{"id":14058,"date":"2011-05-31T00:56:26","date_gmt":"2011-05-31T00:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=14058"},"modified":"2011-10-07T00:32:28","modified_gmt":"2011-10-07T00:32:28","slug":"race-ethnicity-and-difference-in-a-contemporary-carioca-pop-music-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=14058","title":{"rendered":"Race, Ethnicity, and Difference in a Contemporary Carioca Pop Music Scene"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race, Ethnicity, and Difference in a Contemporary Carioca Pop Music Scene<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Diagonal: Journal of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music<\/a>
\nVolume 6 (2010)<\/a> [Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Brazilian Music (c1600-Present)]
\n16 pages<\/p>\n

Frederick Moehn<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Music; Affiliate, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center Africana Studies
\nStony Brook University, State University of New York<\/em><\/p>\n

Parts of this paper are from my book-in-progress, tentatively titled \u201cChameleon in a Mirror: Essays on Sound and Society in a Brazilian Popular Music Scene\u201d, for Duke University Press.<\/em><\/p>\n

In my research on popular music making in Brazil<\/a>, primarily in Rio de Janeiro<\/a> and largely among middle-class subjects, one of the things I have sought to analyze is how individuals conceptualize mixture, understood on a variety of levels but always in relation to the dominant discourse of national identity in the country. As you all know, this is a discourse which holds that Brazil’s history of miscegenation<\/a> corresponds to a natural facility with cultural mixing. Moreover, it is widely presumed that this purported capacity is most fabulously in evidence in the sphere of music making. There exists a comfortable fit between celebratory discourses of national identity as rooted in miscigena\u00e7\u00e3o<\/em>, on the one hand, and the way many contemporary Brazilian musicians\u2014not just in Rio de Janeiro but generally in urban areas\u2014talk about their practice, on the other. Such talk, in turn, has real bearing on musical sound as mixture becomes almost an imperative in some scenes: to make \u201cBrazilian\u201d music, following this logic, is to mix<\/em> (and not to mix risks seeming rather un-Brazilian, or at least overly traditionalist). What theoretical tools can we bring to bear on this naturalized and seemingly self-evident logic of cultural production, interpretation, and national identity? In this paper I will examine a variety of aspects of these dynamics in an effort to reflect on our central theme of rethinking race and ethnicity in Brazilian music…<\/p>\n

…Hybridity theory and difference<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let me return for a moment to the question of mixture and its association with racial contact. In Brazil, of course, we also encounter the influential modernist theory of cultural cannibalism, or anthropophagy, as a specifically artistic discourse about difference, appropriation and recombination, arising around the same time as race mixture begins to be positively valued in debates over national identity; that is, the 1920s and 30s. These modernist tendencies predate the emergence of the hybridity theory that arose in the postmodern postcolonialism of the 1980s and 1990s. As Joshua Lund has written, the resurgence of hybridity in the human sciences during these later decades \u201cwas met with the incredulous response in Latin Americanist circles that can be summed up by the question ‘So what else is new?’\u201c Hybridity, suddenly the fashionable cultural theory, \u201chad always been a generic mark of Latin America’s geocultural singularity.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race, Ethnicity, and Difference in a Contemporary Carioca Pop Music Scene Diagonal: Journal of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music Volume 6 (2010) [Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Brazilian Music (c1600-Present)] 16 pages Frederick Moehn, Assistant Professor of Music; Affiliate, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center Africana Studies Stony Brook University, State University […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,83,21,1196,8],"tags":[6476,6475,1392],"class_list":["post-14058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-diagonal-journal-of-the-center-for-iberian-and-latin-american-music","tag-frederick-moehn","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}