Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil - Softcover

Hertzman, Marc A

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822354306 ISBN 13: 9780822354307

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2013

Synopsis

In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the Telephone") at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. This apparently simple act—claiming ownership of a musical composition—set in motion a series of events that would shake Brazil's cultural landscape. Before the debut of "Pelo telephone," samba was a somewhat obscure term, but by the late 1920s, the wildly popular song had helped to make it synonymous with Brazilian national music.

The success of "Pelo telephone" embroiled Donga in controversy. A group of musicians claimed that he had stolen their work, and a prominent journalist accused him of selling out his people in pursuit of profit and fame. Within this single episode are many of the concerns that animate Making Samba, including intellectual property claims, the Brazilian state, popular music, race, gender, national identity, and the history of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro. By tracing the careers of Rio's pioneering black musicians from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, Marc A. Hertzman revises the histories of samba and of Brazilian national culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Marc A. Hertzman is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia University.

Review:

"Making Samba is revisionist history at its best. Marc A. Hertzman takes on cherished myths of Brazilian popular culture and carefully debunks them, demonstrating through pioneering research and painstaking analysis where, how, and why they were created. In addition, he illuminates the links between popular music, race, labor, and intellectual property. This should attract considerable attention; no other study of Brazil has done similar work." (Bryan McCann, author of Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil)

"In Making Samba, Marc A. Hertzman narrates with great skill and clarity the complex history of Brazil's foundational musical genre. In doing so, he reveals how this celebrated, often romanticized Afro-Brazilian form emerged out of an acutely material set of social conditions and in close relation to Brazil's modern struggles over race, artistic ownership, and popular culture. By focusing in large part on the actual laboring lives of the musicians who negotiated Brazil's commercial/legal structures and technologies of circulation/dissemination, Hertzman brings alive samba's modern story while also telling a powerful tale about the music's generative cultural power. A remarkable contribution to popular music studies, suggesting compelling parallels with musical traditions to the north." (Ronald Radano, Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Wisconsin–Madison)

"I'm looking forward to the Portuguese translation, because [Making Samba] is a significant contribution to our [Brazilians'] collective understanding of ourselves, made through an academic reading of the larger social world of samba." (DJ Carlos Silva, radio host for 98.7 Mare FM)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0822354306
• ISBN 13: 9780822354307
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392