Sounds of Tradition

The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces: An International Dialogue / Routledge, 2018

This chapter explores how cultural and artistic interventions in urban space can shape collective identities and create momentum for the political activism of social movements. In particular, it is claimed how sound and its effects on space can act as a medium for social transformation (Cox, 2011; Labelle, 2010), thereby engendering the power to reconfigure and repoliticise urban relations (Connor, 2004; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The role of emotions created in collective actions through artistic and cultural productions (like music and dance) are inaccurately underestimated, since they represent important means to reinforce a sense of solidarity with the group and shape a “collective identity” in common struggles (Brown, 2016). The chapter shows how music and sound operate in (re)creating space and place-making, not only as a dissenting voice in the urban landscape, but also by producing momentum for political activism, which is obtained together through contestation and the proposal of alternative ways of (re)creating new spaces. To this end I investigate artistic and cultural productions that are set in motion in order to challenge the status quo of institutional power. Music, in this context, is conceived as a universal vector allowing full sensory reappropriation propagating through space, boundless and undisciplined, dis- closing the city’s invisible “power borders” and producing change by bringing forth problems and opportunities that feed the need for discussion and comparison between different subjects (Dayrell, 2005; Lamotte, 2014; Leite, 2004).

The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa. Memory, Narrative, and History. Book edited by Elsa Peralta. , 2022

Social scientists typically treat policing as repressive and historical centers as impoverished imitations of unmarked social relations. Yet in Salvador, Brazil’s Pelourinho Historical Center, police attempts to discipline both tourists and working-class residents, together with these officers’ violent support of attempts to separate people from their practices memorialized as public culture, generate perforations or folds in the musealized landscape. These structures of feeling support the neighborhood’s aura of rooted authenticity. In this way they punctuate, and thus veil, the heritage zone’s fraught construction and support the ideological goals of Bahia’s cultural heritage bureaucracy that claims to safeguard humankind’s shared legacies. This emphasis on the productivity of policing is not to argue that such spaces are bona fide tokens of Brazilian pasts or popular vitality, but to suggest the importance of policing in animating supposedly homogeneous spaces

Open Theology, 2024

In 2019, right before arriving in Salvador, Brazil, to develop missionary activities, an international Protestant organization declared that this city – the center of the black culture in the country – was “known for its people’s belief in spirits and demons.” The statement soon triggered indignation from activists and devotees of Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion that is a key element of the city’s history and identity. This article analyzes the transformation of this case into a public problem, which demanded different forms of reparation and affirmation of religious differences. The text debates the extension of Candomblé's semiotic community in Salvador and how the circulation of its symbols in different social contexts furthers the dissolution of bound- aries between “religion” and “politics.” I pursue such ideas by describing a form of civil protest that moves liturgical forms from the Candomblé temples to public spaces. Such civil protest technology engages music, dance, and a set of materialities, presenting an instructive performance of the constitution of “religion” and the “public” in a post-colonial landscape.

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2024

This article discusses Brazilian quilombo heritage by focusing on three dimensions of the intersection between this heritage and emancipation: 1) the emancipatory power of heritage, 2) the possibilities that result from emancipating heritage from a consonant approach, and 3) the possibilities of emancipation from heritage. Quilombos are collective societies formed mainly by people of African descent who created independent communities outside the Brazilian slavery system. Using a case study based on ethnographic and archival research conducted at the Quilombo Campinho da Independência and the city of Paraty between 2015 and 2024, I begin by detailing the dominant heritage narratives in the town of Paraty and then examine how suppressed quilombo voices navigate these narratives in legal and metaphorical terms for emancipatory purposes. Ultimately, the article pushes for approaching heritage from multiple scales and angles.

2019

This article explores the evocative power of sonic and performative aspects of a set of actions taken by Catholic quilombolas (inhabitants of quilombos) in northwest Maranhão, Brazil, in the context of the religious celebration of their community's patron-saint Santa Teresa de Jesus. Its aim is to explore the principal ways in which the itinerant drummers employ sound, movement and performance to respond to the unsettled conditions of everyday life. In line with this volume's orienting questions, this article sheds light on some of the main evocations that emerge from engaging with sound in the context of a quilombo religious festivity and the impacts these may have upon people's lives in 'conflict circumstances'. The discussion focuses on the outings of the itinerant group (batuque) for the collection of donations (joia), and on the ways in which these ritualistic acts, which are heuristically called 'performative religious praxis', visibly and acoustically manifest Catholicism in a religiously contested territory. It is argued that in the joia outings Catholic resistance to the growing influence of local Pentecostal churches and quilombola resilience to land competitors are channelled through the batuque's musical performance. In those instances, it is posited that in the joia outings, the space considered as the Saint's land is moulded, acted upon, reconfigured, and constituted by the batuque for the entire Catholic community.

Brasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies, 2019

This article describes the music of baile de rabecada and folia da bandeira from the perspective of two rabeca players who are leaders in a rural Afro-Brazilian community. Their narratives rely on repertoire and music examples that are part of the aural tradition of these practices in the quilombo. Adopting as its focus specific music pieces, this study reveals that baile de rabecada features rhythmic patterns indicating a mixture of Iberian and Afro-Brazilian aspects, to a much greater extent than literature suggests. My ethnographic work on these two rabeca players highlights the association between their music practices and the socioeconomic networks of the rural economy. The baile and the popular Catholic folia da bandeira are associated with an agrarian traditional system and territorial relations that form a cultural setting that operates as agency, which has enabled the communities in Vale do Ribeira to reclaim the historical meaning of the quilombo (maroon community), and carry out a political campaign for the recognition of their land rights. As a result of broad social changes, community leaders acknowledge that they do not perform the tradition as it was once practised and are now concerned with the extent to which future generations will maintain the rituals that characterize these rural Afro-Brazilian communities.

2013

The right to the city, a concept previously associated with the struggle of social movements in the search of radical changes in the relations in the city, has recently been accepted and redefined by new actors, from governments or NGOs to UN agencies. It has entered a process of institutionalization in some international, national and local arenas. However, a new discourse around the concept, that has lost its original radicality, has become dominant in these spaces, concealing alternative and more transformative visions. The paper aims to understand the contents as well as the processes of production and institutionalization of this new discourse. For this purpose, we inspire in critical discourse analysis to approach three key texts at international, national (Brazil) and local (Salvador da Bahia) level. Moreover, we will study the local case of the Movimento dos Sem Teto da Bahia, to analyse how this process poses significant constraints (but also new potential) for resistance and for the production of an alternative and more transformative discourse. Résumé Le droit à la ville, un concept antérieurement associé aux mouvements sociaux qui luttaient pour des changements radicaux des relations dans les villes, a été récemment accepté et redéfini par de nouveaux acteurs, tels que des gouvernements, des ONG ou des agences des Nations Unies. Le droit à la ville a commenceún processus d'institutionnalisation dans quelques espaces aux niveaux international, national et local. Cependant, le nouveau discours tenu, devenú dominant dans ces espaces, a perdu sa radicalité initiale, et oculte des visions alternatives et plus progressives. L'article se concentre sur les contenus, les processus de production et d'institutionnalisation de ce nouveau discours. Pour cela, nous nous inspirons de l'annalyse critique du discours pour nous rapprocher de 3 textes clefs au niveau mondial, national (Brésil) et local (Salvador da Bahia). De plus, nous étudions le cas local du Movimento dos Sem Teto de Bahia, pour annalyser comment ce processus présente de limites importantes (même s'il présente aussi un nouveau potentiel) pour la résistance et la production d'un discours alternatif et plus progressif.

Social Movements Studies, 2018

This article deals with the relationship between a sonic entanglement and its ruling in a weekly assembly. In doing so, material participation is foregrounded through focus on this specific entanglement and the ways in which it is enacted within the context of a weekly assembly of a citizen-led project. Based on ethnographic work developed in el Campo de Cebada – a temporary use open-air urban site – I describe the case of a noise complaint, and how relationships around it are deployed in multiple directions. Different heterogeneous actors play specific roles in the development of a controversy, and the assembly of the project in question deals with them in order to govern them. The paper is organised around three moments: (1) the emergence and formation of a sonic entanglement; (2) the bestowing of legitimacy on the weekly assembly to deal with a controversy lacking legal standing; and (3) the process of ruling that sonic entanglement by the legitimised assembly. In studying this case, I explore how activist projects are complex heterogeneous assemblages that are developed, governed, and ultimately benefit from the enactment of what I call the ‘politics of welcoming’. I argue that those politics of welcoming – against politics of confrontation – are based on the management of timing through several governance mechanisms that allow stretching, lengthening, delaying, shortening or slowing time. Among those mechanisms, but not limited to them, we find radical openness, under-definition, re-definition, subjective perception, interpretation, exception and postponement.