Performing Identity in Brazil and the Caribbean a DISSERTATION
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Ciphering Nations: Performing Identity in Brazil and the Caribbean A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Naomi Pueo Wood IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Amy Kaminsky and Jaime Hanneken, co-Advisers June 2011 © Naomi Pueo Wood 2011 Acknowledgements It is with great pleasure that I fill these pages. There are many friends, figures, mentors, and muses that have guided my intellectual and personal process and have aided me in arriving at this moment. I would first like to thank my advisers Amy Kaminsky and Jaime Hanneken. I was inspired early on by Amy’s scholarship linking Latin America, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Diaspora and I aspire to have an academic career as rich as hers. I greatly appreciate the close readings and insightful comments she provided with every new chapter’s iteration. Jaime has engaged my project every step of the way with incredible dedication and patience. She has been a much-needed mentor and dedicated adviser throughout. I am greatly indebted to the hours of work they each spent reading my chapters and to their persistent encouragement and support of this ambitious project. I am also greatly appreciative of the mentorship that I received from Ananya Chatterjea. In addition to her commitment to teaching me bodily epistemologies she was a grounding force who reminded me throughout that dancing was equally essential to the completion of this dissertation as the time spent sitting and writing. Similarly, Omise’eke Tinsley modeled for me early on the ways of mixing textual forms and mixing academia and personal life. It was through her graduate seminar on the Queer Postcolonial Caribbean that many of the seeds for this project were first discovered. Finally, I wish to thank Fernando Arenas for not only the rich texts that he wove together in courses but also the tremendous support he showed me as I endeavored learning Portuguese and incorporating Brazil as a central component in my work. Many other faculty at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities have helped shape my scholarship and provided invaluable mentorship. Foremost among these are Joanna O’Connell and Ana Paula Ferreira. Joanna saw me through my early formation and was an unyielding believer in stretching the disciplinary boundaries of the field of Hispanic Studies; Ana Paula was a great support in my early stages of writing and was the first to suggest using Hip Hop as a methodology rather than a subject of analysis. I also wish to acknowledge Barbara Weissberger, David Valentine, and Jaime Ginzburg (from the Universidade de São Paulo) whose pedagogical capacities truly inspired me to want to continue in the profession. Beyond the classroom-based intellectual shaping that has structured my life over the past seven years, I have also benefited from an incredible entourage of committed friends and special people. I greatly appreciate some select Minnesotans who endured my unrelenting complaints about the weather and who took me to great breakfast spots and out running and dancing, thanks Bev, Doug, and Sally. And, I especially thank Mary P. whose oozing attitude and general badassness continues to be an inspiration. In addition, I wish to thank Mark Hoffman for being a dissertation buddy and grounding force. I will miss commiserating over our shared goal and seeking out productive locales to feed our inspiration. Similarly, I appreciate the intense hours of writing spent with Caley Horan. My colleagues and buddies in the department of Spanish and Portuguese over the years i form an extraordinary and lasting community. Thanks to Adriana Gordillo, Joseph Towle, Kristin Beamish-Brown, Angela Pinilla, Ricardo Moreira, Michael Arnold, and Katherine Ostrom. In addition, I am also grateful for those that came before me and shared writing tips, laughs, bailes and copas. Gracias, a la novia Deya, a Marce la optimista, a Vane la bachatera, a Mandy la amiga desde el primer día, y a Kelly-D. Many special people from near and far have made the trip to Minnesota to see me through this seemingly never-ending process. To my most dedicated visitor and close friend, thank you David; you will be missed in Minnesota by many and you will be my guy for always. To another transplant, thank you to Zein Murib for the special dissertation hugs and the ability to summarize my project better than me in those early stages. I can only hope to return the care in the next couple of years and beyond. In addition to the culmination of my doctoral degree, this time has offered me the opportunity to grow through the friendships of some very special people. My love for Elakshi Kumar, deejay-E, and Adriana Sánchez-Vargas, la amigota, and their returned love for me, has helped my personal growth progress alongside my academic advancement. Thank you with all my heart. Similarly, I wish to thank Maggie and Meka who reminded me of what pure joy feels like and who helped me to regain grounding when I was beginning to float away. Lastly, I wish to thank my families in California and Hawai’i who have so lovingly supported my seemingly endless years of education, through thick and thin, who have made multiple visits and at times put up with excessive lack of contact. Thank you mom, Sophie, bonus dad Russ, Isaac and Heather, Susan and the girls, Charlotte and Anna. Starting as an undergraduate I have benefitted immensely from the mentorship, humor, and love of my dad Houston Wood, PhD. I am proud to now call myself a colleague and to remain your loving daughter. Thank you. Without the support of University of Minnesota grants and student services this project would not be the same. Thank you to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for grants to travel to both academic conferences in the U.S. and Puerto Rico and to conduct research in Brazil. Also, thank you to the UCCS dissertation group and to Dr. Harriet Haynes for approaching dissertating holistically and with heart and humor. A tod@s, gracias. ii Abstract This dissertation explores the interaction of theories of hybridity, mestizaje, mestiçagem and popular culture representations of national identity in Cuba, Brazil, and Puerto Rico throughout the 20th century. I examine a series of cultural products, including performance, film, and literature, and argue that using the four elements of Hip Hop culture—deejay, emcee, break, graffiti—as a lens for reading draws out the intra- American dialogues and foregrounds the Africanist aesthetic as it informs the formation of national identity in the Americas. Hip Hop, rather than focus solely on its characteristic hybridity, calls attention to race and to a legacy of fighting racism. Instead of hiding behind miscegenation and aspirations of romanticized hybridity and mixing, it blatantly points out oppressions and introduces them into popular culture through its four components—thus reaching audiences through multiple modalities. Tropes of mestizaje or branqueamento—racial mixing/whitening—depoliticize blackness through official refusal to cite cultural contributions and emphasize instead a whitened blending. Hip Hop points blatantly to persistent social inequalities. Diverse and divergent in their political histories, the geographic and nationally bound sites that form the foci of this study are bound by their contentious relationships to the United States, an emphasis on the Africanist aesthetic, and a rich history of intertextual exchanges. Rather than look at individual nation formation and marginalized bodies’ performances of subversion, this study highlights the common tropes that link these nations and bodies and that privilege an alternative way of constructing history and understanding present day transnational bodies. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Abstract iii Introduction: De-Ciphering 1 Chapter 1: Ciphered Nations 23 Chapter 2: Defining Nation from the Outside-In: Las Krudas and Célia Cruz 61 Chapter 3: Brasileiras no Palco: Brazilian Women on Stage 94 Chapter 4: Breaking Time: Sirena Selena and Fe en disfraz 141 Conclusions: Re-Freaking 176 Works Cited: 187 iv Introduction: De-Ciphering “The practices of b-boyin, MCing, graffiti writing, and deejaying had never been seen before, but the aesthetic concepts that underwrite them were updated, not invented. As with everything in hip-hop, the key is how everything is put together, and the energy with which it is suffused” (Adam Mansbach, 93) This study engages performers, film, and literature that address national identity development in the African diaspora, specifically in Cuba, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. In particular, the performers, protagonists, and writers selected for this project are connected to the more than century-long critical investigation into the relationship of minority identities and constructions of nationalism. In his chapter "Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora" (2005), Rinaldo Walcott asks, "why is it that the black studies project has hung its hat so lovingly on U.S. blackness and therefore a 'neat' national project? And how does a renewed interest in questions of the diaspora seem to only be able to tolerate U.S. blackness and British blackness? Finally, how does imperialism figure in national subaltern studies?" (92). The purpose of this investigation is not only to highlight multiple routes by which identity and cultural markers travel but also to further integrate scholarship on diaspora, performance, and nationality in the Americas. My dissertation addresses three diverse locations that, because of their common tie to the Africanist aesthetic, provide unique insight into questions of racial mixing, popular culture, and globalization in the Latin American context. I am primarily interested in examining representations of intersectional identities and transnational dialogue in the latter half of the twentieth century in the Americas.