Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil

Disenfranchised Black Brazilians use hip-hop to reinvigorate the Black radical tradition, creating safe havens and alternative social, cultural, and political systems that emphasize diasporic connections, ancestry, and Black identifications. This has reinvigorated and reterritorialized a critical legacy of Black political and cultural resistance.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 280 pages
Publication date: 02 January 2024
Publisher: University of Texas Press

Salvador da Bahia, often referred to as Black Rome, is a predominantly Black city in Brazil. The local art, food, and dance are intricately intertwined with the African roots of the population. However, a significant number of Black Brazilian residents face political and economic disenfranchisement. Bryce Henson delves into a culture of resistance and activism that has emerged in response, manifested through hip-hop and the social connections surrounding it.

Emergent Quilombos, based on years of ethnographic research, sheds light on how Black hip-hop artists and their circles challenge structures of anti-Black racism by creating safe havens and alternative social, cultural, and political systems that serve Black people. These artists value and empower marginalized Black individuals through song, aesthetics, media, visual art, and community action that emphasize diasporic connections, ancestry, and Black identifications in opposition to the anti-Black Brazilian nation. In the process, Henson argues, the Salvador hip-hop scene has revitalized and reterritorialized a critical legacy of Black political and cultural resistance: quilombos, maroon communities of Black fugitives who refused slavery as a way of life, gathered away from the spaces of their oppression, protected their communities, and nurtured Black life in all its possibilities.

Weight: 418g
Dimension: 152 x 228 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781477328101