Afro-Brazilian Music: a bibliographic guide by John GrayCall Number: HSSE - 2nd floor LC ML120.B7 G73 2014
Publication Date: 2014
The impact of Afro-Brazilian culture, both inside of Brazil and abroad, has been immense, particularly in the area of popular culture. Audiences around the world are familiar with it through the work of popularizers such as Carmen Miranda or films such as the 1959 classic Black Orpheus. However a much richer and more complex story lies behind these popular images, one that spans from the long slave trade that flourished in Brazil between 1538 and the 1850s to the more recent rise of urban black and cultural nationalist movements of the 1970s and beyond.
This less well-known history is the subject of John Gray's latest bibliography. While primarily about music the literature it documents reflects on all aspects of black life and culture in Brazil from language and religion to gender relations and race.
Its central focus is four distinct but intertwined categories of black vernacular culture¿secular and Afro-Catholic festivals such as Carnival, bumba-meu-boi, and Folia de Reis, each of which has music and dance as a central component; the music, dances and ensembles associated with them, e.g. the afoxés and blocos afro of Bahian Carnival; folk and popular music idioms from jongo and capoeira to samba, rap and funk; and the liturgical musics of Afro-Brazilian religions, e.g. Candomblé, Umbanda, Xango.