Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil (review)

Abstract

This volume is meant to be a general introduction to the heritage from black Africa in the music of Brazil. Peter Fryer gives no rationale for writing such a book. Its organization, however, readily shows that it is a basic survey of various historical sources from the eighteenth century onward that inform the various song and dance genres, as well as musical instruments, having alleged African origin. In nine chapters, the author treats (respectively) the heritage of Nigeria and Benin, the Angolan heritage, the "Angola warble" (street cries and worksongs), Brazil's dramatic dances, three vanished instruments, the African dance heritage, Brazil's Atlantic dances, the emergence of Brazilian popular music, and maxixe and modern samba. The introduction sets out the basic factual information for Fryer's subsequent discussion: the connection of desafio (translated as "challenge singing") and the Atlantic cultural triangle, the African presence in Brazil through the slave trade, the relative recognition over the centuries of the African cultural heritage in Brazil, so-called neo-African music, acculturated music, and finally, the sources of Brazil's "neo-African" music. This introduction reveals the author's a priori, diffusionist, and reductionist assumptions, and thereby his limited experience with his subject. Fryer is determined to give the desafio song genre a triple ancestry (African, Arab, and Portuguese), but rather than attempting to demonstrate [End Page 931] how such an ancestry remains clearly evident in the contemporary counterpart in Brazil, he simply recounts the well-known presence of Arab and black-African influences in Portuguese music before the colonization of Brazil. The different development and idiosyncratic nature of the Portuguese and Brazilian desafio do not retain his attention. Once more, the reader witnesses here the old paradigm of searching for and focusing on origins of musical practices, genres, and instruments and their potential continuity over long periods of time. Surely, the actual examination of the specific evolution in time and space of such practices and genres would seem much more relevant for a better appreciation of the contemporary expressive forms of Afro-Brazilian traditional and popular music. It matters little in the year 2000 to point to specific elements of the vastly complex and diverse repertory of Afro-Brazilian musics as being of African origin. What matters is the unique nature of Afro-Brazilian expressive culture resulting from singular experiences in Brazilian society under varying conditions at various periods. Moreover, the insistence on an "African" presence and cultural heritage tends to disenfranchise the very essence of Afro-Brazilians as cultural beings. Fryer seems to hold to the anachronistic notion that ethnicity is the sole factor of cultural identity. Afro-Brazilians' connection to sub-Saharan Africa, while certainly a significant historical fact, can hardly explain the many aspects of their music in the twentieth century, given the fluidity of ethnic identity and the fact that musical expressions transcend ethnic boundaries and traditions in contemporary Brazil. In addition, the author's use of the term "African-Brazilian" throughout the book may appear politically correct from an American (United States) or British standpoint, but its application to anything Afro-Brazilian ("afro-brasileiro" in Portuguese, never "africano-brasileiro") is unwarranted, since the ideology that justifies the qualification "African American" for black music in the United States cannot be imposed on Brazilian music and culture. To do so implies a flagrant misrepresentation, irrespective of the search for African origins.