I am a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UT Austin. My teaching and scholarship focus on the cultural, political, and intra-hemispheric dimensions of popular music, cinema, and literature in Latin America (including Brazil) and the United States.
This book traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin Americ... more This book traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century. Across Latin America jazz functioned as a conduit through which debates about race, sexuality, nation, technology, and modernity raged in newspapers, magazines, literature, and film. For Latin American audiences, critics, and intellectuals—who often understood jazz to stem from social conditions similar to their own—the profound penetration into the fabric of everyday life of musicians like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker represented the promises of modernity while simultaneously posing a threat to local and national identities. Brazilian antijazz rhetoric branded jazz as a problematic challenge to samba and emblematic of Americanization. In Argentina jazz catalyzed discussions about musical authenticity, race, and national culture, especially in relation to tango. And in Cuba, the widespread popularity of Chano Pozo and Dámaso Pérez Prado challenged the United States' monopoly on jazz. Outlining these hemispheric flows of ideas, bodies, and music, TROPICAL RIFFS elucidates how "America's art form" was, and remains, a transnational project and a collective idea.
... 3. Latin American literatureFilm and video adaptations. I. Title. ... Consequently, LatinAme... more ... 3. Latin American literatureFilm and video adaptations. I. Title. ... Consequently, LatinAmerican intellectuals' reaction to the Hollywood invasion was not initially marked by the same urgency that character-ized so much anti-imperialist literature. ...
Chasqui-revista De Literatura Latinoamericana, 2008
... Driven by the powerful US recording industry, given ideographic repre? sentation by Hollywood... more ... Driven by the powerful US recording industry, given ideographic repre? sentation by Hollywood cinema and its journalistic supports, hot jazz and early swing catapulted performers like Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker and Duke Ellington to international promi? nence. ...
When jazz first penetrated the Latin American imaginary in the 1920s, the very word denoted as mu... more When jazz first penetrated the Latin American imaginary in the 1920s, the very word denoted as much a new cultural paradigm as a musical genre, serving as an umbrella term for an ever-expanding web of industries, distribution networks and metropolitan fashions issuing from the modern matrices of Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. As US performers such as Sidney Bechet, Paul Whiteman, and Josephine Baker made headlines overseas and films like The Jazz Singer (1927) played to full houses in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Lima, avant-garde intellectuals from the region were attempting to break free from the shackles of various cultural establishments and literary traditions, all the while keeping their fingers on the pulse of international trends.Largely, but not entirely, following European models, Latin American vanguards tended at first to relegate jazz to an odd realm of civilized savagery at once synonymous with the North and its others. Indeed, for peripheral intellectuals such as Alejo Carpentier and Mario de Andrade, jazz was in many ways the ideal means of embracing the contradictions of the modern metropolis, seemingly without abandoning either projects of novomundismo or concerns for subaltern cultural practices. Writers of diverse political affiliations rightly saw the arrival of jazz from the United States as inseparable from the rapid spread of film, radio and the recording industry, but also clearly associated it with the hotly debated subject of negritud. Some, like the Mexican Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, viewed the artifact of the "race record" as a metaphor for the globetrotting mobility, eroticism and exoticism of jazz and those performers rightly or wrongly associated with the music.1 The Peruvian journal Amauta, on the other hand, tended to condemn jazz as part-and-parcel of US cultural imperialism.2 Pioneering popular music magazines such as Brazil's Phonoarte, meanwhile, likewise downplayed the musical innovation of jazz as a commercial assault facilitated by the sophistication of recording technology and the aid of Hollywood's growing mastery of sound cinema.5Like other Latin American avant-garde publications, the Argentine journal Martin Fierro greeted jazz with primitivist ecstasy tinged with fear, yet steered clear of concomitant critiques of the US culture industry. In his 1926 poem "Jazz Band," for example, Leopoldo Marechal compares the sound of the music to the "shouting of children or savages" since this is the only way that "the dead mouths of joy can be revived"(3).4 In an essay published the following year ("Afirmacion del jazzband"), Ulises Petit de Murat credits jazz musicians for coaxing "pure music" from "the abyss of noise" with their peerless technique. At the same time, Petit de Murat maintains that the dynamics of jazz, with its syncopation and "sharp and nervous palette" of sound fills the listener with "almost physical sensations of trepidation" (4). Buenos Aires-based vanguard writers thus mitigated the musical achievements of jazz not by emphasizing the music's commercial impurities, but rather by stressing the ominousness of its transformative power.Although Petit de Murat nominally distances the music from its "fondo racial," the specter of race, with its connotation of syncretism and even witchcraft, is never far off from his purview (4). The study of race in Argentina has frequently been beset by a disavowal of blackness as either an exotic import or an anomaly remote from criollo subjectivity. Yet nowhere in Latin America has jazz criticism been so prolific and intense, particularly in the pivotal period of the 1920s and 1930s, when African-American musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington first came to the attention of local intellectuals and musicians. Indeed, Argentine writers were the first in Latin America to rigorously examine jazz not only as a technically sophisticated musical genre but also as a cultural practice inseparable from the African diaspora and postcolonial legacies of slavery. …
Hasta la tercera d?cada del siglo XX, los intelectuales brasile?os, uruguayos y argentinos tratan... more Hasta la tercera d?cada del siglo XX, los intelectuales brasile?os, uruguayos y argentinos tratan el f?tbol deforma principalmente negativa. A partir de los a?os 20, sin embargo, escritores como Juan Parra del Riego, Roberto Arlt, Ezequiel Mart?nez Estrada, Antonio de Alc?ntara Machado, Gilberto Freyre y Gilka Machado empiezan a celebrar a los atletas latinoamericanos (gran parte de ellos provenientes de familias de negros, mestizos e inmigrantes) como emblemas de un individualismo nacional (intuitivo, genial) frente al colectivismo sobrio de los grandes equipos europeos. Las victorias nacionales en el espacio aparentemente nivelador de las competiciones internacionales de la ?poca parecen confirmar sus intervenciones. La celebridad ex?tica elaborada por los intelectuales les permite exhibir su solidaridad con sus "otros pr?ximos" (B. Sarlo) adem?s de su dominio discursivo de los aspectos "peligrosos" del deporte, especialmente la percibida vulgaridad de los hinchas populares, aunque estos provengan de las mismas etnias y clases sociales que los propios jugadores. De tal manera, los nuevos fans letrados pretenden justificar su celebraci?n del f?tbol a trav?s de narrativas ficticias en las que el pleno ?xito de los atletas "subalternos" solamente se consagra por medio de una otredad exaltada.
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Dec 1, 2001
At rst glance, Horacio Quiroga and Monteiro Lobato may seem unlikely pioneers of Latin American ... more At rst glance, Horacio Quiroga and Monteiro Lobato may seem unlikely pioneers of Latin American pop subversion and lmic ction. Situated some distance from early twentieth-century political and intellectual discourse dominated by such gures as José Vasconcelos, Manuel Ugarte and Gilberto Freyre, seemingly indifferent to reigning debates over nationality, ethnicity and imperialism, Quiroga and Lobato nevertheless offer an abundance of ctional and non-ctional prose on US popular cinema. They are not alone among contemporaneous Latin American writers in their preoccupation with lm in general and Hollywood in particular. The Mexican José Juan Tablada and the Brazilian João do Rio, for example, dedicate a good deal of critical writing to the subject well before Quiroga, Borges, Roberto Arlt and others tackle lm in earnest. Nor do Quiroga and Lobato offer an œuvre of Hollywood-based narrative nearly as extensive as those of later writers such as Manuel Puig and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Perhaps more than any other Latin American writers of their time, however, Quiroga and Lobato use the cinema as a springboard for a unique ctional discourse on national and ethnic identity. Their work thus constitutes an important—and sometimes overlooked—point of departure for any discussion of early Latin American narrative representations of Hollywood lm. Nowhere is this cinematic discourse more evident than in Quiroga’s story ‘Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa’, in which the author deftly crafts a narrative out of the dreams and insecurities of an Argentine bureaucrat intent on marrying himself off to a Hollywood movie star. By constructing his story on a series of lies and falsications, Quiroga in one brilliant stroke mimics cinematic form at the same time as he bases his entire story thematically on the cinema, his protagonist struggles to free himself from the hegemony Hollywood exerts over him by sheer force of his imagination creating, in essence, his own private Hollywood. Monteiro Lobato, meanwhile, achieves a similar effect in his 1926 novel, O Choque das Raças. Like Quiroga, Lobato uses a peculiar literary discourse to problematize issues of class and ethnicity with regard to North America. At the same, Lobato’s novel empowers its Latin American narrator through a highly cinematic technique that rivals the apparatus which the narrative itself describes—a ‘virtual’ time machine repeatedly identied with the United States. Thus both writers treat lm formally and not just thematically, and it is just such cinematic form which epitomizes the 1920s and at the same time sets Quiroga and Lobato apart from many of their contemporaries. In the
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Sep 1, 2013
In his landmark study Hybrid Cultures, Néstor García Canclini rejects originality and its opposit... more In his landmark study Hybrid Cultures, Néstor García Canclini rejects originality and its opposite – imitation – as inadequate analytical paradigms for Latin American cultural practices. This paper argues for a reevaluation of the imitation paradigm, arguing that it should be understood neither as a synonym of colonial subordination (as García Canclini implies) nor, in Homi Bhabha's sense, as a dangerously ‘destabilizing’ sign of ‘partial presence.’ Glissant's concept of détour (diversion) is perhaps a more appropriate mode of analysis, since it captures the ‘playful’ oscillation between the extremes of mimesis outlined by García Canclini and Bhabha. Latin American film comedy's relationship with Hollywood from the 1930 through the 1950s – and specifically its wide-ranging treatment of Charlie Chaplin's work – illustrates such mimetic ‘diversions.’ From outright impersonation to homage and quotation, spanning the Chaplinesque adaptations of Cantinflas, Tin Tan, and Luis Sandrini, and the multivalent parodies of Brazilian chanchadas, Latin American film comedy of the period used imitation as a shifting, elastic, and critical trope revealing local and national subjects' contentious links with hegemonic models.
This book traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin Americ... more This book traces how jazz helped forge modern identities and national imaginaries in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century. Across Latin America jazz functioned as a conduit through which debates about race, sexuality, nation, technology, and modernity raged in newspapers, magazines, literature, and film. For Latin American audiences, critics, and intellectuals—who often understood jazz to stem from social conditions similar to their own—the profound penetration into the fabric of everyday life of musicians like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker represented the promises of modernity while simultaneously posing a threat to local and national identities. Brazilian antijazz rhetoric branded jazz as a problematic challenge to samba and emblematic of Americanization. In Argentina jazz catalyzed discussions about musical authenticity, race, and national culture, especially in relation to tango. And in Cuba, the widespread popularity of Chano Pozo and Dámaso Pérez Prado challenged the United States' monopoly on jazz. Outlining these hemispheric flows of ideas, bodies, and music, TROPICAL RIFFS elucidates how "America's art form" was, and remains, a transnational project and a collective idea.
... 3. Latin American literatureFilm and video adaptations. I. Title. ... Consequently, LatinAme... more ... 3. Latin American literatureFilm and video adaptations. I. Title. ... Consequently, LatinAmerican intellectuals' reaction to the Hollywood invasion was not initially marked by the same urgency that character-ized so much anti-imperialist literature. ...
Chasqui-revista De Literatura Latinoamericana, 2008
... Driven by the powerful US recording industry, given ideographic repre? sentation by Hollywood... more ... Driven by the powerful US recording industry, given ideographic repre? sentation by Hollywood cinema and its journalistic supports, hot jazz and early swing catapulted performers like Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker and Duke Ellington to international promi? nence. ...
When jazz first penetrated the Latin American imaginary in the 1920s, the very word denoted as mu... more When jazz first penetrated the Latin American imaginary in the 1920s, the very word denoted as much a new cultural paradigm as a musical genre, serving as an umbrella term for an ever-expanding web of industries, distribution networks and metropolitan fashions issuing from the modern matrices of Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. As US performers such as Sidney Bechet, Paul Whiteman, and Josephine Baker made headlines overseas and films like The Jazz Singer (1927) played to full houses in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Lima, avant-garde intellectuals from the region were attempting to break free from the shackles of various cultural establishments and literary traditions, all the while keeping their fingers on the pulse of international trends.Largely, but not entirely, following European models, Latin American vanguards tended at first to relegate jazz to an odd realm of civilized savagery at once synonymous with the North and its others. Indeed, for peripheral intellectuals such as Alejo Carpentier and Mario de Andrade, jazz was in many ways the ideal means of embracing the contradictions of the modern metropolis, seemingly without abandoning either projects of novomundismo or concerns for subaltern cultural practices. Writers of diverse political affiliations rightly saw the arrival of jazz from the United States as inseparable from the rapid spread of film, radio and the recording industry, but also clearly associated it with the hotly debated subject of negritud. Some, like the Mexican Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, viewed the artifact of the "race record" as a metaphor for the globetrotting mobility, eroticism and exoticism of jazz and those performers rightly or wrongly associated with the music.1 The Peruvian journal Amauta, on the other hand, tended to condemn jazz as part-and-parcel of US cultural imperialism.2 Pioneering popular music magazines such as Brazil's Phonoarte, meanwhile, likewise downplayed the musical innovation of jazz as a commercial assault facilitated by the sophistication of recording technology and the aid of Hollywood's growing mastery of sound cinema.5Like other Latin American avant-garde publications, the Argentine journal Martin Fierro greeted jazz with primitivist ecstasy tinged with fear, yet steered clear of concomitant critiques of the US culture industry. In his 1926 poem "Jazz Band," for example, Leopoldo Marechal compares the sound of the music to the "shouting of children or savages" since this is the only way that "the dead mouths of joy can be revived"(3).4 In an essay published the following year ("Afirmacion del jazzband"), Ulises Petit de Murat credits jazz musicians for coaxing "pure music" from "the abyss of noise" with their peerless technique. At the same time, Petit de Murat maintains that the dynamics of jazz, with its syncopation and "sharp and nervous palette" of sound fills the listener with "almost physical sensations of trepidation" (4). Buenos Aires-based vanguard writers thus mitigated the musical achievements of jazz not by emphasizing the music's commercial impurities, but rather by stressing the ominousness of its transformative power.Although Petit de Murat nominally distances the music from its "fondo racial," the specter of race, with its connotation of syncretism and even witchcraft, is never far off from his purview (4). The study of race in Argentina has frequently been beset by a disavowal of blackness as either an exotic import or an anomaly remote from criollo subjectivity. Yet nowhere in Latin America has jazz criticism been so prolific and intense, particularly in the pivotal period of the 1920s and 1930s, when African-American musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington first came to the attention of local intellectuals and musicians. Indeed, Argentine writers were the first in Latin America to rigorously examine jazz not only as a technically sophisticated musical genre but also as a cultural practice inseparable from the African diaspora and postcolonial legacies of slavery. …
Hasta la tercera d?cada del siglo XX, los intelectuales brasile?os, uruguayos y argentinos tratan... more Hasta la tercera d?cada del siglo XX, los intelectuales brasile?os, uruguayos y argentinos tratan el f?tbol deforma principalmente negativa. A partir de los a?os 20, sin embargo, escritores como Juan Parra del Riego, Roberto Arlt, Ezequiel Mart?nez Estrada, Antonio de Alc?ntara Machado, Gilberto Freyre y Gilka Machado empiezan a celebrar a los atletas latinoamericanos (gran parte de ellos provenientes de familias de negros, mestizos e inmigrantes) como emblemas de un individualismo nacional (intuitivo, genial) frente al colectivismo sobrio de los grandes equipos europeos. Las victorias nacionales en el espacio aparentemente nivelador de las competiciones internacionales de la ?poca parecen confirmar sus intervenciones. La celebridad ex?tica elaborada por los intelectuales les permite exhibir su solidaridad con sus "otros pr?ximos" (B. Sarlo) adem?s de su dominio discursivo de los aspectos "peligrosos" del deporte, especialmente la percibida vulgaridad de los hinchas populares, aunque estos provengan de las mismas etnias y clases sociales que los propios jugadores. De tal manera, los nuevos fans letrados pretenden justificar su celebraci?n del f?tbol a trav?s de narrativas ficticias en las que el pleno ?xito de los atletas "subalternos" solamente se consagra por medio de una otredad exaltada.
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Dec 1, 2001
At rst glance, Horacio Quiroga and Monteiro Lobato may seem unlikely pioneers of Latin American ... more At rst glance, Horacio Quiroga and Monteiro Lobato may seem unlikely pioneers of Latin American pop subversion and lmic ction. Situated some distance from early twentieth-century political and intellectual discourse dominated by such gures as José Vasconcelos, Manuel Ugarte and Gilberto Freyre, seemingly indifferent to reigning debates over nationality, ethnicity and imperialism, Quiroga and Lobato nevertheless offer an abundance of ctional and non-ctional prose on US popular cinema. They are not alone among contemporaneous Latin American writers in their preoccupation with lm in general and Hollywood in particular. The Mexican José Juan Tablada and the Brazilian João do Rio, for example, dedicate a good deal of critical writing to the subject well before Quiroga, Borges, Roberto Arlt and others tackle lm in earnest. Nor do Quiroga and Lobato offer an œuvre of Hollywood-based narrative nearly as extensive as those of later writers such as Manuel Puig and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Perhaps more than any other Latin American writers of their time, however, Quiroga and Lobato use the cinema as a springboard for a unique ctional discourse on national and ethnic identity. Their work thus constitutes an important—and sometimes overlooked—point of departure for any discussion of early Latin American narrative representations of Hollywood lm. Nowhere is this cinematic discourse more evident than in Quiroga’s story ‘Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa’, in which the author deftly crafts a narrative out of the dreams and insecurities of an Argentine bureaucrat intent on marrying himself off to a Hollywood movie star. By constructing his story on a series of lies and falsications, Quiroga in one brilliant stroke mimics cinematic form at the same time as he bases his entire story thematically on the cinema, his protagonist struggles to free himself from the hegemony Hollywood exerts over him by sheer force of his imagination creating, in essence, his own private Hollywood. Monteiro Lobato, meanwhile, achieves a similar effect in his 1926 novel, O Choque das Raças. Like Quiroga, Lobato uses a peculiar literary discourse to problematize issues of class and ethnicity with regard to North America. At the same, Lobato’s novel empowers its Latin American narrator through a highly cinematic technique that rivals the apparatus which the narrative itself describes—a ‘virtual’ time machine repeatedly identied with the United States. Thus both writers treat lm formally and not just thematically, and it is just such cinematic form which epitomizes the 1920s and at the same time sets Quiroga and Lobato apart from many of their contemporaries. In the
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Sep 1, 2013
In his landmark study Hybrid Cultures, Néstor García Canclini rejects originality and its opposit... more In his landmark study Hybrid Cultures, Néstor García Canclini rejects originality and its opposite – imitation – as inadequate analytical paradigms for Latin American cultural practices. This paper argues for a reevaluation of the imitation paradigm, arguing that it should be understood neither as a synonym of colonial subordination (as García Canclini implies) nor, in Homi Bhabha's sense, as a dangerously ‘destabilizing’ sign of ‘partial presence.’ Glissant's concept of détour (diversion) is perhaps a more appropriate mode of analysis, since it captures the ‘playful’ oscillation between the extremes of mimesis outlined by García Canclini and Bhabha. Latin American film comedy's relationship with Hollywood from the 1930 through the 1950s – and specifically its wide-ranging treatment of Charlie Chaplin's work – illustrates such mimetic ‘diversions.’ From outright impersonation to homage and quotation, spanning the Chaplinesque adaptations of Cantinflas, Tin Tan, and Luis Sandrini, and the multivalent parodies of Brazilian chanchadas, Latin American film comedy of the period used imitation as a shifting, elastic, and critical trope revealing local and national subjects' contentious links with hegemonic models.
El clown inglés no constituye un tipo, sino más bien una institución, tan respetable al menos com... more El clown inglés no constituye un tipo, sino más bien una institución, tan respetable al menos como la cámara de los lores. El arte del clown significa el domesticamiento de la bufonería salvaje y nómade del bohemio, según el gusto y las necesidades de una refinada sociedad capitalista.-José Carlos Mariátegui, "Esquema de una explicación de Chaplin" (168)
This YouTube playlist (which includes commentary) gives a sampling of the performers and performa... more This YouTube playlist (which includes commentary) gives a sampling of the performers and performances that speak to the main issues covered in the five chapters of my book TROPICAL RIFFS: LATIN AMERICA AND THE POLITICS OF JAZZ (Duke University Press, 2018). The playlist is meant to enhance and complement readings of the book, and may be helpful to teachers who would like to includes sections of the book in course assignments.
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