Nicolas Allen

This dissertation tells the story of the Brazilians who made samba into a national anthem—not the celebrated musical artists, not the state propogandists, but the invisible Afro-Brazilian sound technicians, arrangers, and field recorders who, from the 1920s onward, worked at the intersection of popular music and machine modernity. Too often, the feats of those professional journeymen were obscured by their achievement: a genre of recorded popular music, samba, that outwardly acceded to mainstream stereotypes linking Afro-Brazilian culture to “liveness” and traditional “authenticity.” Set against the backdrop of Brazil’s mid-century embrace of racial mixing (1930s-1960s), this dissertation recovers the stories of black sound pioneers who subtly challenged primitivist stereotypes by insisting that “authenticity” was the preserve of state-of-the-art recording technology. “Black Transducers” tells the story of the Afro-Brazilian music makers who pressed for expanded cultural citizenship through subtle assertions of black sonic modernity.