Music and antiracism in Brazil: Politics, art activism, 19642004

Music and antiracism in Brazil explores how Brazilian music-making from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s challenged racist practices and discourses. With fresh readings of the most representative compositions, performances and initiatives from the period, it offers a comprehensive, critical appraisal of their legacy for the antiracist cause. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s, Brazil’s popular musicians produced a remarkable body of work that exposed and challenged the country’s distinctive brand of racism. In this book, David Treece provides a comprehensive, critical appraisal of that tradition of musical activism and its important legacy for the wider antiracist cause. In post-Abolition Brazil, music was invariably invoked as a symbol of the country’s racially ‘democratic’ character as a mixed, mestiço nation. In practice, though, the quasi-official ideology of mestiço nationalism functioned as a bulwark of White supremacy, denying the selfhood of Black Brazilians and suppressing their claims to autonomy and self-representation. But in the mid-1970s, in the face of a military dictatorship, a newly emergent Black movement began to contest the regime of racial denialism and to link its own demands with the wider struggle for democracy. As it grew, the movement was informed by the creative work and interventions of diverse generations of musicians: the roots samba artists of Rio de Janeiro, the blocos afro of Salvador, the soul, hip-hop and funk movements, and the work of singer-songwriters such as Gilberto Gil and Milton Nascimento. Treece shows how, across four decades, these artists subverted the discourses of racial power and, at the same time, how they gave voice and presence to the new Black subjectivity and its aspirations. Furthermore, they demonstrated how music-making might embody an antiracist ethics by transcending the fantasies of ‘race’ and nation and modelling class-based and cosmopolitan forms of solidarity in their place. 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.