LAFEVERS-DISSERTATION-2018.Pdf (9.135Mb)
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Copyright by Cory James LaFevers 2018 The Dissertation Committee for Cory James LaFevers Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: EMBODYING BRAZILIANNESS: PERFORMING RACE AND PLACE IN AUSTIN TEXAS Committee: Robin Moore, Supervisor Sonia Seeman Lorraine Leu Moore Christen Smith EMBODYING BRAZILIANNESS: PERFORMING RACE AND PLACE IN AUSTIN TEXAS by Cory James LaFevers Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2018 Dedication This one’s for you, Dad. James B. LaFevers, Jr. 1959 – 2014 Acknowledgements This project would never have been completed without the support and encouragement of many people. First, to all of the musicians who contributed to this project, thank you for your friendship, for letting me play music with you, and for entertaining my questions. I greatly appreciate the enthusiastic interest and insightful suggestions of committee members Sonia Seeman, Lorraine Leu Moore, and Christen Smith, without which this project would never have gotten off the ground. I benefited from great professors, colleagues, and friends throughout my education. At the risk of forgetting people, thanks are due to Charles Carson, Steven Slawek, Ted Gordon, Maria Franklin, João Costa Vargas, Juan Agudelo, Andrés Amado, Heather Buffington Anderson, Sidra Lawrence, Christina Hough, Myranda Harris, Eddie Hsu, Martina Li, Leo Cardoso, Sandra Olsen, Joel Zigman, Brian Griffith, and many other fellow students at UT; to my friends and family in Austin, Laíse, Bryant, Bruno, Devon, Jacaré, Frank, Michael, my cousins Sara, Caleb, Cricket, and Zaiden, Adrian, and the members of Forró de Quintal; to Rose Lange, Paul Bertagnolli, Howard Pollack, James Conyers, Malachi Crawford, Carol Poindexter-Sylvers, Gerald Horne, Tyron Tillery, and all of my colleagues at the University of Houston. I am indebted to Bill Cole, Kwame Dixon, John Burdick, Joan Bryant, and all of my fellow students and the professors in the African American Studies department at Syracuse for providing a solid foundation. I also greatly appreciate my students, whose energy, curiosity, and enthusiasm were a source of rejuvenation. Special thanks are due to my advisor, Robin Moore, who supported this project since the beginning, provided invaluable advice and impeccable editing at every step, and v who maintained an abundance of much needed patience throughout the long journey. Robin, I am truly grateful. None of this would have been possible without my family. Special thanks to my mom, Lynn and to my sister, Kayla, for their love, encouragement, and for hanging out with Bernardo so I could write an extra paragraph. I am also grateful for my dad. I wish he could see the final product, but memories of him provided encouragement. I would not have finished without Bernardo, whose love, energy, wit, and humor where a constant source of joy and inspiration. Finally, to Viviane, for your contributions, insights, and critical attention to the project, for sacrificing so much to support me, for never let me quit, for never let me doubt myself, for always pushing me to be better, and providing all of the love and strength I needed to keep standing…I cannot thank you enough. I love you. vi Abstract Embodying Brazilianness: Performing Race and Place in Austin Texas Cory James LaFevers, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 Supervisor: Robin Moore The number and variety of musical groups performing and teaching Brazilian music in Austin Texas expanded considerably since 2010, making it one of the largest and most diverse Brazilian music scenes outside of Brazil. This dissertation investigates the racial meanings generated in the embodied performances of Austin’s Brazilian music groups. I argue that Brazilian performance ensembles outside of Brazil are not mere products of globalized cultural flows but rather contemporary manifestations of a long-standing transnational racial formation that links Brazil to the United States and Latin America more generally. Chapter 2 focuses on the history of segregation and racially exclusive social spaces in Austin that continue to accentuate divisions between Blacks, Whites, and Latinxs, and that have contributed to the formation of racially exclusive performance practices. In chapter 3, I engage with critical Whiteness studies, performance theory, racial interpellation, and the broader (trans)national historical context of blackface minstrelsy to investigate the extent to which performing Afro-descendant music and vii dance constitutes a form of racial drag on the part of the majority-White American participants. Chapter 4 extends this analysis into the realm of material culture, considering how the embodied experience and spectacle of Brazilian music performance occurs through particular interactions between bodies and musical instruments that enact notions of race and gender. Chapter 5 considers the discursive dimension of racial drag by tracing how descriptions of samba and maracatu in Austin (re)articulate three interconnected transnational narrative tropes of Blackness—alegria (joy, happiness), hot/infectious rhythm, and community. Taken together, the multiple layers of racial drag suggest that despite attempts to celebrate Brazilian culture and even potentially challenge racial stereotypes, Brazilian music and dance performances in Austin tend to unintentionally (re)produce and reinforce views that both circumscribe the possibilities of Blackness while simultaneously reifying the power of Whiteness. The final chapter of the dissertation proposes new approaches to world music pedagogy that mitigate against race and gender stereotypes while simultaneously optimizing the potential of music for fostering cross-cultural understanding and anti-racism education. viii Table of Contents Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... ix List of Tables .................................................................................................................... xiii List of Figures ................................................................................................................... xiv INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 1 Methodology .................................................................................................. 8 Ethical Concerns ........................................................................................... 12 Chapter Breakdown ...................................................................................... 15 PART I: RACE AND SPACE ......................................................................................... 20 Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................... 21 Brazilian Racial Democracy and (Trans)national Racial Formations: .............................. 21 Rethinking Race in Brazilian Performance Ensembles in North America ........................ 21 Trem do Samba at Boteco Food Truck #1 ................................................... 21 Music and (Trans)National Racial Formations ............................................ 27 Trem do Samba Rehearsal ............................................................................ 37 Brazilian Racial Democracy Abroad: Cosmopolitanism and Racial Silences ................................................................................................... 39 Trem do Samba at Botecto Food Truck #2 .................................................. 48 Exoticist Desire and (Trans)National Whiteness ......................................... 49 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 65 Racialized Space in Austin ................................................................................................ 65 Brazil Day at the Historic Scoot Inn ............................................................ 65 Liberal Progress and Producing a Racial-Spatial Divide in Austin ............. 71 ix Spatial Production, Heterotopias, and Racial Formation ............................. 75 Deepening the Divide: from Post-War to the 1980s Tech Boom ................. 78 Keeping Austin Weird (and White?): Austin as a Palimpsest ...................... 82 #KeepAustinGentrified: Race, Space, and Disembodied Consumption ...... 87 Alice in Austinland: the Mad Spectacle of Samba in Austin ....................... 96 Keeping it Weird with Bossa Nova and Kayaks: Race, Space, and Embodiment ......................................................................................... 102 Ch. 2 Appendix ................................................................................................................ 108 PART II RACIAL DRAG ............................................................................................. 118 Chapter 3 ......................................................................................................................... 119 Embodying Brazilianness: Performance, the Body, and Racial Drag ............................. 119 Maracatu Texas at Sahara Lounge ............................................................. 119 Feeling the Inexplicable ............................................................................