Micol Seigel
Postdoctoral Fellow, Spring 2003

Micol Seigel received her Ph.D. from the American Studies Program at New York University. She completed her dissertation, “The Point of Comparison: Transnational Racial Construction, Brazil and the United States, 1918-1933,” under the direction of Robin D. G. Kelley, with assistance from the U.S. Foreign Language and Area Studies Program and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her most recent work appears in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and the Revista Brasileira de História. Upon completion of her Driskell Center fellowship, she will join the Liberal Studies faculty of the California State University, Los Angeles.

Fellow's Project Description
Playing Politics: Jazz And National Identity in the Americas

One of the early twentieth century’s most intriguing global tangles is the fervor for Afro-Diasporic cultural forms known at the time as the “Negro Vogue.” The rage for modernist primitivism in high art, for ragtime and jazz in popular music and dance, and for Black cultural forms in general reached around the globe, an irreducibly complex network of transnational commercial and cultural exchange. This phenomenon shared the global stage with a great wave of nationalism in the Americas. Decrying the brutality Europeans visited upon each other in the World War, patriotic Americans North and South elaborated dynamic nationalisms based on racial hybridity: independentist Cubanidad, indigenismo in Mexico and Peru, mestizaje in Nicaragua and Colombia, criollismo in Argentina, democracia racial in Brazil, and in the U.S., whiteness, a nationalism as hybrid as any of its regional contemporaries. These nationalisms were formed by people amply aware of their regional contexts, in conversation with their fellow-citizens and neighbors through a variety of routes of exchange—including the broad and variegated channels of the African Diaspora, and including the “tumulte noir.” What was the role of jazz culture in creating and contesting racialized nationalisms in the Americas in the early twentieth century?

This project explores the ways North Americans and Brazilians, particularly African Americans and Afro-Brazilians, used the travels of culture after WWI to stake political claims at home. I have a fair idea of how this process worked in Brazil. There, my research suggests, Afro-Brazilian musicians and other cultural workers used the “Negro Vogue” to vest the cultural authority of Paris and the cachet of North American “modernity,” to ameliorate prevailing views of Afro-Brazilian cultural forms, and to cultivate prestige for performers considered “modest” at home. Examining those struggles highlights the agency of members of the African Diaspora, assertively promoting what they understood to be their best interests, in cultural as well as more traditionally political arenas. It also shows the role of the Diaspora—and the performance of the idea of such a thing—in shaping ideologies of nation, as well as of race. It reveals, in other words, non-elite and popular-cultural participation in ideological production, and the transnational contours of national ideology.

The irrevocably tangled flows of jazz culture constitute an arena of cultural diffusion far more complex than a one-way shadow of economic power. Following the imperative in post-colonial and feminist theory to trace the impact of the Other on the self, this project maps these cultural politics as a genuine back-and-forth conversation, albeit one in which power makes one side far more audible. Inequalities in metropole-periphery relations made traveling easier for first-world performers and the culture industry’s favorite cultural forms, and in retrospect makes it difficult to see the importance of travel in the other direction. Yet researchers interested, against the grain, in cultural influence on the U.S. are invariably rewarded, as the work of John Storm Roberts suggests most strongly. My research to date has yielded much more material on jazz in Brazil than on Brazilian musicians and musical forms in the U.S.; this project fills in the other side of the conversation.

There are plenty of clues to follow in this search. African Americans, long fascinated with Brazil’s reputation as a place free of racism, had the chance to meet Brazilian performers who traveled to the U.S. in the decade after WWI, such as the maxixe dancer Duque, saxophonist Luís Americano, and bandleader Romeu Silva. What did the Brazilians leave behind? What inspirations did they offer? Too, North American musicians toured Brazil, including the violinist and bandleader Leon Abbey, Baxter and Williard’s “American Rag-Time Revue,” “Bernard Kay’s American Jazz Band,” dancer Ollie Bourgogne, dance team Delson & Nata, dance team Greenlee & Drayton, bandleader Simon Boutman, drummer Gordon Straight, white bandleader Harry Kosarin, bandleader Sam Wooding, whose band transversed Brazil after a gig in Argentina in 1927, and the group “Wild Bird,” which Blaise Cendrars claims jammed with the Brazilian “Oito Batutas” in Rio in the mid-1920s. What did these travelers take home from their tours? What did they learn?

A significant set of routes of U.S.-Brazil contact wound through Paris. African American performers met a number of Brazilians in Paris, and sometimes played together, as in the case of the bandleader Andreosi, or when Romeu Silva’s band accompanied Josephine Baker, including a number of Brazilians who accompanied him and North Americans whom he picked up there. What new musical languages did these disparate musicians create in order to communicate with each other? French performers traveled to Brazil, sometimes taking U.S. players with them, or returned to Paris to meet and incorporate North Americans. The fascinating “mulata” Elsie Houston, for example, granddaughter of Texan Sam Houston, was born in Brazil, involved in the surrealist movement in Paris, and later patronized by the U.S. State Department, ending her tragic life in the U.S. The troupe “Ba-ta-clan” sowed seeds of transnational musical exchange like the prodigal sailors they were. North American trombonist John Forester went to Rio in 1922 with Mistinguette, Ba-ta-clan’s most famous starlet, later to return to Paris and play again with U.S. colleagues. How did these experiences change the music U.S. jazz innovators played? How did it change their view of Afro-Diasporic culture? How did it change the arguments they made in their music and in their lives about their relationship to the U.S., to Europe, to whiteness and Blackness, and to each other?

To see jazz culture as a transnational conversation will show some of the unacknowledged reach of this complex phenomenon, and reveal reciprocity in the dichotomies that structure modern social relations. In other words, it will demonstrate the necessity of a vision unrestricted by nationalism, an ever more critical insight these days, and reveal the radical dependence of the stronger categories on their mismatched pairs—white on Black, metropole on periphery, elite on popular, and so on. It is also a fascinating story, and perhaps, if we listen carefully, a beautiful one.