Kalunga Project

Abstract

This article explores how musical culture is created and recreated in multi-dimensional flows and cultural transfers between two countries, Brazil and Angola, and in spaces that extrapolate national boundaries and confound cultural hierarchies. It will discuss the encounter between two national fields of musical production through the Brazilian Kalunga Project, which helps to understand how musical movements are organized between transnational popular cultures. I adopt field theory, which comprehends fields of meaning as relational principles, whose heuristic force is shaped by their historicity and temporality, rather than by their spacial characteristics. With my focus on the Kalunga Project, I am interested in the cultural transformations that operate in such fields of cultural exchange as these are fostered by national and international flows of goods and symbols, and are shaped by various mediators, such as musicians, producers, critics, journalists and others between Brazil and Angola. In other words, the article focuses on cultural practices and productions in artistic production as a whole, rather than on individuals, institutions or specific national contexts.