Elsie Houston: Revolutionary Soprano

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, black and mixed-race women from across the globe came together in Paris and New York to engage in an artistic, sexual, intellectual, and political revolution -the ultimate flapper girls, they molded and shaped Western avant-garde thought and nascent ideas about race, sexuality, and left-wing politics, as well as the rapidly changing, increasingly visible role of women in modern life. This biography uncovers the story of one extraordinary figure known as Elsie Houston, who was a Brazilian, mixed-race, classically trained soprano. Following her artistic and social networks from Brazil to Paris and then on to New York, author Adjoa Osei opens the door to an unexpected history of race, sexuality, and society during the twentieth century.

Houston captured the Western artistic vogue for black exotica by restylizing Afro-Brazilian folk songs on elite stages. She performed in Portuguese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Afro-Cuban Abakuá, Afro-Brazilian dialects, and South American indigenous languages such as Quechua. Houston ran with the revolutionaries; she married the French surrealist Benjamin Péret and was engaged in the same political sphere as the Trotskyists. She performed in one of Paris' risqué nudist cabarets, moved in the same social circles as the likes of Josephine Baker, and was photographed by Man Ray. After she moved to New York City in 1937, the press branded her folk songs as 'voodoo' and she became part of a bohemian set of figures who were connected to the Harlem Renaissance. Elsie Houston shines a spotlight on a largely forgotten Brazilian singer who embodied the modernist, cosmopolitan zeitgeist that connected Europe and the Americas.