Full Description
Music and antiracism in Brazil explores the contribution of Brazilian music-making to the antiracist cause between the mid-1960s and the early 2000s. Offering fresh, critical readings of the most representative compositions, performances and initiatives from the period, it comprehensively assesses how, during the 1964-85 Dictatorship and the democratic reconstruction that followed, musicians contributed to the development of an antiracist politics in their creative approaches, repertoires and interventions.
While often claiming music as evidence of the country's mixed, racially 'democratic' character, the authoritarian state and its mestiço nationalist ideology actively sought to deny the selfhood of Black Brazilians as autonomous agents of their own history. But as David Treece shows, the musician-activists of the antiracist movement succeeded in giving voice to an insubordinate, insurgent Black subject while transcending the fantasies of 'race' and nation through class-based and cosmopolitan forms of solidarity.
Contents
Introduction
I - A musical counter-politics
1 Love music, hate racism? Musical activism, Blackness and antiracism
2 Musical Blackness and mestiço nationalism in Brazil
3 Beyond body and soul: Against the colonial division of labour
4 Improvising freedom: Repetition, listening, community
II - Let us speak: Black subjectivity, agency and history in the era
of authoritarianism
5 Policing the racial regime: Antiracism and the State
6 Coming to voice in the language of soul: Música Popular Black and
the performance of antiracism
7 Quilombos and Marias: History and memory in the narrative of
Black resistance
8 Afro-Bahia, afrocentrism and Black radicalism
III - Struggles over space and power in a racialised nation
9 Musical community, citizenship and class
10 A place in the system? Hip hop and funk, between periphery
and centre
IV - 'All the colours' and none
11 Solidarity, cosmopolitanism and the gafieira universal
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
