{"id":26625,"date":"2012-11-23T16:09:40","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T16:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26625"},"modified":"2014-12-11T00:06:01","modified_gmt":"2014-12-11T00:06:01","slug":"nation-drag-uses-of-the-exotic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26625","title":{"rendered":"Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/escholarship.org\/uc\/item\/3807p80j\" target=\"_blank\">Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/escholarship.org\/uc\/acgcc_jtas\" target=\"_blank\">The Journal of Transnational American Studies<\/a><br \/>\nISSN 1940-0764<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/submit.escholarship.org\/ojs\/index.php\/acgcc_jtas\/issue\/view\/398\" target=\"_blank\">Volume 1, Issue 1<\/a> (2009)<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiana.edu\/~amst\/faculty\/seigel.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">Micol Seigel<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies<br \/>\n<em>Indiana University<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=26629\" target=\"_blank\">Uneven Encounters<\/a><\/em>, the forthcoming book from which this article is excerpted, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and she demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Maxixe_(dance)\" target=\"_blank\">maxixe<\/a><\/em>, to Rio musicians embracing the \u201cforeign\u201d qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back-and-forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation are constructed together, by both non-elites and elites, and gleaned from global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones. Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans\u2019 paradoxical sense of self as productive \u201cconsumer citizens.\u201d Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, S\u00e3o Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far but who absorbed ideas from abroad nonetheless. African American vaudeville artists saw the utility of pretending to \u201cbe\u201d Brazilian to cross the color line on stage. Putting on \u201cnation drag,\u201d they <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\">passed<\/a> not from one race to another but out of familiar racial categories entirely. Afro-Brazilian journalists reported intensively on foreign, particularly North American, news and eventually entered into conversation with the U.S. black press in a collaborative but still conflictual dialogue. Seigel suggests that projects comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formations transcend national borders; attempts to understand them must do the same.<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"https:\/\/submit.escholarship.org\/ojs\/index.php\/acgcc_jtas\/article\/view\/6939\/6096\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic The Journal of Transnational American Studies ISSN 1940-0764 Volume 1, Issue 1 (2009) Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies Indiana University In Uneven Encounters, the forthcoming book from which this article is excerpted, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,83,21,8,6462,20],"tags":[12842,10262,6332],"class_list":["post-26625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-journal-of-transnational-american-studies","tag-micol-seigel","tag-the-journal-of-transnational-american-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}