What does the BAIANA have?

Josephine Baker and

the Performance of
Afro-Brazilian Female
Subjectivity on Stage
Lisa Shaw

Introduction
On May 10, 1939, in the elite venue of the Urca Casino in Rio de Janeiro, Josephine Baker
took to the stage, alongside the Afro-Brazilian comic performer, Grande Otelo.1 Dressed in
the costume of the baiana, a stylized version of the outfits worn by the Afro-Brazilian street
vendors of the cities of Rio and Salvador,2 Baker proceeded to perform the song O que
que a baiana tem? (What does the baiana have?) in Portuguese, having taken lessons
from the Brazilian singer Elisa Coelho3 (Figures 1 and 2). Bakers performance clearly took
its lead from that of Carmen Miranda, who sang this very song, wearing the same type of
baiana costume, in the musical comedy film, Banana da Terra (Banana of the Land) (Figure
3). This was the hit film of the carnival period of 1939, released in February of that year, as
was Mirandas recording of the song O que que a baiana tem? It was in this movie that
Miranda first appeared in what would become her trademark Hollywood baiana outfit, making it her own by transforming the baskets of fruit carried by the real-life quitandeiras (street
vendors) on their heads, into a series of edible, fruit-laden turbans.Trading on the landslide
success of this film, Miranda went on to perform this song, written by Dorival Caymmi, at
the Urca Casino herself in February 1939, and it was this performance by Miranda which
attracted the attention of a particular member of the audience, the US show business impresario Lee Shubert, who promptly offered her a contract to perform on Broadway. On May
4, 1939, Miranda and Shubert departed for NewYork on the S. S. Uruguay, leaving the stage
of the casino set for Josephine Bakers arrival just a few days later.
Baker played a key role in transnational dialogues and exchanges, most famously between
the United States (Harlem), Europe (Paris), and a mythical black Africa. Mediated by her passage through the artistic circles of cosmopolitan Paris, and performed by an authentic
North American star associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Bakers version of the baiana
offered the white elite audience of the Urca Casino in May 1939 a palatable performance of
one of the most celebrated yet racially marked popular tropes of Brazils colonial past. This
article seeks to situate her performance of the iconic baiana persona in the context of the
figures historical representation in the teatro de revista (Brazils version of vaudeville),4 as
well as within wider transatlantic performance traditions, and to illustrate the place of this

English Language Notes 49.1 Spring / Summer 2011

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English Language Notes 49.1 Spring / Summer 2011

Figure 2. Advertisement for Josephine Bakers

performance at the Urca Casino, which appeared in the
Correio da manh newspaper, June 16, 1939, p. 8.
Reproduced with kind permission from the Biblioteca
Nacional, Rio de Janeiro

Figure 1. Advertisement for

Figure 3. Carmen Miranda wearing a baiana costume

Josephine Bakers performance at

the Urca Casino, which appeared in
the Correio da manh newspaper,
May 10, 1939, p. 6. Reproduced
with kind permission from the
Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro

in a scene from the Brazilian film Banana da terra (Banana

of the Land, 1939), produced by the Sonofilmes studio.
Courtesy of BBC Wales; reproduced with kind permission
from Maria Byington, and with the technical assistance of
Rosngela Sodr, CTAv, and Mauro Domingues, Labdigital,
Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro

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93

South American nation within the multidirectional waves of cultural influence that have
characterized the Black Atlantic.
As a conceptual framework, the Black Atlantic has tended to be applied rather too neatly to
discrete linguistically defined geographical groupings, linked by colonial ties, more specifically the Anglophone and Francophone worlds.5 As Naro, Sansi-Roca, andTreece affirm, the
Lusophone worlds relationship with the Atlantic remains predominantly ignored or overlooked in many studies of the Atlantic World published in English, and while the concept of
the Black Atlantic is influencing scholarly work on Afro-Brazilian culture, studies that adopt
this framework have been restricted to work on contemporary race relations or the historical evolution of Afro-Brazilian religions.6 This article intends to help de-center approaches to
the study of African diasporic cultural migrations by considering the Brazilian city of Rio de
Janeiro. More specifically, it examines the stages of its elite casinos and popular theaters as
a nexus of black cultural exchange within a global circuit of production of Afro-inspired popular performance. It thereby asserts the role of non-Anglophone, non-Francophone, southern hemispheric cultures in Black Atlantic dialogues. Illustrating how the Black Atlantic is a
multi-lingual, multi-layered international space, it aims to contribute to a fuller understanding of inter-hemispheric cultural links and transnational influences in the Americas. As
Jules-Rosette argues, there is potential for new research on Baker to articulate with multicultural studies of the African diaspora, and her article follows Gilroys lead in highlighting
the roles of diasporic figures in constituting transatlantic dialogues.7

I. Josephine Baker in Brazil in 1929

Even before she first set foot there in 1929, Josephine Baker was a household name in
Brazil. In 1927 Paulo de Magalhes published an article in the magazine Para Todos based
on an interview he had carried out with her in Paris. He tellingly wrote:
Josephine Baker, dark-skinned star of Paris. The first news about her to arrive
here called Josephine Baker a black star. This gave rise to the appearance of
several jet-black stars on the stages of Rio. Then, photographs and word of
mouth revealed that Josephine Baker was not as black as all that. Here is a picture of her, showing that she is only dark-skinned, without the features, not
even the nose, of colored actresses that we see around here.8
Bakers impact on the zeitgeist in Brazil is amply reflected in the numerous inter-textual references that alluded to the star within the realm of popular performance. Juara de Oliveira,
daughter of the famous Afro-Brazilian clown, Benjamin de Oliveira, and briefly a child star
of the teatro de revista, was described in the press as being the color of Josephine Baker.
Similarly, Ester Little, another would-be theatrical prodigy, was referred to as a perfect imitator of Josephine Baker.9 The revues of the teatro de revista drew heavily on the topical
headlines of the day, not least Bakers success in Paris and her tour of South America. The
revue Laranja da China (Chinese Orange), staged at the Recreio theater in April 1929 and
starring Araci Cortes, a performer discussed in more detail below, included, for example, an

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English Language Notes 49.1 Spring / Summer 2011

imaginary, and prophetic, encounter between Baker and Cortes, and featured the Argentine
comic actor, Palitos, playing Josephina Baker in drag.10
On November 18, 1929, Baker first appeared on stage in Brazil at the Cassino Theater, in a
visit organized by the impresario Nicolino Viggiani. Alongside her jazz band, the so-called
Negros Cubanos (literally, Cuban Blacks), she starred in the show Casamento de Preto
(Black Wedding) with Grande Otelo, and sang the well-known song Boneca de Pixe (Tar
Doll). The newspaper headlines of the time illustrate the impact of her performances in
Brazil: The great coup of the impresario Viggiani, Josephine Baker in So Paulo,11 and
She has come to America.12 On November 25, 1929, Baker appeared at Rios Santana theater, where she proved to be a tremendous success.13
In a volume of her memoirs, Baker writes of a succulent feijoada washed down with
paraty,14 held in her honor at the chic Confeitaria Colombo tea rooms in down-town Rio,
which she attended with Araci Cortes.15 She continues, in relation to her new friend Cortes:
She dances the maxixe like I dance the Charleston. It was riotous fun. A great party, in the
Rio style, a wild time.16 Bakers stage-managed encounter with the mixed-race teatro de
revista star, Cortes, has been analyzed by Judith Michelle Williams from the perspective of
the intra-diasporic gaze of recognition that it gave rise to.17 Williams situates this genuine
physical encounter within the transnational circulation of people and ideas that has characterized the Black Atlantic, and within the understudied tradition of Brazilian participation in
these cultural migrations. Bakers blackness evidently presented a problem in Brazil, and
her deliberate positioning alongside Cortes, herself labeled as mulata assumida,18 attenuated her dark menace by giving her the reflected identity of the mulata. In order to understand
the problematical issues surrounding Bakers racial marketing in Brazil, as well as to better
situate her performance of the baiana at the Urca Casino in 1939, it is necessary to take a
closer look at the traditions surrounding the representation of black women on stage in
Brazil in the 19101940 era.

II. The Baiana in the Teatro de Revista

The baiana, played by a white actress pretending to be black, was the first archetype of the
teatro de revista, inherently associated with the city of Rio de Janeiro.This stage baiana was
conflated with the figure of the mulata, a term that had less to do with a perceived phenotype than with a mythical sexual allure and perceived loose morality.19 On the popular
stages of Rio during the First Republic (18891930) the generic label of mulata could mean
a woman who used her body in a performative, sexualized way, regardless of her racial mixture, drawing on a long-standing tradition of the eroticization of women of African descent
in general.20 The terms baiana and mulata became interchangeable in the context of popular performance, and both came to stand for the quintessential Afro-Brazilian woman of the
people in theatrical revues from the second decade of the twentieth century.21 The characteristically devious, lascivious, and illiterate baiana/mulata formed part of a stock cast of
stereotypical figures from Rios urban landscape that also included the Portuguese immi-

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95

grant, the streetwise malandro hustler (associated closely with male mulato identity), and
the uneducated rural migrant. These types, but especially the baiana/mulata and her male
counterpart, the malandro, personified the nation in the teatro de revista in this era.22 Like
the other types, the baiana/mulata was clearly also intended to be laughed at for her supposed ignorance and lack of education, but equally mocked for her pretentiousness and
desire to better her lot in life, all clearly consequences of her low social position, the legacy
of colonialism and slavery. Throughout this popular theatrical tradition, the baiana/mulata
was associated with incorrect speech, characterized by replacing the letter l with the letter r, exaggerating the double ss at the end of words, and inappropriately using difficult words and her own unwittingly comical neologisms for effect.23 Thus blackface
performance was both visual and vocal, with white performers mimicking what the elite
deemed to be black speech patterns.24
If the labels attached to this female archetype were inherently interchangeable in the scripts
of theatrical revues into the 1920s, reflecting the slippery, problematic nature of representation and the importance of socio-historical contexts and nuance to our understandings of
racial taxonomies, one constant until the 1920s was the casting of white women, often of
European origin, in the roles of baiana/mulata. In March 1890, the revue A Repblica (The
Republic), by acclaimed playwright Artur Azevedo, starred the Greek soprano Ana Menarezzi as Sabina, a character based on a real-life Afro-Brazilian quitandeira in Rio. As Melo
Gomes and Seigel, who refer to Sabina as a proto-baiana figure, write: if Menarezzi
whitened Sabina, Sabina blackened Menarezzi, who adopted the typical accent of an uneducated Afro-Brazilian, and the typical clothing.25 In 1892 the Spanish actress Pepa Ruiz
took on the role in the revue Tim-tim por tim-tim (Down to the Last T), a production by a
visiting Portuguese company, a fact which reflects the pervasive impact of the trope of the
baiana.26 Even in the 1920s the role was often played by the pale-skinned Lia Binatti, a
woman from the south of Brazil who was of Italian and German ancestry. These whiteskinned women were transformed into apocryphal Afro-Brazilian women with the aid of
elaborate costumes of frills, lace, and necklaces based on those of the quitandeiras.
Sometimes their faces were also darkened with make-up to lend credence to their performances, in addition to their adoption of an imagined black speak.
The ethnic trajectory of the stage baiana did shift, however, in the 1920s, the decade in
which Araci Cortes, the daughter of a Spanish immigrant father and a mother of AfroBrazilian descent, became the most famous baiana of the teatro de revista, having made her
first appearance in 1921. Her mixed-race looks meant that she did not require the blackface
make-up that was worn for this role by some of her pale-skinned predecessors.27 Nonetheless, one can assume that it was her partial European origins and lighter skin tone that
made her presence on stage in this role acceptable. As the 1920s wore on Brazilian theaters
began to showcase the dancing skills of the Afro-Brazilian inhabitants of Rios shantytowns
(which also provided the setting for a number of productions). In the revue Piro de areia
(Sand Porridge, 1926), the black female performer Rosa Negra (literally, Black Rose) was

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billed as dancing with eight black girls (these English words were often used to refer to
the female chorus).This shift in the permissible representations of black female subjectivity
on stage in the 1920s was undoubtedly linked to wider transnational trends, discussed in
more detail below, but equally to the changing nature of the audiences of the teatro de
revista in this decade. Until then audience members had been overwhelmingly drawn from
the middle and upper classes; but to enjoy continued commercial success companies were
now obliged to appeal to both elite and poorer spectators, who were thus drawn from a
much wider spectrum of racial as well as socio-economic backgrounds.
The most noteworthy development of the 1920s was the creation of the Companhia Negra
de Revistas (The Black Revue Company), the first all-black Brazilian theater troupe, formed
in 1926 by the Afro-Brazilian performer from the northeastern city of Salvador, Joo Cndido Ferreira, better known by his stage name, De Chocolat (literally, Of Chocolate).28
Ferreira had travelled to Paris at the beginning of the 1920s, appearing in variety shows and
making the acquaintance of some of the stars of the popular stage. By 1925 he had returned
to Brazil, but with his eye on theatrical developments in Paris he soon became aware of the
tremendous success of the Revue Ngre in which Josephine Baker starred. Joining forces
with the Portuguese set designer Jaime Silva, De Chocolat set about creating a Brazilian version of this artistic sensation.
De Chocolats company, all of whom self-identified as negro or black (with the exception of
Silva)29 met with heated debate in the mainstream press around the issue of Brazils selfrepresentation, with journalists drawing a marked distinction between the grotesque performances of the Companhia Negra de Revistas and the ultra-civilized Revue Ngre with
its US star, Josephine Baker. 30 A particularly scathing review of their first production Tudo
Preto (All Black), in the newspaper A Rua, referred to the poor girls exhibiting on stage very
skinny black legs covered in white marks [which] made you feel nauseous.31 The racially
premised prejudice against the group reached its peak when they were prevented from
touring in Argentina by the SBAT (Brazilian Playwrights Association). A token Afro-Brazilian
presence on the popular stage could traditionally be tolerated, but not a troupe composed
almost entirely of those of African descent. For majority white audiences, black Brazilians
on stage lacked the cosmopolitan allure of foreign black theater performers from NewYork
and Paris, who had begun to arrive in Brazil and were billed in promotional material as
authentic and original.32
Against a backdrop of such white anxieties about blacks representing Afro-Brazilian identity on stage, and of audiences who expected to be entertained by the familiar stock types of
the Brazilian revue theater, the Companhia Negra de Revistas was faced with the dilemma
of how to deal with ostensibly patronizing racial stereotypes in their productions.The companys response was to continue to feature the baiana figure, played by either Araci Cortess
sister, Dalva Spndola, or one of two other Afro-Brazilian actresses, Rosa Negra and Djanira
Flora.33 In the revue Tudo Preto, a baiana sings a song in which many of the clichs associated with her stock type feature: Im a little cheerful baiana/ All coy and friendly/ The first

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97

woman/ In this land of Brazil/ Ive a certain sway when I walk/ And swinging hips/That make
any elegant guy/ Fall in love with me.34 It is clear that to stray far from established norms
of racial representation, tacitly approved by the white elite, would have been a difficult task
and a move that may have jeopardized commercial success among an audience who were
overwhelmingly of white European descent. As Melo Gomes and Seigel argue,
Embracing the conventions of popular theatre, Tudo Preto was uninterested in
deviating from the recognizable types and predictable slapstick humour
proven to draw and satisfy audiences. Even so, the play offered profound ideological interventions, including a pointed critique of the absence of blackness
on the popular stage and advocacy for the restitution of that lack. Furthermore,
it opened to discussion questions which were previously rarely entertained,
brought Afro-Brazilians together in a context in which those questions were
made possible, and, most simply and perhaps most powerfully, articulated an
Afro-Brazilian identity in an ideological context that powerfully discouraged
such identification.35
Nevertheless, it is important to note that, in addition to the baiana,Tudo Preto included the
appearance of Black girls em trajos de banho (Black [chorus] girls in swimsuits), who
danced and sang a song which self-reflexively referred to them as delicate bathers, celebrated flappers, and futurist bathers, the lyrics and evidently skimpy costumes conspiring to evoke the mythical sexual allure of the mulata but equally seeking to equate these
Brazilian black dancers with metropolitan modernism. In this musical number the limited
options for black Brazilian female subjectivity are clearly challenged and momentarily
extended via the adoption of performance traditions that arrived in Rio de Janeiro via
transatlantic and inter-hemispheric cultural migrations of people and ideas. Similarly,
although the companys performance of the baiana archetype may seem at first sight retrograde, and to perpetuate racist stereotypes, the very presence of a black woman performing the baiana on stage naturally alters the implications of the lyrics of the song that she
performs, which can be seen to assert a pride in Afro-Brazilian identity and the contribution
made by African slaves and their descendants to the formation of the Brazilian nation. The
reiteration of the baianas legendary sexual potency and playful lasciviousness, rather than
serving to demean and essentialize black Brazilian women, instead underscores the enduring importance of this figure, however formulaic her representations, within Brazilian popular culture, and as an emerging symbol of national identity.
It is tempting to interpret the representation of the baiana figure by self-identifying AfroBrazilian women as an example of black blackface performance, but given that the very
nature of blackface implies the ability to change identity, to put on an obvious mask, to
adopt a guise that can be slipped in and out of at whim,36 such an interpretation proves
problematic.These women were constrained by the archetype of the mulata/baiana, whereas blackface performance opens up opportunities to unfix identities and create alternative
personae that are visibly ephemeral.37 As a consequence of their perceived phenotype and
its implicit class position, together with their Brazilian nationality, the adoption of the baiana

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persona by the female performers in the Companhia Negra de Revistas is not a case of
blackface masking. In blackface masking, the process of masking is more important than the
mask itself, and the mask can be put on or taken off at will.38 Because these performers were
not sufficiently distanced from the real-life black women on whom this stereotype was modeled, they could not slip in and out of the mask, nor could they assert the process of masking or the performative nature of their version of the baiana. Baker, on the other hand, who
had been referred to in the Brazilian press in 1927 as not as black as all that [. . .] without
the features, not even the nose, of colored actresses that we see around here,39 and who
had gained the reflected identity of a pale-skinned mulata thanks to her implicit associations
with Araci Cortes, was able to draw on her transnational credentials in order to effectively
join the ranks of the white women who performed the baiana on stage in black- or brownface, both before and after the brief existence of the Companhia Negra de Revistas. It must
not be overlooked, however, that the black chorus girls of the Companhia Negra de Revistas
appeared on stage in Tudo Preto as self-defined celebrated flappers and futurist
bathers, explicitly aligning themselves with both their black and white counterparts on the
popular stages of New York and Paris, and most obviously the epitome of black modernist
performance, Josephine Baker herself. In doing so, they fleetingly distanced themselves
from the archetypes of Afro-Brazilian female subjectivity and were able to unfix their identities, to create alternative personae that are visibly ephemeral, and to adopt a different
guise or mask at whim, to borrow from Norths analysis of blackface performance.40 These
chorus girls are seeking to be modern by acting black.41 Just as Josephine Baker drew on
her transnational credentials in order to distance herself from blackness, these black
Brazilian futurist flappers dialogued with transatlantic and transcontinental performance traditions in order to open up the possibilities for Afro-Brazilian self-representation,
however short-lived.
By the end of 1927 the Companhia Negra de Revistas had ceased to exist, and by 1936, in
the revue batatal! (Its Spot On!), a white actress was once again playing the role of the
baiana,42 re-establishing the dominant tradition that was tantamount to blackface performance of black female subjectivity, as Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker would illustrate
in 1939.

III. Blackface Baianas at the Urca Casino in 1939

When Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker took on the stage persona of the baiana in
1939, they both returned to the tradition of blackface performance of this stock type. At the
Urca Casino in November 1938, in a performance witnessed by the Hollywood star Tyrone
Power, Miranda wore a baiana outfit designed by the illustrator, cartoonist, and fashion
designer J. Luiz, better known as Jotinha, and adopted visibly darker facial make-up than
she had in her screen performance in Banana da terra, filmed earlier that month.43 In a
famous photograph taken at the Urca Casino in 1939 before her departure for New York,
Miranda is dressed as a baiana and is again clearly wearing dark make-up in brown-face,
as was the tradition when performing certain sambas which dealt with Afro-Brazilian char-

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99

acters in their lyrics. This was the look witnessed by Lee Shubert on the night that he first
saw her perform, and it is telling that by the time Mirandas baiana set foot on a Broadway
stage, she had literally been whitened, the dark make-up jettisoned for good.44 Nevertheless, her continued appropriation of the racially marked costume of the baiana throughout
her Broadway and Hollywood careers was, in itself, a diluted form of blackface performance. Josephine Bakers performance as the baiana at the Urca Casino in 1939 can equally
be interpreted as a de facto blackface performance. In Paris, Baker performed a composite
version of blackness which conflated Harlem with the continent of Africa, and she effectively took on the role of minstrel in blackface. In the tableau, The Mississippi Steam Boat
Race, from the Revue Ngre, Bakers lips were painted white to exaggerate her mouth, and
her eyes were outlined in paint in the typical mask of minstrelsy. She drew heavily on her
background in the minstrelsy tradition to construct her racialized persona of Fatou in the
danse sauvage of the Revue Ngre, and that of the Ebony Venus.45
In Brazil in 1939 Baker did not need to darken her skin to play the baiananevertheless she
clearly performed Brazilian blackness on the elite stage of the Urca Casino.The samba composer and radio presenter Ari Barroso acted as Bakers host in Rio de Janeiro during her
visit in 1939, and on June 30 accompanied her to a macumba ceremony in the suburb of
Ramos, which he was charged with reporting on for the RdioTupy radio station.46 According to Jota Efeg, this visit was the brain-child of the magazine O Cruzeiro and the newspaper Dirio da Noite, who entrusted its organization to Heitor dos Prazeres, Paulo da Portela,
and other leading lights from the world of samba. He writes, It was likely not a religious
ritual, strictly speaking, but just a show that combined a mix of folklore, chanting and sambas. All with baianas and pastoras,47 swaying and dancing to the rhythm.48 Efeg illustrates
how this event, clearly manufactured for Bakers benefit, was to provide inspiration for
Barrosos compositions, but it is perhaps also a telling indication of Bakers fascination with
Afro-Brazil, particularly its more performative aspects. On the stage of the upscale casino,
both Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker were acceptable to the white elite audience precisely because they were simply performing the baiana persona; Mirandas white skin and
European descent (she was born in Portugal, but emigrated to Brazil with her family as a
young child), and Bakers metropolitan blackness, US birthplace, and Parisian star-dust provided them with white masks, to use Fanons term,49 sufficiently distancing them from the
real-life black women on which the baiana persona was based. Both Mirandas and Bakers
baianas represent a visual and aural celebration of what James Clifford terms traveling cultures.50 The stage of the Urca Casino, like that of the low-brow teatro de revista, represented a fertile site of travel encounters, what Clifford would term a site of displacement,
interference, and interaction.51 Baker, the international entertainer and thus the quintessential traveler, came into contact there with the baiana persona, an archetype of marginalized
black Brazilian female subjectivity that she displaces onto the body and into the accented
voice of a US-born black star of modernist Paris. Bakers baiana is thus intrinsically transnational, relying on its interstitial, borderland position to acquire the cultural capital and cosmopolitan cachet required by white elite audiences in Rio de Janeiro.

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IV. Conclusions
The vogue for black performance that made its way to Rio de Janeiro from NewYork and
Paris briefly opened a window of opportunity for black self-representation within popular
theatrical performance in the then Brazilian capital in the mid-1920s. As a consequence of
the impact on Brazil of transnational artistic currents, black Brazilian women were permitted to take center stage in the role of baiana for the first time. As Domingues argues, the
Companhia Negra de Revistas did not bring about significant innovations, but it knew how
to assimilate, stylize, and re-elaborate aspects of the musical theater, reproducing them in
an original, creative way.52 The performance of the baiana/mulata archetype by this troupe
was far from being an example of rebellion through racial ventriloquism,53 but was rather
the adoption of a well-worn performative straight-jacket that denied Afro-Brazilian women
agency in the representation of their subjectivity. These were not blackface performances,
or instances of selective masking, unlike those of Baker and Miranda on the stage of the
Urca Casino just over a decade later. However, the companys Afro-Brazilian chorus girls in
the show Tudo Preto did assert their alternative identity as celebrated flappers and futurist bathers, thus alluding to wider international performance traditions and seeking to align
themselves with modernist, metropolitan blackness, as epitomized by Josephine Baker,
echoing the anthropophagist tendencies of Brazils own Modernist movement in elite culture in the 1920s.54
The interlude of black transnational exchange exemplified by the emergence of the
Companhia Negra de Revistas was short-lived, as representations of black identity by black
performers were only rendered acceptable to white elite Brazilian tastes by virtue of the
cultural capital afforded by associations with Parisian negrophilie. It was only with the
consciousness-raising carried out by the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental
Theater), founded in Rio in 1944, that the custom of white actors performing in blackface to
represent Afro-Brazilians on stage gradually came to an end. As late as 1948, in performances of Nelson Rodriguess play Anjo Negro (Black Angel), the role of the Afro-Brazilian character, Ismael, was played by the white actor, Graa Melo, and in 1957, in a production of
Antnio Callados play Pedro Mico, the black protagonist was played by the white actor
Milton Morais.55 It is within this enduring Brazilian tradition of blackface performance by
whites of black subjectivity that Josephine Bakers rendition of O que que a baiana tem?
at the Urca Casino on May 10, 1939, must be contextualized.
A letter from a certain V. Bencio da Silva, an official of the Ministry of War, addressed to the
Ministry of Education and dated October 12, 1941, exemplifies the reassertion of hegemonic codes of representation after the brief interlude enjoyed by the Companhia Negra de
Revistas in 192627. The author complains, at great length, about a show he has recently
seen, with a group of foreign dignitaries, at the Urca Casino, in which a production number
commemorating America Day represented the Brazilian nation ridiculously and indecently in the form of the mulata, with lascivious and indecent swaying of her hips, gestures only tolerated in theaters of the poorest quality. He continues, turning the black, the

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mulato, into a national type; choosing this figure as a model for our nation, exhibiting him
as a Brazilian symbol to foreigners who visit us in their thousands, in our theaters, in our
casinos and even sending him abroadthis is inadmissible and deserves to be decisively
and severely repressed.56 While the author does not deny the contribution of black
Brazilians to the formation of the nation in this correspondence, he deems them unfit to represent the nation on an elite stage. On this same stage, however, the Brazilian white elite
had just two years earlier delighted in Carmen Miranda and Josephine Bakers white blackface performances of Afro-Brazilian identity.
Baker, the transnational star par excellence (who was seen in Brazil as not as black as all
that and deemed an honorary mulata), was far removed from the realities of being a poor
black Brazilian woman, and her assumption of the baiana persona was obviously performed
to render her appearance on this elite stage as an example of white blackface. Rogin suggests that when identities are blatantly performed, a clear distinction is drawn between costume as a way of life and as something that can merely be discarded at will. The more
freedom there is to try on different genders, ethnicities, and other roles, the more likely the
performed identity will have little purchase on the self.57 Bakers performance of Brazilian
blackness encapsulates perfectly what Paul Gilroy terms the playful diasporic intimacy that
has been a marked feature of transnational black Atlantic creativity.58 Carmen Mirandas
earlier performance of Africanity on screen, and subsequently on the casino stage, is
reprised by Baker, a symbolic figure of the black diaspora. This could perhaps be viewed
as one of the last examples of what Gilroy identifies as the distinctive patterns of crosscultural circulation that preceded World War II, which began with black musics entry into the
public domain of late nineteenth-century mass entertainment.59 Numerous examples of
transnational cultural migrations have been brought into focus in this article, evidencing a
play of mirrors that reflected examples of black popular performance to and fro across the
Atlantic and between the hemispheres.These include the inspiration that black Paris provided for Afro-Brazilian popular theater troupes like the Companhia Negra de Revistas and the
Ba-Ta-Clan Preta, and for individual stage personae, such as Deo Costas self-styled Jambo
Venus, who was billed as Brazils very own Josephine Baker. We could also mention the
Afro-Brazilian woman Bartira Guarani, a member of the Companhia Mulata Brasileira
(Brazilian Mulato Company, founded in 1930), who travelled to Paris where she re-created
Josephine Baker on the stage of the Casino de Paris.These instances of black diasporic cultural exchange equally embrace white playwright Oduvaldo Viannas importation of blackface minstrelsy into Brazilian teatro de revista following his visit to New York in 1929. The
white-skinned Carmen Miranda would then go on to adopt brown-face when performing
songs with Afro-Brazilian themes, most notably Boneca de Pixe (Tar Doll),60 although
for US audiences her personification of black Brazil on stage rejected dark make-up in
favor of a whitened, sanitized baiana look. Mirandas baiana then provided the inspiration
for Josephine Baker to extend her panoply of black diasporic representations.Transnational
circulation was central to the acceptance of Bakers baiana by the white Brazilian elite, since
her fame in Paris, and what must have been an obviously foreign accent when singing in

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English Language Notes 49.1 Spring / Summer 2011

Portuguese, endowed her with the necessary cultural capital to assert her distance from
black Brazilian women performing the identical archetype on stage.The consumption of her
performance at the Urca Casino thus served to legitimate the social distance between the
upscale audience of this elite venue and the low-brow spectators of the teatro de revista.
Although Miranda and Baker did not meet in person in Brazil in 1939, they were brought
into contact as a consequence of Bakers reprisal of Mirandas earlier performance of the
baiana on the stage of the Urca Casino, a metaphorical but no less significant example of
what Clifford terms a transforming encounter61 between fellow travelers on the transnational circuit. The stages of both popular theaters and elite casinos in Rio de Janeiro, a city
that was increasingly a nexus of transnational, transatlantic, and transcontinental human
and cultural migrations, allow us to penetrate complex histories of travelling cultures,62
and provide valuable glimpses into the multi-directional voyages and exchanges involving
Afro-descendant popular culture in the 192040 era.
Lisa Shaw
University of Liverpool

NOTES
1 Grande Otelo (literally, Big Othello) was the stage name of Sebastio Bernardes de Souza Prata, a
moniker clearly based on his very dark skin and an ironic allusion to his diminutive stature. Such racially inspired stage names for non-white performers have been a long-standing feature of both the stage
and screen in Brazil.
2 The figure of the baiana has a long history in Brazil. Her typical outfit was traditionally worn by the black
female street vendors of the city of Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia and main port of entry for
African slaves during the colonial period.Their characteristic attire was essentially a synthesis of diverse
African traditions present in the city, and a fashion that was developed by both enslaved and free black
women incorporating elements of Portuguese colonial dress styles. Jos Ligiero Coelho, Carmen
Miranda: An Afro-Brazilian Paradox (PhD diss., New York University, 1998), 90. Such street vendors, or
quitandeiras, both free and enslaved mostly older Afro-Brazilian women, were commonplace on the
streets of Rio de Janeiro during the nineteenth century and throughout the First Republic (18891930).
By 1939, when Josephine Baker appeared in the costume, real-life baianas could be found not only selling food on the streets of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, but also leading the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian
religion, candombl; they also appeared in the ranks of Rios so-called samba schools, the neighborhood
carnival groups paying homage to the Bahian women, such asTia Ciata, responsible for bringing samba
from the North East to the capital and subsequently to the rest of the nation in the first decades of the
twentieth century. Although literally baiana means simply a woman from the northeastern state of
Bahia, the term baiana would come to carry a heavy burden of signification, and the archetype that
emerged in popular culture and found its way into the consciousness of the city was essentially a carioca (Rio de Janeiro) invention. Tiago de Melo Gomes and Micol Seigel, Sabinas Oranges: The Colours
of Cultural Politics in Rio de Janeiro, 18891930, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 11, no. 1
(2002): 10.
3 Elisa Coelho adopted the baiana persona herself in a performance at the Urca Casino in 1935. Ruy
Castro, Carmen: uma biografia (So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2005), 172.

By the 1880s, the teatro de revista had been consolidated as a recognizable entertainment format in
Brazil, which went on to enjoy widespread popular appeal into the 1920s and 30s.

Lisa Shaw

103

See, for example, Bill Marshall, The French Atlantic:Travels in Culture and History (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2009). Marshalls argument that the French Atlantic world has many fundamental features that distinguish it from other comparable linguistic groupings, such as a distinctive relationship
with native peoples and transplanted slave populations, which sometimes inspired new hybridities as
well as relations of domination, is less than convincing (5).
5

6 Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David Treece, Introduction: The Atlantic, between Scylla
and Charybdis, in Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic, eds. Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca,
and David Treece (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 78.

Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life:The Icon and the Image (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2007), 325 (Note 26).
7

Paulo de Magalhes, Josephine Baker, estrela morena de Paris, Para Todos, February 5, 1927. This
quotation and all others from Portuguese-language sources have been translated into English by the
author.
8

9 Orlando de Barros, Coraes de Chocolat: A Histria da Companhia Negra de Revistas (192627) (Rio
de Janeiro: Livre Expresso, 2005), 267.

Judith Michelle Williams, Uma Mulata, Sim!: Araci Cortes, the mulatta of the Teatro de Revista,
Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 16, no.1 (2006): 14.
10

11

A Notcia, November 28, 1929.

12

Progresso, April 28, 1929.

13 This

success prompted the Serrador company to approach Viggiani about hiring her to perform at the
Odeon theater.

14 Feijoada, a stew of beans and cheap cuts of meat, is seen as Brazils national dish, descended from
slave diets on the colonial plantations. Paraty is a generic name for cachaa, the potent firewater made
from sugarcane alcohol, and also a brand-name for this product.

Josephine Baker, Memrias de Josephina Baker: Vida e Segredos de uma Venus de bano (So
Paulo: Editorial Paulista, 1931), 114.

15

16

Ibid.

17 Williams,

Uma Mulata, Sim! 8.

18 This

term implies a lighter skinned woman of mixed-race heritage who could sometimes pass for
white but who embraces rather than denies her African roots.

Melo Gomes and Seigel point out that this conflation of the two now very separate figures may surprise observers today, given the gulf that now exists between the image of the sensual, young, lightskinned mulata, highly sexualized in the popular imagination, and that of the dark-skinned, older,
matronly baiana street vendor. Melo Gomes and Seigel, Sabinas Oranges, 18.

19

20

Ibid., 12.

Salvyano Cavalcanti de Paiva, Viva o rebolado!: Vida e morte do teatro de revista brasileiro (Rio de
Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1991), 107.
21

22 Tiago

de Melo Gomes, Negros contando (e fazendo) sua histria: alguns significados da trajetria da
Companhia Negra de Revistas (1926), Estudos Afro-Asiticos 23, no.1 (2001): 60.

23 Neyde Veneziano, O teatro de revista no Brasil: Dramaturgia e convenes (Campinas: Unicamp,

1991), 12829. It is interesting to note an obvious parallel between this mockery of black womens desire
to better themselves by imitating the language of the white elite, and the US blackface minstrelsy tradition, in which white performers who used burnt cork to darken their faces often made fun of black efforts
to imitate whites. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting
Pot (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998), 33.

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English Language Notes 49.1 Spring / Summer 2011

Michael North refers to a kind of vocal blackface [. . .] a mimicry of black speech patterns in the film
The Jazz Singer (1927). Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth-Century
Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6.
24

25

Melo Gomes and Seigel, Sabinas Oranges, 1314.

Portuguese popular theatrical companies performed regularly in Rio de Janeiro in the first decades of
the twentieth century, largely for the considerable immigrant community composed of their compatriots.The baiana was transported across the Atlantic to Lisbon by these companies; a book by Portuguese
actor Carlos Leal, published in 1921, features a photograph of the white actress Sinhazinha Prates in a
baiana outfit, posing next to a tray of fruit, in a production staged in Lisbon. Carlos Leal, Demolindo:
Memrias Panfletrias do Artista (Lisbon: Galhardo & Costa, 1921), 281. In 1933 Araci Cortes took her
stage baiana to Lisbon as star of the Tr-l-l theatrical company, the first Brazilian company to visit
Portugal. The baiana archetype took hold in the Portuguese popular imagination, prompting, for example, a one-act comedy play by Romualdo Figueiredo titled O que que a baiana tem?, written in 1942.
26

Male performers in the teatro de revista also adopted blackface make-up, such as the white actor Joo
Martins in the revue Diz isso cantando (Say it in a Song, 1930), who also wore black gloves and a white
suit, taking his lead perhaps from Al Jolsons performance in the film The Jazz Singer of 1927, a huge hit
in Brazil. White playwright Oduvaldo Vianna is said to have imported the idea of blackface minstrelsy
into Brazilian teatro de revista following his visit to New York in 1929. A photograph of the cast of the
revue Guerra ao mosquito (War on Flies, 1929), for example, clearly shows they had blacked up their
faces, with one actor even adopting the exaggerated white lips of minstrelsy.
27

For comprehensive studies of this theater company see Barros, Coraes de Chocolat, and Tiago de
Melo Gomes, Um Espelho no Palco: Identidades Sociais e Massificao da Cultura no Teatro de Revista
dos Anos 1920 (Campinas: Unicamp, 2004).

28

29 As Melo Gomes and Seigel explain, many of the same performers would re-appear as part of the
Companhia Mulata Brasileira (Brazilian Mulato Company) in 1930, suggesting that they interpreted the
term negro (black) as referring to anyone of African descent, even though the title of their first production, Tudo Preto (All Black) uses the alternative term preto, which conventionally refers to very dark skin.
They write, The Companhia Negra recognized language as a site of struggle, and occupied it bodily.
Melo Gomes and Seigel, Sabinas Oranges, 1920.

Barros, Coraes de Chocolat, 231. Melo Gomes writes that Tudo Preto proved to be a commercial
success, running from July 31, 1926, to September 1 of that year, a long run by the standards of the day,
and he argues that there seems to be no real evidence of racial prejudice against the company. After Rio,
the company performed in So Paulo, where Tudo Preto was very well received by the local press, which
rarely gave much space to Rios teatro de revista. The shows premiere in So Paulo was greeted with
great fanfare, in particular, in the local black press. Melo Gomes, Negros contando (e fazendo) sua
histria, 67.
30

31

A Rua, September 14, 1926, cited in Barros, Coraes de Chocolat, 106.

32

Ibid., 292.

Similarly when De Chocolat broke away from the Companhia Negra de Revistas in 1927 to form the
splinter group, the Ba-Ta-Clan Preta (a name clearly inspired by the French company, Ba-Ta-Clan, with
its several Afro-American members, which visited Brazil in 1925), it was the Afro-Brazilian performer,
Deo Costa, billed as the Jambo Venus and referred to in the press as our Josephine Baker, who took
the part of the baiana. (A jambo is a dark-skinned fruit found in Brazil, and Costas stage name was clearly inspired by Bakers moniker of the Ebony Venus). Barros, Coraes de Chocolat, 287.
33

34 The

plays final section, of which regrettably no record exists, centered on the equally stereotypical figure of the Me Negra, the legendary black wet-nurse of Brazils colonial plantations. See Melo Gomes
and Seigel, Sabinas Oranges, 2224, for more details of the likely representation of this figure in the
play.

Lisa Shaw

35

Ibid., 20.

36

North, The Dialect of Modernism, 67.

37

Ibid.

38

Ibid.

39 Magalhes,
40

105

Josephine Baker, estrela morena de Paris.

North, The Dialect of Modernism, 67.

41 Ibid., 8. North identifies this strategy within the route to modernity adopted by the protagonist of
Sampson Raphaelsons short story The Day of Atonement, published in January 1922 in Everybodys
Magazine, and argues that it is reiterated over and over again in the next decade within transatlantic
modernist literature.
42

Cavalcanti de Paiva, Viva o rebolado!, 425.

43

Castro, Carmen: uma biografia, 173.

For a more detailed exploration of Mirandas re-packaging of the baiana for North American audiences, see Lisa Shaw, The Celebritisation of Carmen Miranda in New York, 193941, Celebrity Studies
1, no. 3 (2010): 26884.
44

45 Baker learned the techniques of applying blackface make-up, minstrel-style, in her early touring days
with the Dixie Steppers vaudeville act and in Noble Sissle and Eubie Blakes vaudeville musicals, Shuffle
Along and Chocolate Dandies. Ethnic stereotypes performed in blackface, predominantly but not exclusively by whites, were a staple of US vaudeville. Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life, 5658;
145.
46 Macumba is an Afro-Brazilian religion that combines elements of Catholicism with those of belief systems taken to Brazil by African slaves.

Pastoras are a group of female samba dancers who traditionally appear in the annual carnival parades
in Rio de Janeiro as part of the samba schools (neighborhood carnival groups).
47

Jota Efeg, Figuras e Coisas da Msica Popular Brasileira, Volume 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1978),
14546.

48

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Given their gender, Mirandas
and Bakers donning of the white masks deserves further exploration within the context of well
rehearsed gender studies critiques of Fanons male-centric theoretical formulations.

49

James Clifford, Traveling Cultures, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and
Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 101.

50

51

Ibid.

Petrnio Domingues, Tudo preto: A inveno do teatro negro no Brasil, Luso-Brazilian Review 46,
no. 2 (2009), 117.
52

53

North, The Dialect of Modernsim, 9.

54 The

Modernist movement in Brazil, whose official emergence can be dated to the 1922 Modern Art
Week event in So Paulo, which brought together writers, plastic artists, and musicians such as Oswald
and Mrio de Andrade, Emiliano de Cavalcanti, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, celebrated the ingesting and
regurgitating of imported cultural influences (hence its adoption of the metaphor of anthropophagy or
cannibalism), especially those of cosmopolitan Paris, but sought to creatively re-work transnational cultural currents, thus undermining any suggestion of neo-colonial cultural encounter. For more details see
Annateresa Fabris, Figuras do moderno (possvel) in Da Antropofagia a Braslia: Brasil 19201950,
Museu de Arte Brasileira and Fundao Armando Alvares Penteado (So Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2002) 41
140.
55

Domingues, Tudo preto: A inveno do teatro negro no Brasil, 122.

106

English Language Notes 49.1 Spring / Summer 2011

56 Manuscript consulted on microfilm at the CPDOC (Center for Research and Documentation), Getlio
Vargas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, December 2009.
57

Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 34.

58

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 16.

59

Ibid., 88.

Performances of this song traditionally called for white artists to darken their faces. One can assume
that when Josephine Baker performed the song at the Teatro Cassino theater in Rio de Janeiro in 1929,
when she was again paired on stage with the very dark-skinned Grande Otelo, she did not need to darken her face, but that she nevertheless adopted a version of blackface performance in her costume and
gestures.

60

61

Clifford, Traveling Cultures, 105.

62

Ibid.