Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil - Hardcover

McCann, Bryan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822332841 ISBN 13: 9780822332848

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

“Hello, hello Brazil” was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace.  New genres like samba and repackaged older ones like choro

served as the currency in this marketplace, minted in the capital in Rio de Janeiro and circulated nationally by the burgeoning recording and broadcasting industries. Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. Through analysis of the competing projects of composers, producers, bureaucrats, and fans, he shows that Brazilians alternately envisioned popular music as the foundation for a unified national culture and used it as a tool to probe racial and regional divisions.

McCann explores the links between the growth of the culture industry, rapid industrialization, and the rise and fall of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo dictatorship. He argues that these processes opened a window of opportunity for the creation of enduring cultural patterns and demonstrates that the understandings of popular music cemented in the mid–twentieth century continue to structure Brazilian cultural life in the early twenty-first.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bryan McCann is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Georgetown University.

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"No Latin American country offers more for the study of popular culture through music than Brazil. Bryan McCann's revelation of this neglected source will delight both Brazilian and non-Brazilian readers."--Thomas Skidmore, author of "Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought"

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Hello, Hello Brazil

Popular Music in the Making of Modern BrazilBy Bryan McCann

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Bryan McCann
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822332848

Chapter One

CONSTRUCTING RACE WILLIAMS

The Klan and the Making of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction

In an emergency Americans will enforce their own law-not merely their statutes but also fundamental laws that they believe essential for their own or the national good-and ... they will use lampposts if it should become necessary.-Stanley Frost, The Challenge of the Klan

The flash of my gun showed me nothing. It never does, though it's easy to think you've seen things.-Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

From its first appearances in the pulp magazines of the 1920s, hardboiled crime fiction emphasized its populist credentials. These were stories, the genre's writers and fans claimed, with a privileged purchase on "real life" and a fundamental antipathy to genteel fantasy. Against the "bunk" of oversophistication, they promised to deliver the stark truths of contemporary society-"ugly, vicious, sordid, and cruel." And, at their most grandiose, they linked this antiliterary sensibility to a complaint against social corruption. Revealing unpleasant reality was not just pulp sensationalism, the fiction's writers and editors implied; it was part of a moral struggle against dishonesty. The fiction thus railed against social decline-indicting "graft," denouncing "parasites," and complaining against "unjust ... wealth" and "tainted power." As one influential editor implied when he claimed that his fiction offered a "public service" to its readers, the champions of the genre were rarely content to see it as a form of entertainment alone. Hard-boiled crime fiction, they suggested, offered a popular critique of a decadent society.

In short, as many commentators have since noted, the hard-boiled detective story created a pulp version of the populist jeremiad. What has been less apparent about this antielitist fiction, though, is the way it developed in close proximity to a nonfictional variety of nativist populism. During the early twenties, as the hard-boiled genre emerged in Black Mask magazine, the recently revived Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in American society by championing a social fantasy that closely resembled the mythology implicit in hardboiled crime fiction. Like the heroes of Black Mask's "new type of detective story," Klan ideologues during the twenties railed against class parasites and social decadence. Like the jaundiced private detective, they, too, spotted the signs of corruption in urban vice and moral decline. And, like the hard-boiled heroes, Klansmen imagined that the only effective response to social ills was a form of vigilante justice that imposed order on the confusions of an urbanizing society. The common ground was apparent in the title of an early Dashiell Hammett story, "Women, Politics, and Murder." In both Klan ideology and hard-boiled crime fiction, the American city was riven by illicit sexuality, corruption, and crime-closely linked forms of social disarray that demanded the control of vigilant men.

Such notions have, of course, a long lineage in the traditions of American populism, and their common presence in pulp fiction and the rhetoric of the Klan might seem merely coincidental were it not for a suggestive accident of publishing history. During the later months of 1923, at the same time in which hard-boiled crime fiction was gaining prominence in the magazine, Black Mask also featured an ongoing discussion about the Ku Klux Klan and its place in the moral regeneration of American society. Indeed, the first successful hard-boiled private detective, Carroll John Daly's tellingly named Race Williams, made his debut in a special issue of Black Mask dedicated to a fictional debate over the Klan-a dispute that Williams entered as an enemy of the Invisible Empire. And for the next six months, as Daly's and Dashiell Hammett's stories gained popularity in the magazine, Black Mask continued to run a "Klan Forum" in which its readers debated the KKK and its relation to "Americanism." This unusual event created a small sensation in the magazine, and it coincided with important changes in Black Mask's tone and direction. But its most important effect came in the way that it placed the magazine's "new type of detective fiction" in direct contact with Klan ideology at the moment when nativist politics were approaching their high-water mark in American history.

In the person of Race Williams, hard-boiled crime fiction began life directly opposed to the Klan's nativist populism, and, as we will see more fully, the fiction did its utmost to undermine the racial ideology and moral authoritarianism vital to Klan thinking. As the name of Daly's protagonist implies, however, the contest was a deeply ambivalent one at best. In Carroll John Daly's fiction, Race Williams and the Ku Klux Klan battled for the right to possess and define the spirit of "race," struggling over the characteristics of American inheritance and its meaning for national politics and culture. The Klan and hardboiled crime fiction developed different answers to the questions implicit in this contest, and as the Klan's vision disappeared from both national politics and the pages of Black Mask during the later twenties, hard-boiled populism rose to supplant it in the magazine-so that the genre invented by Daly and Hammett gained a reputation, first as the Black Mask and later as the peculiarly American version of the detective story. What Black Mask's Klan Forum reveals, however, is that hard-boiled fiction and nativist fantasy competed on the same ground during the twenties. Each sought to fashion a convincing populist account of contemporary life, and each supported that vision with a particular idea of race and its uses. The results of that competition would be apparent in hard-boiled crime fiction's characteristic ambiguities long after the Klan faded from view. In order to recognize those effects, though, it will be helpful to trace the thinking against which the genre contended and the context in which it first appeared.

A SIDE JOURNEY INTO THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE

Black Mask's unusual Klan debate began with few expectations apart from a desire to cash in on the recent and surprising popularity of KKK membership. During the early twenties, the Klan had risen from obscurity to become a nationally prominent mass movement of disaffected white Protestant men, and Black Mask's editors sought little more than to get in on the sensation. Describing the KKK as "the most picturesque element that has appeared in American life since the war," they presented their readers with a special issue dedicated to the group in June 1923. This "side journey into the Invisible Empire" was an unexpected success, prompting strong reader reaction and a wave of enthusiastic letters. For the remainder of the year, therefore, the magazine attempted to exploit its good fortune by running a "Klan Forum" in which reader letters and occasional essays debated the KKK and its relation to American citizenship. It was, the magazine claimed, the "only open, free, absolutely unbiased discussion for and against the Invisible Empire published anywhere in America."

That description was much exaggerated, but Black Mask did publish a series of letters from ordinary Klansmen and their opponents, and those often unlettered accounts of the appeal or repugnance of Klan politics were rare in the early...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822332841
• ISBN 13: 9780822332848
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar