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When many people think of African music, the first ideas that come to mind are often of rhythm, drums, and dancing. These perceptions are rooted in emblematic African and African-derived genres such as West African drumming, funk, salsa, or samba and, more importantly, essentialized notions about Africa which have been fueled over centuries of contact between the "West," Africa, and the African diaspora. These notions, of course, tend to reduce and often portray Africa and the diaspora as primitive, exotic, and monolithic.
In
Africanness in Action, author Juan Diego Díaz explores this dynamic through the perspectives of Black musicians in Bahia, Brazil, a site imagined by many as a diasporic epicenter of African survivals and purity. Black musicians from Bahia, Díaz argues, assert Afro-Brazilian identities, promote social change, and critique racial inequality by creatively engaging essentialized tropes about African music and culture. Instead of reproducing these notions, musicians demonstrate agency by strategically emphasizing or downplaying them.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1. Bahia as an Epicenter of African Diasporic Culture
- 2. Redeeming the Study of African Essentialism
- 3. Orkestra Rumpilezz: A Big Band Playing Percussion
- 4. Orkestra Rumpilezz: Complications of African Rhythm
- 5. Orquestra Afrosinfônica: The Africanization of Erudite Music
- 6. The Nzinga Berimbau Orchestra: Performances of Bantu Heritage
- 7. The Tuned Berimbaus of OBADX: Melodic Performances of Africanness
- Conclusion: Lessons from Essentialism
About the author
Juan Diego Díaz is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at UC Davis. Prior to UC Davis, Díaz
held posts as a lecturer at the University of Ghana and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Essex, the latter funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The funded research investigates the music of the descendants of freed enslaved Africans who resettled from Brazil to Ghana, Togo, and Benin during the nineteenth century. This research has produced a book called
Tabom Voices: A History of the Ghanaian Afro-Brazilian Community in Their Own Words (2016) and the documentary film
Tabom in Bahia (2017), documenting the visit of a Ghanaian master drummer to Bahia, Brazil. His articles appear in journals such as
Ethnomusicology,
Ethnomusicology Forum,
Analytical Approaches to World Music, and
Latin American Music Review.
Summary
In Africanness in Action, author Juan Diego Díaz examines musicians' agency, constructions of blackness and Africanness, musical structure, performance practices, and rhetoric in Brazil, and provides a model for the study of African-derived music in other diasporic locales.
Additional text
Africanness in Action presents a story of creativity and agency. In it, musical essentialism is something that musicians do rather than embody or believe and something that allows them to navigate their concerns connecting artistic creation and racial justice. Diaz's understanding of tropes as something "put into action" allows him to find scholarly meaning in Africa-inspired musical creation beyond the pursuit of a 'truth' about (or the impossibility of) African survivalism. Africa here operates not as an objective source of musical elements but as a symbolic referent allowing black musicians to convey their agendas in a racialized context.
