Micol Seigel is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Program in American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Introduction 1

Coffee and Consumer Citizenship 13

Cultural Exchange and Erasure 67

Making the Meanings of Jazz in Rio de Janeiro 95

Uses of the Exotic 136

TransNationalism in the São Paulo Black Press 179

6 Black Mothers Citizen Sons 206

Conclusion 235

Abbreviations 241

Notes 243

Discography 321

Bibliography 323

Index 367

“I can think of few works about Brazil that reveal so much about the United States, and no work about the United States that tells us so much about Brazil. . . . . [A]n important, thought-provoking book.” - Marc A. Hertzman, A Contracorriente



“Uneven Encounters is an imaginative, thoughtful, and eloquently argued work of Atlantic history.” - George Reid Andrews, Journal of American History



“Drawing widely from postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, diasporic, and queer studies, Seigel approaches this topic through a bold use of sources, archives, and theoretical approaches, arguing quite convincingly that Afro-Brazilians played an active role in the international circulation of ideas and cultural expressions in the tumultuous 1920s. . . . [An] outstanding study.” - James M. Green, American Historical Review



“ . . . Micol Seigel offers a refreshing analysis of racial perceptions in the USA and Brazil. . . . The contributions of Seigel’s are many and to different fields, including history, American, Latin American, cultural and race and ethnic studies. Rather than a comparison of national traits and differences, Seigel’s sophisticated study explores the complexities in the encounters between Brazil and the U.S. in the transnational scenery of popular artifacts. It sheds new light on notions of race and nation in Brazil and the U.S. by maintaining that these were forged often in relation to on another.” - Cileine de Lourenco, Ethnic and Racial Studies



“Seigel . . . displaces scholars who have argued that the myth of racial democracy was possible in Brazil due to an ignorant lack of black identity, showing instead how blacks helped create and shape racial democracy.” - Felipe Cruz, The Latin Americanist



“I suspect everyone, depending on research interests, will find something here that illuminates previously held understandings of complex and sometimes misread histories of the United States and Brazil.” - Stanley R. Bailey, Bulletin of Latin American Research



“Uneven Encounters is a very important contribution not only to the transnational study of racial formation but to the very definition of what transnational scholarship should be.”—María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development



“In recent years, the comparative study of race in Brazil and the United States has reached an impasse. Uneven Encounters, rather than reviving the old debates, challenges their very premises. With style and substance, Micol Seigel offers us a searing critique of the comparative method and brilliantly demonstrates how a transnational and cultural approach to race and racial identities can open up genuinely new and productive lines of inquiry.”—Barbara Weinstein, author of For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920–1964