Emergent Quilombos

Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil

Bryce Henson author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Texas Press

Published:9th Jan '24

Should be back in stock very soon

Emergent Quilombos cover

2024 Best Book Award, National Communication Association, Ethnography Division
2024 Roberto Reis Book Prize, First Book category, Brazilian Studies Association
2024 Outstanding Book Award, National Communication Association, Critical and Cultural Studies Division
2024 International and Intercultural Best Book Award, National Communication Association, International and Intercultural Division

How disenfranchised Black Brazilians use hip-hop to reinvigorate the Black radical tradition.

Known as Black Rome, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, is a predominantly Black city. The local art, food, and dance are closely linked to the population’s African roots. Yet many Black Brazilian residents are politically and economically disenfranchised. Bryce Henson details a culture of resistance and activism that has emerged in response, expressed through hip-hop and the social relations surrounding it.

Based on years of ethnographic research, Emergent Quilombos illuminates how Black hip-hop artists and their circles contest structures of anti-Black racism by creating safe havens and alternative social, cultural, and political systems that serve Black people. These artists valorize and empower marginalized Black peoples through song, aesthetics, media, visual art, and community action that emphasize diasporic connections, ancestrality, and Black identifications in opposition to the anti-Black Brazilian nation. In the process, Henson argues, the Salvador hip-hop scene has reinvigorated and reterritorialized a critical legacy of Black politicocultural resistance: the quilombo, 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.

[Emergent Quilombos] contains food for thought that requires collective reflexive assessment. Henson is to be commended for bringing this age-old issue back into sharp focus. . . . this book is excellent for readers of all levels interested in the historical struggle for racial equality across time and space. * CHOICE *
A real game changer...offering a comprehensive ethnographic account of the hip-hop movement in Salvador...with a very sophisticated theoretical framework that builds upon previously established scholarly traditions, but which also offers its own innovative spins and perspectives...Henson's book offers a journey that is filled with respect, intimacy and tenderness towards the cultural actors portrayed in his ethnographic work without compromising an inch of academic rigor. * A Contracorriente *
The sober thoughtfulness, loving regard, and meticulous attention with which Bryce Henson treats both the topic and participants of the study described...[make this] a very worthwhile read. * Hispania *

ISBN: 9781477328101

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 25mm

Weight: 399g

280 pages