La fiesta de los negros: Una historia del antiguo carnaval de Buenos Aires y su legado en la cultura popular. By Ezequiel Adamovsky

Ezequiel Adamovsky’s La fiesta de los negros is a welcome addition to the flourishing literature on race in Argentina. Set in the city of Buenos Aires and drawing extensively on its rich periodical literature and visual archives, the book demonstrates how public festivities surrounding pre-Lenten Carnival in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served “to process the acute class, gender, and ethno-racial tensions” accompanying the formation of modern Argentina, especially in the wake of mass European immigration. Carnival’s playful irreverence provided a space for Porteños (residents of the capital) of various backgrounds to bridge differences: men dressing as women, the rich as paupers, city-dwellers as rural gauchos, and whites as Indigenous or Black people. With its leveling impulses, the author argues, Carnival slowly eroded social boundaries and helped “forge a sense of belonging” that endured beyond the festivities.

La fiesta de los negros focuses on the performances of Blackness that became a central feature of Carnival comparsas (troupes) by the late nineteenth century. Racial masquerade began in the mid-1860s with upper-class comparsas, whose members blackened their faces with burnt cork or makeup and sang songs in an Africanized form of Spanish with allusions to slavery (but whose costumes and musical styles remained European). The “mask of Blackness” was quickly adopted and modified by working-class comparsas that played stylized forms of candombe, an Afro-Argentine music and dance, and dressed in styles that evoked Africa or the slave past. These groups, which exploded in popularity in the 1880s and early 1890s, were typically comprised of either whites or Afro-Porteños, but the author suggests many were interracial. Building on the literature about what scholars have called “blackface” comparsas, but paying closer attention to the meanings of racial impersonation in these working-class troupes, Adamovsky offers a polemical argument: in Carnival’s spirit of unity and leveling, revelers used the “mask of Blackness” heretically (to reject dominant strictures of propriety or masculinity) and in an antiracist way (to affirm Black peoples and cultures, subvert racial hierarchy, or invoke interracial love).

Adamovsky pointedly rejects the use of the term “blackface” for its imposition of a U.S.-centric framework on a local phenomenon that demands understanding on its own terms. The blackface minstrelsy of the United States, he argues, was premised on racist aggression and parody, emerged in a context of slavery and violence, and entailed a horror of miscegenation. It functioned as “the vehicle of antagonism between two opposed groups.” The “ethnic transformism” of Argentine Carnival, by contrast—especially that of the “popular” comparsas—was horizontal and multi-directional; the groups themselves were mixed, both because many were inter-racial but also because Argentine society was itself the product of extensive racial mixing. Moreover, Adamovsky notes that although U.S. blackface minstrel groups toured Argentina in the 1860s and ‘70s, they had a negligible impact locally; the practice of racial masquerade drew, rather, from the Spanish theater, where more sympathetic Black characters had long been present.

In making these arguments, La fiesta de los negros claims to offer a new reading of racial impersonation “from the South” and in a “Latin American key.” It welcomes readers “to the marvelous world of ambivalence” in which we must learn to hold contradictory thoughts in mind: namely, that a practice with surface similarities to racist U.S. blackface could also have deeply antiracist local meanings. The book suggests that such nuanced interpretations have (until now) been thwarted by the interpretive framework of U.S.-based scholarship, which in the “last twenty-five years” has made Latin American traditions of hybridity or mestizaje the “object of profound criticism.” Yet readers familiar with the vast “post-revisionist” scholarship on race in Latin America, produced at least since the 1990s, will recognize many of its insights reflected in this book (although they may be surprised not to see this literature more fully engaged). An earlier revisionist scholarship, from the mid-twentieth century onward, had challenged the uncritical celebration of Latin American societies as “raceless,” mixed, or racially harmonious and vigorously asserted the existence of racism in the region. Post-revisionist scholarship similarly rejects the idea that Latin America is free of racism, yet does not assume that racism in Latin America works exactly as it does in the United States. Nor does it dismiss or lament popular understandings of race (as revisionists largely did) as elite-peddled “myths” that impeded the rise of true (i.e., U.S.-style) racial consciousness and anti-racism in the region. In fact, scholars in the post-revisionist tradition, many of them writing from the South (Brazil’s contributions are foundational), have become quite adept at keeping contradictory thoughts in mind, pushing readers to contemplate counterintuitive, even uncomfortable definitions of antiracism that were powerful in their own time even if they do not align with present-day racial orthodoxies associated with U.S. multiculturalism.

La fiesta de los negros partakes of and contributes to this longer tradition by exploring the meanings of Argentina’s racial masquerade from within Argentine racial formations. Yet despite its expressed commitment to ambivalence, the book’s tone is more frequently one of certainty. Explaining why the racial masquerade of Argentine Carnival does not constitute racism, for example, Adamovsky argues that

[r]acism functions by activating negative feelings in relation to Blacks, representing them as aesthetically ugly, morally abject and intellectually inferior. [Racism] singles out bodies that should be avoided. By contrast, parading alongside Afro-Porteños, taking on their characteristics, putting oneself in their place, dancing intoxicated by the joy and the pleasure that they transmitted, feeling in one’s body the resonant vibrations of a drum, activated positive feelings. Unlike racism, which urged [people] to reject Blackness, all of the above invited its embrace.

By stating summarily how “racism functions,” the book misses the opportunity to pose and explore that crucial research question. Restricting racism to “feelings” of rejection or negativity overlooks how anti-Blackness can work despite, or even through, affection and “positive” stereotypes (something scholars of race across Latin America have demonstrated in nuanced detail). Together with this narrow reading of racism, the book’s evidentiary base—first-hand accounts hailing the equalizing dynamics of Carnival, penned mostly by white contemporaries and taken at face value—enables an overly capacious, optimistic reading of antiracism. Rather than being left with two contradictory thoughts in mind, readers may come away with a reprise of the century-old idea that because Latin America was different from the U.S. it was therefore not really racist.

Especially in the final chapters, Adamovsky builds on recent scholarship considering how “negro” (both as a stigmatizing epithet and an assertion of oppositional belonging) came to attach broadly to popular sectors in Argentina. He makes a novel and compelling case that the repeated, over-the-top performances of Blackness in Carnival are central to understanding how Blackness suffused other parts of Argentine popular culture long after Afro-Argentines declined as a visible demographic. This, indeed, is one of the book’s central goals: to frame the history by which many white and mestizo Argentines came to be considered “negros” as the outcome of widespread practices of “transpropriation” (rather than one-sided “appropriation”) in and beyond Carnival. In this sense, Carnival truly becomes the festival of the “negros” in the peculiarly Argentine sense of the term—not strictly of Afro-Argentines but of the popular sectors as well.

The decision to center the definition of “negritud” that prevailed in the twentieth century—one that denoted the multiethnic popular sectors rather than a distinct “minority” defined by race or descent—reflects the author’s salutary conviction that a history of Blackness in Argentina must necessarily look different from such a history elsewhere in the Americas. In rejecting foreign “multicultural” frameworks and recuperating Argentina’s off-white popular sectors as the collective protagonists of this story, however, the author might have made more room to explore precisely the ambivalence of Carnival’s legacy for different groups of “negros”—not just celebrating what Argentines who do not identify as Afrodescendants got out of Carnival’s embrace of Blackness, but attending to the consequences, for Afro-Argentines, of that embrace.