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Chapter 3 describes Salvador's major public festivals and emphasizes the cultural contribution of the city's largely African-Bahian working class and its Candomblé community. This group used the festivals to shape the wider acceptance of African-Bahian practices (practices such as Candomblé, samba, and capoeira) and created pressure that was central to the ideological reevaluation of those practices after 1930. This chapter also contributes to knowledge about the festivals, on which there is very little scholarship for the period 1930 to 1980.

Chapter 4 focuses on how various parties used the festivals as opportunities to formulate and disseminate a public discourse of inclusive “Bahianness” that came to embrace the city's African-Bahian heritage. These groups included Vargas's appointed governors during the Estado Novo (1937-1945), elected politicians from 1945 to 1954, and newspaper journalists and editors. The chapter also describes the important contribution of samba lyrics to this process.

Chapter 5 explores the important changes that took place within Bahian Carnival during the Vargas era. Between 1938 and 1952 the elites clubs, which had dominated Carnival since the late nineteenth century, were financially hampered. This created a vacuum within Carnival that the African-Bahian batucadas filled. The batucadas and the African-Bahian afoxés played important roles in creating the association between Bahia and African-Bahian culture. The chapter shows the importance of African-Bahian agency, the power of public performance and ritual, and the extent and limitations of the dominant class's reshaping of the meanings of Bahianness from 1930 to 1954. This chapter is the first scholarly treatment of mid-twentieth-century Bahian Carnival.

This chapter discusses two recent, and very different, films about illegal immigration to and through France: Le Havre (2011) by Aki Kaurismäki and Samba (2014) by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano. This comparison between examples of alternative cinema (Le Havre) and mainstream cinema (Samba) is facilitated by the concept of cinéma-monde, which acts as a levelling field allowing all ‘accents’ as defined by Hamid Naficy – be they dominant or alternative – to be connected. Each of the two films selected for this analysis offer valuable mappings of France’s global situation. These mappings are revealed by an analysis of issues of language, accents, working practices, and mobility, and offer new ways of framing French identity.

The chapter analyses the role of the Cidade Nova’s street carnival in incipient racial discourses, through close readings of now much forgotten but influential texts during the 1930s: Graça Aranha’s A Viagem Maravilhosa (The Wonderful Journey) and Arthur Ramos’s O Folklore Negro do Brasil (Black Folklore of Brazil). Several broader transformations are considered, like the 1930 coup that brought Getúlio Vargas to power and the development of radio, instrumental to samba’s emergence as a national genre. Amidst this context, the chapter explores how socio-cultural paradigms and urbanism went in seemingly opposite directions: the country became widely accepted or even celebrated as mixed, but city planning further sought to segregate urban spaces. Our discussion then turns to the first comprehensive plans for Brazil’s capital after the so-called belle époque, commissioned to a pioneering and at the time prestigious French urbanist, Alfred Agache. His vision in the late 1920s of an avenue across the Cidade Nova came into fruition after the Vargas regime’s 1937 dictatorial turn, incorporating fascist elements and privileging the automobile. The tightly controlled and censored press welcomed President Vargas Avenue as a sign of progress, modernity, and cosmopolitanism.

The chapter discusses the President Vargas Avenue’s construction in the context of global changes, and retrieves the voices of local musicians who opposed it. Orson Welles’s experience in Rio, in 1942, provides insight into some of the foreseeable consequences of the urban reforms. The director captures part of the public sentiment around them. Analyses focus on his relationship with popular samba musicians, and prescient realization of the soon to be razed Praça Onze’s importance to Rio’s cultural landscape. Combining existing scholarship and original archival research, the chapter argues that the Praça Onze square would be an integral component of his aborted film, It’s All True. It brings to light unpublished studies commissioned by the director, his portrayal of Afro-Brazilians, innovative use of musical forms to structure the film, and informed references to places well outside of the usual foreigner’s itinerary or contemporary cinematic gaze. One of the crucial scenes in Welles’s film would have been a performance of the song ‘Praça Onze’, by Herivelto Martins and Grande Otelo. Amidst a nationalist and authoritarian state, they composed one of carnival’s most memorable songs to lament the demise of the public square, stimulating a reflection about memory and cultural production.