The disappearing dance: maxixe's imperial erasure.

"category crisis" ... not the exception but rather the ground of culture itself."

(Garber 1992, 16)

In 1914, a revue at New York City's Winter Garden celebrated a fabulous dance, just then all the rage:

 
   The other night a dear, old friend said, "A ball we will 
      attend!" 
   Said he'd show me all the latest dances to date 
   Promised me he wouldn't keep me out very late, 
   So we lost no time at all but we taxied to the hall. 
   First we did a "Tango," then did a "Trot," No "Hesitation" at 
      all. 
   Then he said, "Now Lilian, Let's do the Brazilian 
   And I will show you something new." 
   La-la la (etc.) Oh! what that man did do! 
   His arm went round my waist 
   But it wouldn't stay in place. 
   And every time we bent our knees 
   'Twas then I felt a run in my silk stocking, 
   how shocking! 
   While dancing Brazilian Max-cheese. 
   (Nazareth and Window 1914) 

Sung to music by the Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth, this amusing piece fed and reflected the appeal of the Afro-Brazilian set dance maxixe.

For a brief moment concentrated around this single year, maxixe was an inescapable part of the dance craze sweeping the United States.

In the United States today, of course, maxixe is notable primarily for its absence. Why did maxixe disappear? Like many a fad, this dance vanished from U.S. popular culture and memory when the culture industry turned its attention elsewhere. Later, critics and historians layered their neglect over that of their sources. In maxixe's case, however, the here-today-gone-tomorrow quality of popular fashions is more complex. Maxixe's star rose for some of the same reasons that it fell, all involving a pair of conjoined phenomena key to the structuring of U.S. social relations. The two defining backdrops of both the emergence and erasure of this popular form are U.S. imperialism, at its height in this period, and domestic racial conditions, particularly the ongoing fortification of Jim Crow violence against African Americans, which gained momentum from the end of Reconstruction and into the 1920s. Maxixe's fate in the United States involved both of these factors, as well as the links and tensions between them. I offer here a brief history of maxixe's travels, hoping this disappearing dance can focus those connections and contradictions, revealing facets of the project of musical classification relevant to students of popular music in all disciplines.