for comprehending Brazilian race relations and their implication in discourses of nationhood cannot be understated. They disclose widespread essentialist understandings of what it means to be Brazilian, to have brown skin, to know how to dance the samba. In the search for cultural origins, dance and music are elevated as embodied expressions of a cultural logic that is radically “other,” yet here otherness bears a positive value.

Muniz Sodré (1979, 1988) also emphasizes the original and resistant aspects of Afro-Brazilian traditions. He notes that in the syncopated, polyrhythmic musical form of samba, the strong accent is suspended.

This suspension acts as a powerful calling for the body to fill in the gaps: “The route of the syncope indicates the path of blacks’ resistance to cultural assimilation. . .Within the meaningful dimension generated by traditional samba, the physical presence of the human body is indispensable” (Sodré 1979: 47). According to Sodré, by embracing axé (divine energy) and valuing originality, reversibility of meaning and mystery, Afro-Brazilian cultural forms resist univocal meanings imposed by dominant Western systems of practice and belief. AfroBrazilians’ art is conceived of by the author as opposing itself to the world of work and rationality instituted by the capitalist laws of exchange value (Sodré 1988: 9–10, 142–143).

Costa, Rego, and Sodré claim that the kind of sociality implicated in samba and carnaval present an alternative to Eurocentric social relations. Resembling Asante’s (1999) understanding of orature (the sum of oral and expressive modalities of dance, music, and speech) as the center of African public discourse, this perspective characterizes carnaval

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and samba as free and democratic spaces. Here Afro-Brazilian sociability becomes an interesting point of intersection for the complex production of meaning that frames understandings of race relations in Brazil.

These thinkers follow a romanticized line of thinking which discursively produces a place of origins for Afro-Brazilian culture. Essentializing difference and generalizing “black experience,” the authors’ texts create a non-problematized sequence of links between “Brazilian culture” and “mother Africa.”6 Such visions of carnaval and samba performances are bound by a folklorized, essentialist logic. Nevertheless, Costa’s and Sodré’s celebration of black cultural practices is not exclusively about the creation of essential distinctions. Theirs is not a narrative about cultural fusion and harmony. Instead, cultural purity and resistance to Western rationality seem to warrant claims to a traditional samba that offers “resistance to cultural assimilation” (Sodré 1979: 47).

Costa’s and Sodré’s treatment of Afro-Brazilian culture also points toward an awareness of the practices of exchange and seduction at the heart of samba’s politics. “In its festive relationship with space through dance, through the liberation of the senses, the individual modifies her energy and personal force, and seduces ethnic difference toward a broader sensibility vis-à-vis the world” (Sodré 1988: 133; my emphasis). Muniz Sodré’s remarks point to Afro-Brazilian strategies of social adaptation in defense of persecuted cultural forms such as samba and capoeira (Lopes 1981; Moura 1983; Rodrigues 1984). At the turn of the twentieth century, blacks were increasingly subjected to state repression. The transference of power from slave owners to the capitalist bourgeoisie offered them no space at all. The modernizing orientation of the new elites also meant the restructuring of urban spaces, further displacing and marginalizing the city’s poor by demolishing their homes and forcing their exodus to the Northern regions of the city (Moura 1983; Sodré 1988). In the Zona Norte and on the morros, each terreiro de Candomblé had its own samba or carnaval group.

One of the main contexts of cultural resistance in the early 1900s was the house of a prominent Afro-Brazilian figure, tia (aunt) Ciata: A live metaphor of the positions of resistance adopted by the black community, her house had the ideologically necessary elements for contact with global society: ‘petty-bourgeois’ respectability of the owners (the husband was a professional, the wife a beautiful and elegant mulata), the social balls held in the front part of the house (there, were performed the better known and ‘more respectable’ songs and dances); in the back, the sambas (where the black elite with swing danced); also in the back, the batucada percussion–territory of older blacks, where the religious component became present–protected by the structural ‘screen’ of the

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living-room (in other houses, such screens would eventually become unnecessary: police approval would be enough) (Sodré 1988: 136–137).

Afro-Brazilians organized themselves around their religious centers and carnaval groups, establishing alliances with influential upper-class members interested in their art, who would give them certain legitimacy, protect them from police harassment, and mobilize resources for carnaval pursuits (Moura 1983: 60). Indeed, since the 1920s, samba, both the dance and the music, became the trademark of Brazilian carnaval, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, where it was created.

The largest spectacle on Earth: Populism Brazilian style As the saying goes, today carnaval is the maior espetáculo da terra (largest spectacle on Earth). In any given carnaval parade (and several take place each year), over 25,000 people will dance along the sambódromo (samba’s parade stadium) for the delight of many more spectators. Several authors have noticed the radical changes undergone by carnaval celebrations in Rio de Janeiro as a direct consequence of its increasing mise-en-scène or staging. Haroldo Costa, for example, in his afterword to Eneida’s História do carnaval carioca (1987), points to the progressive distancing between street performers and audience since the introduction of physical barriers such as demarcating ropes and bleachers. Eventually, these makeshift elements gave way to the sambódromo, a massive concrete structure of stands lined up across the extension of Marquês de Sapucaí Avenue. To watch the parades live, spectators need to pay a fee ranging from US $2 to approximately US $3,000, making it difficult for poor Afro-Brazilians to participate in the parades.

The origins of the parade’s institutionalization can be traced to the populist interests of Getúlio Vargas, Brazilian president from 1930 to 1945 (and between 1950 and 1954), who sought to harness popular support for his regime by establishing extensive policies of cultural promotion. These included the creation of institutions such as the SPHAN (Service for the Historical and Artistic National Patrimony) and the DIP (Press and Propaganda Department). As Shaw (1999, chapter 2) clearly demonstrates, the DIP was one of the main organisms for the promotion of the new government, and it controlled the radio, cinema, theatre, and the press. In fact, Williams (2001: 6) states, “Vargas replaced the liberaloligarchical political culture of the First Republic with a nationalisticauthoritarian culture that endured until the mid-1980s”.7 Vargas’s government was very successful and instrumental in the integration of disparate elements of Brazilian culture and folklore in a

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national project. As García Canclini has shown (1992: 245), one of the main political strategies of populist governments throughout Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s was to “modernize” folk practices, transforming them into tools for consensus building, while turning citizens into spectators and consumers of culture.

For example, after enduring years of police repression due to its association with poor Afro-Brazilians, the culture of samba in Rio de Janeiro received governmental sanction in 1932, when the samba-driven carnaval parades were made official by Vargas’s office. Increasingly, Vargas attempted to gain the political support of the masses by praising working-class culture. The “culture” question became a political one, and culture was invested with the task of homogenizing the nation through the appropriation of regional symbols.8 Samba in particular fit the bill very well. It was an Afro-Brazilian cultural form developed in the early twentieth century in Rio, then Brazil’s capital.

This regional form would conquer the nation through radio broadcasting and the expansion of record companies, which contributed to samba’s incorporation into the middle and upper class’s consumption patterns (Matos 1982; Shaw 1999; Vianna 1995).9 Ultimately, the cultural industry came under the control of the state, which used the private sector to expand its sphere of influence (Sodré 1988: 140).

The transformation of samba into a widely commercialized and even exported product was in truth less beneficial to the popular sambista than to the businessmen of the recording companies, music editors, and the radio. Moreover, under the Estado Novo a protectionist policy, which surrounded popular musicians and the proletarian class in general, was simultaneously a controlling and repressive policy instrumentalizing popular culture to serve the interests of the powers that be (Matos 1982: 120).

Vargas’s impact on samba began in the early 1920s. When still an MP, he promoted a national bill that instituted royalty payments for musicians. In the 1930s, already in power, Vargas authorized the broadcasting of advertising on the radio, transforming the outlook of stations that previously focused on classical music and education. This new policy radically changed the place of popular culture, giving radio a new role as “popular entertainment.” The establishment of the radio stimulated the promotion of samba and similar genres through the various stations.

Claudia Matos (1982: 91) notes that Vargas’s policies were welcomed by many artists, who opportunistically benefited from the new channels of dissemination and salaries paid by the DIP (see also Shaw 1999).

The content of samba’s lyrics, however, became strictly controlled by the censorship organisms of the new regime (Shaw 1999: 37). After

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the institution of the Estado Novo in 1937, whose constitution suppressed workers’ rights of protest and defined “work” as a social duty, the DIP tightened the government’s grip on cultural production.

This was accomplished through concrete censorship agencies that reviewed the content of all music before it could be released to the public. According to Matos (1982), sambistas were encouraged to participate in the populist project by producing sambas known as nationalistic eulogies. Such lyrics formulated fables of Brazil as a happy people, living in a tropical paradise, and happily miscegenated, ideas usually expressed around the idea of the mulata or the “brown” character of the Brazilian people (Pravaz 2000).

Popular culture and nationhood Theorists of the Latin American cultural landscape such as García Canclini (1992) and Rowe and Schelling (1991) have shown that the national integration effected by the new media (TV, radio, film) coincided with the rise of nationalist populism.10 In the 1930s states across the region attempted to produce unified identities by recasting low-brow cultures from large urban centers and transforming them into core symbols of nationhood. In Brazil “the people” (o povo) became the central category in the language of Getulismo, creating an identity between state and nation through a rhetoric expressed in printed and oral media. The symbolic integration of the masses, however, was not followed by concrete political power (Rowe and Schelling 1991: 166).

For the urban poor who performed the samba, embracing the state’s paternalism and participating in the production of “acceptable” cultural forms was a question of social survival, one of the only available ways of avoiding police repression and obtaining cultural legitimacy (Moura 1983; Rodrigues 1984).

If samba underwent significant transformations under the policies of the Estado Novo, carnaval celebrations were no less affected (Shaw 1999: 36). For the first time in Brazilian history, the state intervened “productively” (as opposed to previous repression) in the world of popular culture. As already pointed out, in 1932 the festivities began to occupy a sanctioned place in Rio de Janeiro, with the Touring Club of Brazil and the Municipal Tourist Commission officially promoting carnaval (RIOTUR 1991: 191). The first unofficial competition among escolas de samba took place that same year under the sponsorship of the newspaper O Mundo Sportivo. The enredo (plot) of one of the escolas was an exaltation of the revolution of 1930. In a joint privatepublic venture, O Globo newspaper took over sponsorship the following year, and the government allocated funds for the decoration of the

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streets, elite balls at the Municipal Theatre, music contests, and confetti battles.

In 1935 the state officially recognized escolas de samba, granting them special funds and subsidies. The government also required that escolas be registered under the category of Grêmio Recreativo de Escola de Samba (Samba School Recreational Union). In 1937, in line with the newly established Estado Novo, a presidential decree was passed determining that the enredos of escolas de samba should address historical, didactic, and patriotic issues (Matos 1982: 88). It is of interest that the official book of carnaval, RIOTUR’s Memória do carnaval (1991: 322), attempted to erase the dictatorial character of this and other measures by emphasizing that the “proud-nationalist-historical” samba-enredos, which highlighted patriotic issues during the Estado Novo and particularly the war during the years 1942–1944, were not a governmental “requirement.” According to RIOTUR, these regulations merely stipulated that the themes be of a “national” character.

While Vargas was deposed in 1945, the nationalistic intent of his cultural policies continued under subsequent presidencies, including the long, repressive military regime that took place between 1964 and 1985. In fact, according to Renato Ortiz (1985), the regime sought to consolidate national integration and political support by expanding the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods. The military junta established National Cultural and Tourist Systems and in 1966 created the CNC (National Cultural Council), an organization that embraced the discourse of mestiçagem and counted Gilberto Freyre as one of its main members. So important was cultural hegemony for the regime that it created a National Foundation for the Arts in 1975, geared toward the promotion of folklore and popular culture.

Today, samba lyrics are no longer controlled by the government, but the topics of tropical abandon, Afro-Brazilian tradition, and national history are still prevalent as choice themes among composers and school directors alike. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the Vargas regime was never able to completely appropriate and reshape samba according to its interests. “As a musical genre and a social signifier, samba remained a vehicle for resistance to state intervention into cultural production and commercialization” (Williams 2001: 86). It has remained, albeit contested, a vehicle for resisting the official versions of popular culture, as I discuss below.

Mestiçagem and hybridity: Strange bedfellows?

What came to be mestiçagem-cum-national-identity in Brazil was first operationalized by anthropologist Gilberto Freyre in the early twentieth

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century (1933). His ideas have been highly influential in Brazilian society, shaping governmental and public opinion since the 1930s.

Freyre articulated a vision where mestiçagem (mixing) was seen as the central characteristic of Brazilian social relations since the establishment of the colony, producing a society which he defined as the most harmoniously constituted, from the point-of-view of race relations, of all the Americas. This eventually led him to conceptualize Brazil as a “racial democracy.” In Freyre’s framework, the cultural and racial mixing prevalent throughout Brazilian history and the celebration of “mixed race” women known as mulatas became “evidence” of the so-called racially democratic nature of Brazilian society. This is because inter-racial sex is conceptualized as a love fable (see DaMatta 1981), erasing the gendered and racial violence implicated in masterslave relations. In fact, Brazil is not only one of the most violent societies in the world, it is also a society that tends to silence its racialized dimensions (Vargas 2004).11 Following Martínez-Etchazábal (1996, 1999), I argue that the dominant discourse of mestiçagem today is structured upon two distinct “grammars,” symbiosis and synthesis.12 These two grammars are by no means contradictory, feeding off each other at different moments in both private and public discourse.

Mestiçagem understood as symbiosis points to the celebration of racial difference in public culture, where the different “races” supposedly feed off each other in a symbiotic relationship. The problematic nature of the concept of “race” is not questioned or taken up, since difference is defined through “color” and positively expressed through the equally valuable contributions that the so-defined social groups make to the collective project of nation-building. Here, institutional and structural racisms are eclipsed by a language of reciprocity and love, and the concept of “racial democracy” is supported through a folklorized and fetishized version of culture. Of course, the underbelly of this alleged heterophilia is the rampant systemic and face-to-face discrimination that visible minorities confront on a day-to-day basis, which João Costa Vargas (2004) aptly names Brazil’s hyperconsciousness of race.

Mestiçagem takes the shape of “synthesis,” on the other hand, in the context of narratives about the mixture of the “three races” (the “Indian,” the “Black,” and the “White”) as representations of Brazil’s identity. This is what Gilberto Freyre has in mind when he describes the evolution of Brazilian culture as a fusion of diverse ethnic traits.

Such understanding of mestiçagem resonates with other conceptual developments pointing toward the same phenomenon, such as Wade’s “roots-hybridity” (2005) and Bakhtin’s unintentional or organic hybridity (1981: 267), a mixing and fusion that remains opaque and

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never makes use of conscious contrasts and oppositions. The construction of mestiçagem as a “positive” synthesis evidences what Vargas (2004) calls the “negation of race” from Brazilian consciousness, the other side of the coin of race hyperconsciousness. Antonio Sergio Guimarães (1995) clearly articulates the problematic consequences of this discourse of synthesis for the development of identity politics in Brazil, by pointing to the “heterophobic racism” inherent in it.

I contend here that both grammars constitutive of mestiçagem simultaneously fetishize and disavow Afro-Brazilian people and their cultural expressions, as the political use of carnaval parades and samba discloses. In the case of Afro-Brazilian performance practices in Brazil, it is evident that the state has historically fethishized popular culture at the same time that it has displaced or prohibited its political import for black peoples. For example, on the one hand, under Getúlio Vargas we encounter the state’s recognition of Afro-Brazilian culture as a distinct expression of marginalized ethnic groups. These forms of expression begin, at the same time, to be deliberately valued and appreciated by the country’s elite. This process is part of the grammar of symbiosis. On the other hand, the state attempts to create a fused, mestiço nation out of the ethnically and regionally specific cultural expression of samba, a strategy we can inscribe within the grammar of synthesis. Both strategies are contiguous with the systemic repression of Afro-Brazilians and their unacceptable forms of expression, as evidenced in the practices of the DIP. Does the hegemonic use of mestiçagem mean that hybridity’s potential as an emancipatory tool in postcolonial formations, as proposed by Bhabha (1994) and Klor de Alva (1995), among others, is lost for the Brazilian (and arguably Latin American) scenario? On the contrary; I believe it is important to refine our use of the concept within the Latin American context, as some authors have already begun to do (e.g., see Browning 1999, Hale 1996, Papastergadis 1997, Wade 2005) to avoid misunderstandings and facile arguments.

I introduce here the concept of “strategic hybridity” (Pravaz 2003) to refer to the specific ways in which people of Afro-Brazilian descent negotiate between the grammars of symbiosis and of synthesis within the dominant discourse of mestiçagem. This discourse constantly articulates conflicting messages through diverse institutional and communicative practices, enabling emerging subjectivities that alternate between identification with “blackness” or negritude, on the one hand, and affiliation with the proverbial “mulatto” position, on the other. I do not consider that either this latter identification or the embrace of racial democracy as radical utopia (see below) are forms of false consciousness. Neither do I believe that they indicate a lack of

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awareness about or a kind of compliance with the systemic racism prevalent in Brazil. I consider that these complex subjectivities display the diverse ways in which Brazilian persons of color live through and question Brazil’s specific racial formation (see also Silva 1998: 226).

Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s work, Martínez-Etchazábal (1999) shows how hybridism forms a kind of disjunction that destabilizes both symbiosis and synthesis. This destabilization can be seen as a “means for critique and resistance to the monological language of authority” (Papastergiadis 1997: 267).

Hybridization is really about how you negotiate between texts or cultures or practices in a situation of power imbalances in order to be able to see the way in which strategies of appropriation, revision and iteration can produce possibilities for those who are less advantaged to be able to grasp in a moment of emergency, in the very process of the exchange or the negotiation, the advantage (Bhabha 1999: 38–39).

It is this “advantage” that is ultimately being negotiated by Brazilians of African descent in the context of Brazilian racial and cultural politics. Drawing on my fieldwork experience, I consider that in embracing their own version of racial democracy, Afro-Brazilians achieve social recognition and dignity. At the same time, they denounce a system that oppresses them. They also exercise a form of strategic hybridity in which, like tia Ciata, they simultaneously embrace hegemonic discourses on national identity as mestiça and racially democratic and deploy forms of identification with blackness and ethnically specific cultural values.

The strategic use of mestiçagem by some of my research participants, while not contesting the social and cultural systems of oppression in Brazilian society, points toward the inability of systems of power/knowledge to completely “fix” meaning, experience, and definitions of selfhood. I now want to return to my ethnographic material to illustrate what I mean in concrete terms. As will become clear in what follows, Afro-Brazilians such as Haroldo Costa interpret the hegemonic discourse of mestiçagem on their own terms, while acknowledging the larger context of heterophobic racism within which they live their lives.

Revisiting mestiçagem and racial democracy: Fieldnotes Author:

Nowadays there’s a lot of white people in carnaval, and there are some who think that it has lost its authenticity. . .

Haroldo Costa: That’s racism. Because they think that carnaval needs to be static, [they say] “it’s a black thing,” “carnaval is nigger’s

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stuff.” Why? What seems like a protectionist attitude toward Brazilian culture is in fact a demonstration of incubated racism. Because carnaval is a party of all, of a lot of people. I think a escola de samba is the most democratic thing there is.

If you go to a escola de samba, nobody is interested in knowing whether you are Canadian or Argentinean, whether your father is a baron or if he sweeps the streets. Nobody asks you anything, and you have the right to participate in the parade.

So I think that is a beautiful thing. Today, carnaval belongs to everybody. A escola de samba is a generalized property.

With this statement, Haroldo Costa elaborates on received notions of what democracy means and its relationship to the world of samba and to the nature of race relations in Brazil. His words point toward a possible explanation of the intricate relationship between these attributes, complicating received views on mestiçagem. For a long time in the history of Brazilian popular culture, intellectuals such as Costa have contributed to an understanding of carnaval as “the most democratic thing there is,” and as “a party of all.” Translating from Brazilian connotations, this means that in carnaval social distinctions of rank, class and race are erased or simply do not exist.

An egalitarian form of sociation, carnaval has traditionally been offered as a piece of evidence in representations of Brazilian racial democracy. In fact, since the period between the world wars, samba and carnaval have become a metonym for national identity, interpreted as evidence of mestiçagem. Critiques of this ideological hegemony oppose the bounded egalitarianism of carnaval festivals to the racism and classism of everyday life (DaMatta 1978; Goldwasser 1975; Linger 1992). But, as Chasteen asks, “does the ostensible celebration of Afro-Brazilian culture actually undermine the struggle for equity by suggesting that it already exists, as many have argued?” (1996: 45).

Indeed, as Sheriff (1999) has shown, the celebration of AfroBrazilian culture in carnaval is problematically understood as evidence of Brazil’s lack of racial prejudice. The most “apparent” trace of that “democracy,” together with the commemoration of samba, is that during carnaval, the masses of Rio de Janeiro’s urban, black poor become the central characters of the spectacle that has become synonymous with the nation. In fact, during carnaval, Afro-Brazilians are presented in local discourse as the accomplished performers of musical and dance forms celebrated both for their ethnic specificity (symbiosis) and as hybrid metaphors for Brazilianness (synthesis). Carnaval’s atmosphere, with its multi-vocality, makes of this double grammar not a contradiction in terms, but a dramatic negotiation of meaning in an ongoing spectacular politics of personal, social, and cultural identity.

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As much as Afro-Brazilian culture can be said to have been racially and politically neutralized (Sheriff 1999: 15), Haroldo’s view (as illustrated in his written statements, e.g., Costa 1996), neither precludes the possibility of samba being used in identity politics nor condemns its appropriation within the discourse of mestiçagem. From his perspective, samba, the music and dance form most prevalent in carnaval (particularly in Rio de Janeiro) is one of the most important contributions of Afro-Brazilian peoples to the culture of Brazil. In an assertion of cultural value, Haroldo reclaims samba itself as a democratic space that welcomes me, the foreigner. As opposed to condemning the myth of racial democracy as an ideological move on the part of hegemonic powers, the author treats racial democracy as a concrete utopia, as actuality embodied in the context of escola de samba rehearsals. I believe that Haroldo’s discourse performs a subtle tension between the recognition of difference and its erasure, but in a way that is different from the common construction of mestiçagem as national identity. When he says that “samba is the universe of sounds and memories that our black ancestors brought from mother Africa” (Costa 1996: x) and claims that these traits “enrich the cultural patrimony of the Brazilian people” (Costa 1996: x), he is emphasizing the symbiotic relationship implicit in mestiçagem. Yet by making clear the African ancestry of samba, and the black sociability implicit in it, Haroldo is also reclaiming samba for the Afro-Brazilian community.

Therefore, when he exalts the fact that “carnaval is a party of all,” where “nobody asks you anything” (e.g., about your social standing), he is subtly pointing to an ethical stance emerging from a particular ethnic group. In other words, Haroldo does not treat racial democracy as an attribute of the whole of Brazilian society; rather, he defines such democracy as a characteristic of ethnically-specific, Afro-Brazilian sociality.

Robin Sheriff explains that the myth of racial democracy, even though susceptible to being caught in the logic of hegemonic discourse, is still powerful because it is a hopeful act of defiance, offering Afro-Brazilians a moral upper hand (in Hasenbalg 1996: 244). Within the confines of local samba gatherings, racial democracy becomes reality. “For poor people of color, the carioca carnaval is less about Brazil as it is than about Brazil as it ought to be . . . the negotiated product of a history of racialized struggles for public space” (Sheriff 1999: 21–22). Following Chasteen’s (1996: 47) insights on samba, we can say that Haroldo Costa’s point “belies facile implications of racial harmony as it confirms the appropriateness of the dance as an emblem of Brazilian experience.” Costa’s remarks are all the more important within the context of the co-opting and repackaging of

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samba by the white middle class, as discussed by Sheriff (1999) and Taylor (1982).

This co-opting points to the persistence of whitening as the ideological substratum of contemporary celebrations of Afro-Brazilian heritage.

The full impact of this persistence can be evidenced in the growing presence of white elite women in carnaval parades’ most prized positions. During my fieldwork, one of the most talked about such women was Luisa Brunet, a model who became famous as the main face for Dijon, a local jeans company. All those I talked to agreed that she did not know how to dance the samba properly. They explained that she was chosen as rainha da bateria (queen of the percussionists) of a big escola because she was famous. Those closely involved in the world of samba went a step further and insinuated or openly stated that her whiteness was significant. They did not mean that she had been chosen because she was white, but that her presence (and the presence of others like her) meant a narrowing of the public spheres of visibility and pride for women of color. The world of samba, maybe precisely because of its wide acceptance by mainstream society, has become an important space of Afro-Brazilian empowerment (see Santos 1999).

Yet some of my research participants hotly contested this idea by explaining that samba is being used as another tool for racial subordination.

Mercedes is a 26-year-old political science student who holds a highly selective research assistant position at FIOCRUZ foundation.

She volunteers as a teacher in the Pré-vestibular para negros e carentes (a free course aimed at preparing poor and black students for university entrance exams). Mercedes makes it clear that one of the most important ideas behind the preparatory course is to raise awareness about racial discrimination among students. Even though she would be considered a light-skinned “mulata” by dominant standards in Brazil, she identifies as negra (black) and explains that this is a political decision on her part. Mercedes acknowledges that darker-skinned blacks suffer higher levels of discrimination: In order to get a job, for example, if it is to be a domestic worker, it doesn’t matter at all, but if you are applying to be a receptionist, then the lighter-skinned (a mais clarinha) would be preferred over a darkskinned one. This is part of a policy started here in Brazil since the beginning of the [twentieth] century, that had as its objective the whitening of the population. It was said that through mixture the black characteristics would be lost, diluted until only white features remained.

This is why one of the goals of the black movement is to recover black consciousness.

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She goes on to discuss the relationship between blackness and samba as follows:

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Myself, for example, I only listen to reggae music, I don’t like samba.

Samba is a kind of music that was taken over by whites, and it does not represent the interests of blacks.

Mercedes’ comments go against Costa’s remarks on samba as a domain structured by racial democracy (“a escola de samba is the most democratic thing there is”) and suggest the impossibility of rescuing the tradition of samba from the co-opting effects of mestiçagem. Her critical remarks aptly describe the reality of most samba spectacles, where white Brazilians have growing influence, yet which are typically used to defend the image of Brazil as a racial paradise. This complex, conflicting reality speaks to the hyperconsciousness of race implicit in cultural strategies of symbiosis, or, in other words, to the racism implicit behind the celebration of difference. I briefly describe another fieldwork experience that aptly illustrates this point. É o Tchan is a famous band from Bahia that plays a highly commercial form of samba known as axé music. One of the main reasons for its rapid success, aside from the catchy songs, was the presence on its shows and video clips of a blonde woman named Carla Perez dancing the samba onstage. Carla has a mixed heritage: her mother is white and her father is a light-skinned mulatto. Even though her AfroBrazilian ancestry is widely acknowledged, it was her blondness that made her presence so remarkable in the world of samba. The producer of the band in Rio, Ricardo Melo, explained to me in an interview: It is very common to see a mulata or a morena (a light-skinned brunette) dancing the samba. The novelty was to have a blonde doing it.

He also explained that Carla has the soul of a mulata: The black race has a gift that we [whites] don’t have. The gift of swing, of knowing how to do the samba, of swaying the hips. Just look at the soccer team from Cameroon, they have a lot of molejo (swing).

It is of interest that these essentialist remarks did not prevent Melo from putting into evidence the heterophobic racism behind the nation-wide contest being undertaken to substitute Carla, who was retiring from her role: Ricardo Melo: Carla shakes her hips better than many mulattos.

Author: What happens if a mulata enters the contest?

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That would be very bad. In fact, a mulata showed up wearing a blond wig, and she was disqualified. It doesn’t make any sense for a mulata to dye her hair blond.

The contest called for candidates for É o Tchan’s “blonde.” Even though participants were supposed to be “naturally” blond, it was obvious that many of the young women had their hair dyed, as I was able to observe during sessions for the contest. The true crime committed by the disqualified participant was not that of wearing a wig: it was her attempt at “passing,” at blatantly crossing a never-mentioned yet ever-present color line. In these everyday practices we can see the simultaneous fetishization and disavowal of Afro-Brazilianness articulated by mestiçagem.

The complex ambivalences inherent in this dominant discourse appear time and again in the life experience of those personally invested in the world of samba. Marenice, a 46-year-old director of samba dancers in a small escola, experienced severe repression as a child in the form of beatings and whippings at the hands of her father.

He never approved of Marenice’s interest and involvement in samba groups in the favelas where they lived, due to their association with blackness, even though he was a mulatto himself. Marenice always resented this repression and defended her right to participate in samba tooth and nail, escaping home at 13 years of age. She told me that she always followed the sound of African-based drumming wherever she was: The samba beat is linked to the African sound, you know, as long as there’s that African sound, I think everything is great. That’s why I dance the macumba [Afro-Brazilian religion] really well.

Despite this uncompromising endorsement of samba’s African roots and of clearly understanding the racist implications surrounding its repression, Marenice nonetheless embraces the discourse of mestiçagem in her practices as dance director. For example, she told me that in the production of samba shows she tends to “add white girls,” because she likes “the contrast,” referring to the different skin colors, which she arranges in degradeé form on stage. Marenice is not alone in exercising strategic hybridity within the context of samba. Many of the young women who perform the samba at carnaval events refer to themselves as “mulatas” when interviewed in those environments, yet clearly identify as black in later encounters outside the sphere of staged samba (see Pravaz 2003).

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Toward a hybrid understanding of samba Peter Wade has recently argued that “mestizaje [mestiçagem] has both difference and sameness, homogeneity and heterogeneity, inclusion and exclusion as constitutive elements. These oppositions cannot be aligned with other dualisms such as elite versus subaltern or ideology versus lived experience” (2005: 255). Presenting mestizaje as a space of struggle and contest, the author emphasizes the importance of contextual analysis before an interpretation of processes as inclusive or exclusionary is possible. He uses the term roots-hybridity to name what I have chosen to call the synthetic elements of mestiçagem, a grammar parallel to that of symbiosis, and the term routes-hybridity to identify what I name here “strategic hybridity.” Both forms are present in Brazilian’s discourse and experience of samba.

Governmental policy and white middle class values have significantly impacted the Afro-Brazilian cultural forms of carnival and samba (and Candomblé) at least since the 1930s. The political use of regional cultural symbols by Vargas and others did not translate into better living conditions for Afro-Brazilians, nor into financial rewards for their cultural products. In fact, this appropriation contributed to the perpetuation of Brazil’s false self-identity as a racially democratic society, with Afro-Brazilian traditions fused and integrated into dominant white culture.

Mestiçagem’s symbiosis and synthesis, however, have failed to secure a full grip on local understandings of Afro-Brazilian cultural forms. In fact, as Costa, Rego, and Sodré argue, among others, while these forms enrich the cultural patrimony of Brazil, they leave a trace of their ethnic specificity. These forms provide further options to Eurocentric Brazilian social relations, by resisting the imposition of univocal meaning and offering social spaces whose organization challenges racial and social barriers and provides a haven from racism and authoritarianism. Moreover, for those involved in the highly contested worlds of samba and carnaval, strategic hybridity has emerged as a powerful strategy of survival, ensuring the persistence of Afro-Brazilian values and cultural forms.

The dynamics of cultural appropriation and resistance are articulated in the diverse shapes that mestiçagem and racial democracy take in the Brazilian context. It is important to continue, along the lines delineated by Wade, our pursuit of a more complex understanding of Latin American racial formations and cultural landscapes in such a way that captures the divergent, contested, and at times contradictory nature of our lived experiences.

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Notes Received 10 March 2006; accepted 15 June 2007.

I thank Carlos Neves, the editors of Identities, and the three anonymous reviewers for their challenging and extremely helpful comments.

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Address correspondence to Natasha Pravaz, Department of Anthropology, Wilfrid Laurier University, 75 University Ave. West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5, Canada. E-mail: npravaz@wlu.ca 1. To protect the anonymity of my research participants, all names used here are pseudonyms.

2. See, for example, DaMatta 1978, 1981; Eneida 1987; Fry et al. 1988; Goldwasser 1975; Linger 1992; Rowe and Schelling 1991; and Turner 1988.

3. For recent work on the racialized dimensions of inequality and violence in Rio de Janeiro, see Vargas 2004; Goldstein 2003; and Sheriff 2001.

4. Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian syncretic, polytheistic religion based on West African (Yoruba) deities. The religion is structured around rituals of spirit possession, where the saints come down to earth to dance.

5. Escolas de samba usually have between 5,000 and 7,000 members and are divided into wings of about 200 members each.

6. Rather than atavistic traditions from times immemorial, Matory (2000:22) notes that Yoruba identity and culture themselves are late nineteenth-century inventions linked to the Lagosian Cultural Renaissance. According to the author, the development of ex post facto representations of the Yoruba’s primordial unity and dignity, which Afro-Brazilianists take as statements of fact, were produced by a Lagosian elite with vested interests in elevating Yoruba culture as proof of black racial honor.

7. It is widely accepted in the literature that the decade of the 1930s ushered Brazil into modernity, substituting the previous hegemony of the rural areas, given the dramatic increase in urban population and the amplification of citizenship. Governmental “social” spending increased, as did urban employment opportunities, sponsored by the explicit policies of economic growth and industrialization. The new configuration combined an electoral system of mass participation with a strong centralization of power (Schwartzman 1982: 105–113). In fact, inheriting an oligarchic social structure, the populist government was more interested in pre-empting the emergent labor movement’s attempts at radicalization than in seriously transforming social relations (Rowe and Schelling 1991: 166). To do so, it combined charismatic leadership and socially progressive labor laws with an iron fist.

8. See Oliveira et al. 1982; Vianna 1995; García Canclini 1992. These ideas were mirrored in Vargas’s policies of ethnic unification and erasure of hyphenated, migrant identities, particularly through the public education system and the prohibition of social organizations based on ethnic identification (see, among others, Freyre 1963 and Stepan 1991).

9. For a historical account of Vargas’s influence on the expansion of samba as expression of national identity, see Matos 1982. Hermano Vianna’s (1995) work on the relationship between samba, mestiçagem, and Brazilianness is also a key intervention.

10. See also Guss 2000 and Godreau 2002.

11. For critiques of Freyre’s work, see, among others, Ortiz 1985; Mota 1977; Skidmore 1993; DaMatta 1981; and Costa 1985.

12. I use the concept of racial grammar as developed by Theo Goldberg in his Anatomy of Racism (1990).

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