10

Counter-Tradition: Toward the Black Vanguard of Contemporary Brazil

GG Albuquerque

In the 1930s, the first school, Deixa Falar, located in the Estácio de Sá neighborhood of , was experiencing a period of growth. More and more people were accompanying the carnival parade, singing and celebrating in the streets of the city. But this expansion brought an acoustic problem to the sambistas (samba players): amid that crowd, the people could not clearly understand the music that was being played and sung. In an attempt to solve this problem, the composer Alcebíades Barcelos, aka Bide, used his technical skills as a shoemaker and clothed a 20-kilogram butter can with a moistened cement paper bag, tying it to the can with wires and thumbtacks. The result was a brilliant creation: Bide had invented the surdo, a bass drum that not only solved the initial problem of acoustic demand from samba schools, but also revolutionized Brazilian popular music. Until that time, samba had a very different sound from what we now recognize as samba. A notorious example is Donga’s “Pelo Telefone” (1916). The music exhibited a slow swing influenced by rural sounds (like themaxixe ) and European genres (like polka and Scottish), and was recognized as the first samba ever recorded. The polyrhythmic drums, the batucada that became the structural pillar of samba, would only flourish a little more than a decade later, precisely because of the experiments of Estácio de Sá’s musicians in the 1930s. Bide and other composers, such as Ismael Silva, Armando Marçal, Heitor dos Prazeres, Brancura, Baiano, Baiaco, and Getúlio Marinho, developed the sonic language of the urban samba in Rio de Janeiro, the samba de sambar:1 a new sonic configuration based on fast syncopated rhythms and simpler, more direct, and more effective harmonies to be sung in the streets during carnival. Using music and sound as an intensive and material writing of the black body, the musicians of Estácio de Sá founded the creative field of their own, which was recorded by the available technology of the time and distributed by the incipient Brazilian phonographic industry. An example of this new and radical sound is the “Nem é Bom Bom” (1931),2 a composition of Ismael Silva and Nilton Bastos interpreted by Francisco Alves.3 Despite the experimental procedures of Estácio’s crew, qualities like “experimentation,” “innovation,” and other terms that surround the idea of a vanguard

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are rarely attributed to the genre of samba. For the Brazilian cultural intelligentsia, these terms belong almost exclusively to “high culture” movements such as modernism and the Week of Modern Art, known as “Semana de 22” (Week of 22), an event almost contemporary with the Estácio samba, which gathered Brazilian artists such as Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. To samba, another world was destined: appropriated by the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship,4 samba became associated with the Brazilian ethos, a fundamental characteristic of our national cultural identity.5 This music, elaborated by the hands of blacks descended from newly freed slaves, is viewed—as are most African-derived cultures—through the musicological lenses of folklore or the paternalism of tradition, thus silencing its radical experimentalism. While the samba artists recreated daily objects and work tools from the urban daily life of the Rio de Janeiro favelas (slums), modernist artists had on their horizon of reference European modern art. Historically and politically, samba has been labeled as tradition, the archaic, the past, while modernism is identified with the vanguard, the modern, the futuristic. Well, if the vanguard is a matter of groundbreaking experimentation, why not attribute vanguard characteristics to samba, which has not ceased to change in over 100 years? I am talking about one specific genre, but this provocation goes way beyond samba. The issue here is not merely the classification of what is modern or not. I am also not interested in appealing to the legitimacy of an Afro-Brazilian cultural inventory, nor am I trying to turn it into a new canon. What I am seeking, through Brazilian black music, is an experimental exercise of a new epistemology that emerges from the antinomies of modernity and its founding racism. The domestication and non- recognition of the radical potentialities of samba comprise one of many historical deletions and processes of infantilization of Afro-diasporic expressive cultures. It is a classic example of what blackness theorists classify as epistemicide. This is a byproduct of colonialism defined by Sueli Carneiro as the “negation of black people as producers of knowledge … by devaluing, denying, or concealing the contributions of the African Continent and the African diaspora to the cultural heritage of humanity; by the imposition of cultural whitening.”6 To make experimental music black is to trigger a counter-modernity, going the opposite way of modernity and its philosophical tradition. This process, as we shall see, insists on the devaluation of black knowledge—after all, the idea of the black as fundamentally nonhuman and devoid of soul and intellect ideologically legitimized slavery and colonialism, and has been a part of modern Western thought since its inception. On the other hand, experimental music developed and enclosed itself as a canonical paradigm with its own rigid, orthodox, and exclusivist way of thinking about music, form, and sound.7 Given this situation, Brazilian black artists from different regions of the country and different musical scenes have developed new technical procedures, and aesthetic and ethical philosophies about the sonic, which point to a particular type of artistic experimentalism. A Brazilian black experimentalism movement has little or no interest in establishing connections with electroacoustics, musique concrète, or noise music, although, eventually, it might appropriate its methods. I am talking about a decentralized and disconnected collective of artists whose works demonstrate a

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certain refusal of the institutionalized and embedded practices of formal experimental music. Often, these artists are not even worried about “creating new musical forms.” Therefore, to think about black experimentalism in contemporary Brazilian music is to break the consensual establishment of “avant-garde” as a musical genre and the conception of the vanguard as a fetishized artistic novelty, instead treating it as an invention of new and sensible forms of life—a construction of other epistemologies, other ways of perceiving and creating music. In a way, it is a parallel to what songwriter Tom Zé calls procuratividade. This word results from merging the Portuguese verb procurar (to search) with the noun atividade (activity), resulting in a “poetic way to refer to a continuous experimentation, refractory to any external interventions, especially coming from corporations.”8 In any case, it is thinking about the relations between art and life in the postcolonial process and the context of the genocide of the black population.9 The work of Rio de Janeiro’s God Pussy (aka Jhones Silva) provides an indication of the path of Brazilian music. With more than 200 albums released, including solo works and collaborations, God Pussy takes the experience of harsh noise to political levels, dealing with themes such as racism, animal cruelty (on the album Vivisecção, 2018), indigenous peoples (Nativos, 2014), warmongering, and social inequality (Guerrilha, Infância, Adolescência e Morte, 2011). According to Jhones, since the beginning the purpose of his project has been political—even before any musical intention: “God Pussy was created amidst the need for manifestations: artistic, cultural and non-conformist. The work maintains a posture of confrontation and intention of propagation of the chaos, not aiming at the musicality, but the elaboration of a conception and reflection for a determined subject.”10 When asked about his references, he mentions samba players Cartola, Jovelina Pérola Negra, and Bezerra da Silva, and rapper Eduardo Taddeo of the rap group Facção Central. These references are made side by side with those to icons of the black resistance like Malcolm X, Panteras Negras, Zumbi dos Palmares, and Carlos Lamarca, one of the leaders of the armed struggle against the military dictatorship established in the country in 1964.11 A significant album in his extensive discography isL’Arte dei Rumori (2009), dedicated to the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo and his manifesto The Art of Noises (1913). God Pussy creates this homage by using soundscape recordings from his work environment: the metallurgical workshop from where he makes money to survive. In this way, God Pussy expands Russolo’s notion of noise as a basic quality of musical poetry into a field of politics, becoming a manifesto on how sound is an instrument of domination and a signifier for unhealthy working conditions experienced by fellow workers. This ethos is reinforced by a willingness to avoid any dichotomy between what is considered musical and non-musical, preferring an “anti-musical” praxis that fully engages with noise.12 Another pertinent example is Negro Leo (the artistic persona of São Paulo-based singer, guitarist, and composer Leonardo Gonçalves). His album Niños Heroes (2015) was constructed from a singular approach to the procedures used in experimental music. First, hours and hours of free improvisation were recorded in the studio with a band. Afterwards, Negro Leo listened to, selected, and cut excerpts from these

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recordings and then wrote lyrics for these small fragments of noises and melodies. This process blended improvisation, popular chanson, and operations of montage, collage, and edition similar to musique concrète approaches in service of creating a noisy Brazilian music. The resulting songs are a chimera of space rock, crooked , free jazz, and contorted noise rock. More recently, Negro Leo left the noisy songs of his latest albums and decided to embrace the exploration of timbres and textures (in Água Batizada, 2016), and the sounds of Tropicália and Brazilian pop music, particularly the joy of Jorge Ben’s guitar (Action Lekking, 2017). Commenting on this sound transition, Negro Leo points to a specific type of political appropriation of the so-called experimental music techniques:

What people saw as experimental in my music, I understood politically as insertion of different vocabularies in the field of Brazilian chanson. So there is no concern on my part to explore ways open by experimental composers in the field of experimental music, though any novelty in that field can stimulate my songs. Ilhas de Calor and Niños Heroes are diegetic albums, where the narrative itself evokes the chaotic, noisy process of the disc with its own fictional time and space.13

Through the work of Negro Leo and God Pussy, we visualize the black vanguard of contemporary Brazil as a kind of parallel experimentalism, which is not made from the experimental school historically erected from dodecaphonism and electroacoustics. Above all, these artists evidence a link between aesthetics and politics.

Recreate the time: Afrofuturism in the Brazilian way

Art is not a mirror of life. As in the famous phrase of the painter Paul Klee, art “is not a reproduction of the visible, it makes visible.”14 Since music is such a slick, lively, and procedural expression, how can we think of the black people within an ever-changing artistic panorama? Pioneering and groundbreaking studies of blackness and African themes have been conducted on the ontological essentialism of the constitution of identities, seeking to deconstruct hegemonic racist ideologies and unfounded national mythologies. This is the case with the Senegalese historian, anthropologist, and physicist Cheikh Anta Diop, who overturned scientific racism by proving that Egypt was a black civilization; or the Brazilian musician, composer, historian, and writer Nei Lopes, who brought to light the important contributions of the Bantu peoples in the formation of national culture and identity. Although fundamental in their time, this type of approach does not explain the overall picture. There will always be a deviation, what leaks between identity alignments. In response to the complexity of racism in the interstices of a new language (texturized, molecular, fragmented) and the new economic landscape (neoliberal labor relations and the rise of the self-entrepreneur man), multiple ways of being black proliferate in the twenty-first century: multiple ways to become black, to perform blackness, to challenge blackness, to incorporate blackness, thereby transcending the conventional static understanding of race.

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It is in this sense that artists such as Juçara Marçal, Bongar, and Nelson da Rabeca, with his project “Improvised Tradition,” articulate a sonic constellation connected by the principle of multiplicity. Their music takes blackness as a platform of possibilities while opposing race as a frozen and enclosed category, creating a structure of knowledge that offers a unique way of seeing, conceiving, and narrating the body: a practical and theoretical counter-ideological complex. Colonialism and slavery lead to the imposition of a way of seeing the world, as well as a distribution of time and atomization of space. In contrast, the manipulation of space-time allows the emergence of other possible futures, of the unforeseen. Against a linear temporality, Afrofuturism abandons the fetish of Italian futurism of the 1920s for a future detached from the past and activates an expanded and discontinuous space-time. This future is built from historical drift and memory: destroy the master’s clock.15 As stated by Rasheedah Phillips, the theoretician and writer from Black Quantum Futurism collective:

Afrofuturism is visionary and retrospective and current all at once, recognising time as cyclical, spiral, revolving, and usually anything but linear, much like the space- time traditions of our ancestors from the motherland. In this way, afrofuturism creates a perpetually accessible bridge between ourselves, our ancestors, and our descendants, between our futures and our pasts, reminding us that we are a part of the future that our foremothers and fathers shaped. Because their experiences remain embedded in our experiences and give context to our choices.16

The Brazilian artists mentioned here do not declare themselves to be Afrofuturists; however, this conception of cyclic and spiral time pervades all their work. In fact, in order to think of Afrofuturism in Brazil, it is necessary to consider the inheritance of specific African peoples—such as the Bantos and Malês—and their role in shaping the country’s black identity.17There is a predominance of past and Afro-diasporic cultural traditions about the future, to be more exact; however, ancestry does not serve as a formal submission. It is the starting point for thinking about and creating new territories and subjectivities. The philosopher Renato Noguera elucidates: “The future of afroperspectivist philosophy is in the past; not in the sense of a return to what happened, rather, in the search for an immanent future of the past.”18 To transform the sensitive experience of time is to launch the body-mind into a radically decolonial sensory experience. To remodel time becomes an imperative in the music of the most radical artists of Brazilian black experimentalism. Beyond inspiring oneself from the past, it is a question of refounding one’s way of perceiving time. The albumAnganga (2015), a collaboration between São Paulo-based singer Juçara Marçal and Rio de Janeiro noise producer Cadu Tenório, is an affirmative symbol of this moment of temporal reconfiguration of Brazilian music. The album presents reinterpretations of songs from congado (a traditional Afro-Brazilian cultural and religious musical ritual that recreates the coronation of a Congolese king) and vissungos (work songs sung by mining slaves documented by the philosopher and linguist Aires da Mata Machado Filho in the 1920s). A philologist and linguist, Machado registered sixty-five scores of these songs in the book O Negro e o Garimpo em Minas Gerais.

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In 1982, he authorized the recording of fourteen of them in the album O Canto dos Escravos (The Song of the Slaves), interpreted by the voices of the sambistas Clementina de Jesus, Geraldo Filme, and Tia Doca da Portela. More than three decades later, Cadu Tenório and Juçara Marçal revisited this repertoire in a unique and radical way. Anganga is the supreme entity of the Bantu people (Anganga Nzambi). The word appears in the lyrics of the congado song “Grande Anganga Muquixe,” whose verses indicate reverence to the master, the ancestral elder. “It’s an expression that refers to reverence for the past,” informs the album release.19 But the duo rejected the folklorist approach and transformed the songs into multiple artefacts. Cadu creates different layers with drone atmospheres, field recordings, tape loops, asymmetric beats, harsh noise attacks, processed objects of musique concrète, and harmonies from synthesizers. Juçara, who is also the vocalist in the afro-punk combo Metá Metá and a researcher of Brazilian musical folklore, goes from soft singing to guttural sounds and powerful screams. Juçara says she wanted to experiment with her voice as “an empty canvas to create sounds, not just sing a song.” “These songs [ofcongado tradition and slaves’ work songs] have a very strong ancestral force, and I thought it would be interesting to use them on this totally different experience. The songs are so strong that they go through time,”20 indicating the confluence of past, present, and future in a single moment. At its core, Anganga is a deconstruction of historical narratives and redefinition of Afro-Brazilian traditions. Another work that travels along the same path is “Tradição Improvisada” (2018), a partnership between the Swiss improviser based in Brazil, Thomas Rohrer, with the rabequeiro (rabeca player) and luthier Nelson da Rabeca. Therabeca is a musical instrument of Arabic origin, the precursor of the violin. The instrument is played with a bow and has three or four metal strings.21 Nelson da Rabeca turned to music after decades of painful work as a sugar-cane cutter. After being impressed by the sound of the violin, on television, he decided to reproduce a stringed instrument to be played with a bow. That is how he discovered how to make, tune, and play the rabeca on his own. Thomas Rohrer learned to play the violin in his childhood but began to explore expanded techniques of free improvisation with the saxophone. In Brazil, he was introduced to the rabeca by the musician Zé Gomes and approached Nelson da Rabeca later. Then he began to explore unusual ways of extracting sound from the instrument, such as utilizing its wooden body, inserting objects inside its resonant box, rubbing it with objects like an egg beater, and using small engines.22 Tradição Improvisada is a portrait of the long-standing partnership between Nelson and Rohrer, with rough sounds and metallic noises that “resemble the ox cart, the hoarse screams of the workday, the friction between woods, metals and rocks.”23 The album captures a reflexive process in which the procedures of contemporary European music are discovered in the tradition of the Brazilian northeast, and vice versa, forming a work in continuous movement, which breaks it with folkloric paternalism: the idea that the tradition is petrified, an institutionalized culture that must be preserved. As Nelson da Rabeca himself says on “Fala Seu Nelson,” a track from the album Tradição Improvisada: “The more we play the more we learn. We never ‘learned’ the act of playing. We must renew the way we play, so we do not get stuck doing the same thing.”

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The work of the band Bongar also has a strong connection with Afro-Brazilian ancestry and challenges the petrified and racist idea of folklore. Formed in the Xambá community, in the state of Pernambuco, the band has an intimate relationship with the Afro religions of candomblé and umbanda, and the worship of the orixás,24 crossing the borders between the sacred and the profane, as well as the past, present, and future, experiencing time as a continuous flow. Since its foundation, in 2011, the band’s repertoire has mixed chants of jurema (an Afro-indigenous cult present in several terreiros of the northeast) and cocos (a traditional music genre of the Brazilian northeast). In the album Samba de Gira (2016), this spiritual and material connection gained more strength and density. The album intercalates compositions of Bongar with field recordings ofjurema rituals, in which the religious masters sing traditional songs during their spiritual trance. Guitinho, the leader and founder of the band, explains that he “wanted to connect the two worlds [spiritual and profane] with which we live daily in Xambá, having traditional music as the guiding wire to show to us that, by connecting with our spirituality, we can reveal a creativity in partnership with the cultural legacy we inherited from our ancestors.”25 With majestic sound engineering and hypnotic rhythmic patterns, Samba de Gira is in direct contestation with Western logic: the idea of Afro-traditional cultures as something static, monolithic, or folkloric, something that should be conserved, like an archaeological piece in a museum, rather than a dynamic force that is continuously renewed. Bongar is always in search of the new. In the track “Vento Corredor,” Guitinho sings the immanence of tradition, which is, above all, powerful and transforming: “O chão do meu terreiro é o umbigo do mundo.” 26 This floor, however, is what reconnects him to his ancestors and “carries my thoughts to every corner I go / Even out of the world.” For Bongar, ancestry and tradition are half of an evolving dialectic, the other half being an imperative to change. Samba de Gira took three years to be completed and released, an arduous and delicate work with several collaborators. Guitinho describes the process as “very rich,” and states that it reveals the ability of black youth to “create a traditional contemporary music. Tradition is not static, it is reframed over time … Is something that pulsates in a traditional community. Under the artistic bias, this is to ressignificate without corrupting [the tradition].”27

Blackening the body-thinking: The body as sound technology

In Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht seeks epistemic alternatives to what he denounces as the almost absolute and unquestionable predominance of self-understanding of the humanities as an area of knowledge destined to capture or assign meaning to the phenomena it analyses. Challenging “a broadly institutionalized tradition according to which interpretation, that is, the identification and/or attribution of meaning, is the core practice, the exclusive core practice indeed, of the humanities.”28 Gumbrecht points out how modernity, from the Cartesian cogito “I think, therefore I am,” unfolded a series of philosophical

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dichotomies such as spirit and matter, mind and body, depth and surface, in which the first pole (the spiritual, hermeneutical, interpretive sense) always has privileges and is considered hierarchically superior to the second (that deals with materialities and corporeities). Progressively, non-hermeneutic phenomena, which escaped the territory of classical meaning and language, as well as their tangible, spatial, and presence effects, were being obliterated by the Western theoretical edifice since the Cartesian cogito made the ontology of human existence dependent exclusively on the human mind. Thelogos statute grows and gets closer to our time, especially for Martin Heidegger. In short, the German philosopher argued that the Greek language was privileged, distinct from the others because it was the original image of philosophy. Evidently, in the wake of this hegemonic tradition of “Greek authenticity,” Heidegger attributes to his language the status of the natural successor of Greek, suggesting that the knowledge of ancient Greek as well as that of German in itself gave access to philosophical knowledge. “German gains status as logos and establishes itself academically as the original language of philosophy, converted into a main line, if not a creator of European history, in turn designated as the West itself.”29 Presented as the historical essence of the West, this supposed origin of philosophy points not only to purely historical but also political developments. As Muniz Sodré elucidates, the question is not that philosophical works explicitly trigger imperial colonialism, but these systems of articulation of thought have an underlying policy. Moreover, the procedural construction of the logos and knowledge, circumscribed in the dictates of the Germanic Greek, ties the knot that unites the power of European colonization and the theological power of the conversions of souls authorized by Christianity. At the same time, it determines the borders for philosophical production—those who are in the territory of philosophical thinking and those who are on the borderlines. Following the birth of philosophy in Greece, its universalist exclusivity30 has continued in modern North American historiography, based on strong and seasonable colonial, racial, and religious motivation. Sodré adds:

Modern attempts to limit the possibility of affirmation of a philosophical thinking within the symbolic walls of the European Empire are packed, whether or not they want it, by an imperial and colonial power will, whose line of imaginary continuity goes from Alexander the Great to the Napoleonic empire.31

Therefore, what has been called humanism in the modern age gives space to and even shelters the discrimination of the other and, contrary to what common sense claims, provides support for all racism. The idea of “humanity” or “civilization” is precisely the ideological facade that legitimates the looting of precious metals in the Americas, the enslavement of black labor in Africa, and how Europeans know themselves: fully human—though, in the eyes of other peoples, not so fully—civilized versus savage, co-opting other peoples into already “civilized” colonial models. Faced with this historical structuring of social, political, cultural, and subjective dimensions, I am engaged in epistemological decolonization. For me, this means

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trying to think through an incorporated philosophy, which goes in the opposite direction of the philosophical tradition and its devaluation of the body, presenting the idea of the body as the mortal room of an immortal soul.32 I want to evoke the concept of afroperspectivism proposed by Renato Noguera, which has been defined by him in the following terms:

The afroperspectivist philosophy is based on an image of the thought that can be presented in three basic theses: (1) To think is movement, every thought is a movement that instead of seeking the Truth and opposing the false, seeks the maintenance of the movement; (2) Thought is always an embodiment, it is only possible to think through the body; (3) Choreography and dribbling are the ingredients that make it possible to reach the goal of thinking: keep yourself moving.33

Alain Badiou’s work was also dedicated to the body and the metaphor of thought as dance.34 But the French author not only takes as a reference for his writing a dance situated in European models but also does not delve into the potentialities of blackness for the construction of this thought-dance, this thinking in movement through the body. When asked about race, he treats the theme as a mere question of identity and poetics.35 Thus, to reflect on the body in an afroperspectivist panorama implies a specific reflection on the body within the conjuncture of racism. This corporeality and materiality are not placed here purposelessly. After all, in the operation of the international market of African slaves, the black people had to be transformed into non-humans, instrumented to serve as labor for capitalism in the phase of globalization. In the colonial experience, to be black is to be conditioned by a regime that subalternizes you, at the same time that this condition is wrapped in efforts to be naturalized and quietly perpetuated: dehumanized, a subject-object, soulless, destined to serve and to work. Unlike the immigrants of recent times, the enslaved black did not even hold the moral constitution of a person. Mbembe called this process “altericide,” that is, to constitute “the Other not as similar to itself, but as an intrinsically threatening object, from which one must protect oneself, unravel, or simply, to secure their total control.”36 Thus, from the racism of the slave trade to the contemporary “black becoming” analyzed by Mbembe, the black body remains a distinct and unique battlefield, shaped by oppression, violence, silencing, disputes of forces that shape values, and subjectivities. In this sense, the body becomes a fundamental technology for black musical thinking. As the ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt points out:

In this way and others, the body is a technology of black musical communication and identity. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines “technology” as “the practical application of knowledge, a manner of accomplishing a task (i.e., identifying with blackness, the African diaspora, Africans), using a skill or craft, a method or process” (1999). Extra-somatic instruments (drums, flutes, violins, steel pans, and, arguably in some circles, turntables) are acceptable media of artistic technology. The social body as a tool or method of artistic composition and performance,

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however, continues to be overlooked in the study of music, just as the black vernacular body continues to be overlooked in dance history. Drums or any other forms of musical “technology” are but extensions of things the body and voice can do. The striking of body parts and cavities, the resonating of the singing voice, and use of verbal and nonverbal language, manufacture codes, identifications, and ideas about music and life through the “systematic” (re)production of an embodied phenomenology.37

The band Fundo de Quintal is an exceptional example of the invention of instruments and forms of playing through bodily experimentation. The band renewed the language of samba just like Bide and the sambistas of Estácio de Sá did in the 1930s. Fundo de Quintal was born in the late 1970s and mid-1980s when a new generation of musicians and composers began to meet at the headquarters of the carnival parade Cacique de Ramos. In these samba circles of Cacique, new instruments—now consolidated in the instrumental formations of samba—were invented, reformulated, or explored in unconventional ways. Almir Guineto, for example, introduced the banjo with arm and tuning of cavaquinho, an adaptation that made the instrument sound louder than the regular cavaquinho, equating its sound with the volume of percussion instruments like tantan and surdo (it is worth remembering that these samba circles were made without any amplification, in an informal party environment, in the backyard). The operation also gave a more percussive and rhythmic sound to the banjo’s original harmonic configuration. But Guineto was not alone. The percussionist Sereno performed what he calls a “musical kidnapping,”38 bringing the drum used by vocal groups of the 1960s, such as Trio Irakitan and MPB4, to the samba. Thetantan began to be replaced by the surdo in the beat of musical time because its softer sound opened the acoustic space so that the strings of guitars and mandolins also stood out. In turn, the percussionist Ubirany placed bean grains inside a small metal box that he had won as a prize, transforming it into another percussive element for smaller, quieter parties in the living room as well as a distinctive element for studio recordings. He is also the creator of the repique de mão, a percussive instrument that, unlike previous repiques, is played with the hands. The fingers of the right hand peal the skin of the drum, while the left hand marks the offbeat with percussive hits on the body of the instrument. The invention of these instruments was the catalyst for a reformulation of the musical grammar of samba, a renewing artistic gesture based less on methodical rationality and more on a sense of movement and improvisation. It came from tactile exploration, a subtle and refined sensibility about the space and body that occupy it, from the body that samba dances, feasts, sings, bewitches, and opens the circle through an embodied knowledge. Another emblematic case is Samba de Coco Raízes de Arcoverde. Created in 1992 in the city of Arcoverde, in the Pernambuco countryside, the group was based on a new sound technology developed by Lula Calixto, the founding member of the group alongside the Lopes sisters. Using his skills as carpenter and craftsman, the musician and composer made wooden clogs for the band, finding in the sound of the steps of the clogs and hand claps new percussive dynamics, which, added to instruments like surdo, ganzá, pandeiro, and triângulo, created rhythmic dynamics that were heavier with accelerated sonority.

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Following the technique inaugurated by Lula Calixto, Samba de Coco Raízes de Arcoverde transforms the body itself into sound in a very particular procedure of biohack. The body becomes a rhythmic machine, creating body-sound that forms a vertiginous and complex sonic topography, triggering another sensorial language. Lula Calixto made his feet an intensive way of writing, writing concepts with his steps in clogs. A partnership with the North American music producer based in Brazil, Maga Bo, the album Maga Bo Presents Coco Samba Roques de Arcoverde (2018) reveals the rhythm as a body science, approaching the phenomenon that the cultural critic Kodwo Eshun called “hyperrhythm,” which “generates a new physics physicality”39when “beats become abstract at the point when the body succumbs to sensations which induce a gulf crisis in speech, when language falls away and fails, happily.”40 As the first electronic dance music genre created in Brazil, is another source of power and continuous inspiration in contemporary Brazilian black music. In Rio de Janeiro’s slums, DJs and producers like Polyvox, Rennan da Penha, Iasmin Turbininha, and Gabriel do Borel developed this musical grammar from a blend with other genres,41 but mainly through a realization that, when beats per minute (from 130 to 150 BPM) were accelerated at parties, people would break free and dance frantically. DJ Polyvox was the first to produce a track with this fast pace. He recorded and mixed the sound of a Coke bottle knocking on his bedroom door to create what he calls “Tambor Coca-Cola” (Coke Drum),42 a 150 BPM beat that incited the birth of a new form of funk. The 150 BPM orputaria acelerada dominated Rio’s youth parties in favelas with national hits like “Eu Vou Pro Baile da Gaiola” (MC Kevin O Chris), “Me Solta” (Nego do Borel), “Cai de Boca no Meu Bucetão” (MC Rebecca), “Mete Com Força e Com Talento” (MC Nick), and many others. Although remote in space and time, these three moments of invention have engendered new sonic cosmologies and sensitive worlds articulated through an incorporated thought—body-thinking—comprising the samba instruments of the Fundo de Quintal; Lula Calixto and the clogs of Samba de Coco Raízes de Arcoverde; and the BPM acceleration and diversification of the palette of electronic sounds of funkeiros in Rio de Janeiro. The instruments developed by these artists were born from the musicians’ physical and material experience of the world around them. Far from being a speculative, transcendent, or intellectual profile, here thought operates as intensification and movement. It is a continuous motion, a movement of infinity that posits an empirical experience sensitive to a transmutation of concrete daily materials into musical and technological devices able to produce new subjectivities.

Cracked nationalism: Blackness as a constant question

Throughout this chapter, I have spoken about the black experimentalism of contemporary Brazil as an experimentalism parallel to the official avant-garde, and discussed topics that artists have developed in their works: the counter-tradition, the expanded time of afroperspectivism and Afrofuturism, the body as a technology of musical thinking. By extension, we could think of this panorama of artists and aesthetics as a proto-project of the nation, another Brazil, in which black people would

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be included in democratic society and have their rights fully realized. After all, the idea of blacks as a national or proto-national group, with their own hermetically defined and cloistered culture, plays a crucial role in the history of Afro-centric thinking.43 Nevertheless, the music of these artists surpasses the reference points of national analysis and is born of intraracial and interracial confrontations as well as an ambivalent position concerning Brazil: a double condition, in which the blacks are at the same time external and internal to national democratic rights. It is important to remember that, for centuries, Brazil was the world center for the slave trade and was the last country in the world to abolish racial slavery, but its official history attempts to hide its slavery and colonial past. The National Anthem of Proclamation of the Republic (1890) is symptomatic: “We do not even believe that there were slaves in such a noble country.” The verse is the epitome of how the national identity has been based on a historical silencing, especially of black people, in an attempt to sweep racism under the rug using the false facade of “racial democracy.” It is a synthesis of the racism and colonialism that still hover silently over the country and define our society in many instances, from institutional politics to subjectivities, including income distribution, education, police violence, social relations, and construction of values. Issues such as nationality and cultural affiliation only highlight the invariable fragmentation and plurality of the black issue, a fragmentation that has recently intensified and become more complex due to the issues of gender, male domination, and sexuality that are present in the struggle of black women and the LGBTQ+ community. The album Drama (2019) by Tantão e os Fita gives life to this discussion of race and nation, revealing what we can call a cracked nationalism: a nation-state project that only serves the elite and neofascist politicians. A nation-state project that continually fails social minorities, making blacks, indigenous people, women, and transgender individuals invisible and dead.44 When Tantão sings “Música do Futuro” (Music of the Future), he is not making a manifesto on new aesthetic guidelines. On the contrary, his verses underline the cracks of any convenient essentialism: “A divisão vai rolar / A divisão dos mundos / Mundo dividido / Tá pegando fogo / Mil graus Celsius.” 45 Also, when he thinks through a certain nationalism in “Nação Pic Pic” (Nation Pic Pic), Tantão only shows the population that subsists and resists the systematic and institutionalized daily violence in Brazil. He screams: “How many blacks are here? How many Indians are here? How many trans are here? How many gays? How many women?” In terms of sound, Drama articulates black electronic dance music from different corners of the world, weaving a network of electronic beats that indistinctly connects the funk 150 BPM from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the Angolan , passing through the footwork of Chicago and the of London. But none of these influences is applied in its literal and orthodox form. On the contrary, they are the starting point for a particular experimentation. Producer Abel Duarte explains: “We do not pretend to found any musical genre, perhaps to destroy some.”46 In this way, Tantão e os Fita connects with God Pussy, Leo Negro, Juçara Marçal, Bongar, Nelson da Rabeca, Samba de Coco Raízes de Arcoverde, DJ Polyvox, Iasmin Turbininha, and the funkeiros from Rio de Janeiro slums in a complex and plural network of black experimentalist creation, a counterculture of modernity. It is not a succession

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of genres or tropes. We must look at this artistic production as a transformative, potent, and inherently subversive philosophical discourse that clutters the perception instead of setting pillars and demarcating territories, because, as the most disruptive and defiant art, blackness is always a question, never an answer. Through the political and technological devices of its negritude, black music in contemporary Brazil seeks to conjure and to institute new modes of creation, life, and happiness. The dream is of a world in which the fundamental racial oppression of modernity and its idea of civilization and rationality are surpassed.

Notes

1 See Humberto Franceschi, Samba de sambar do Estácio: 1928–1931 (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2010). 2 Odeon, 10.745 is the original vinyl recording. Available from the Instituto Musical Memória website: http://immub.org/album/78-rpm-51955. 3 Most of the recordings made during this period, however, oscillated between arrangements with traditional European instruments, most often discarding Estácio’s (re)inventions, and arrangements that were closer to the spirit of the carnival, usually elaborated by the conductor, arranger, and composer Eduardo Souto or by Pixinguinha. It is noted that the first samba arrangements (from 1928 to 1931) were less connected to the musical concept of Estácio than those produced between 1931 and 1935. 4 Adalberto Paranhos, “Entre sambas e bambas: Vozes destoantes no ‘Estado Novo,’” Locus, Revista da História 13, no. 2 (2007). 5 Bernardo Oliveira, “Batucada de bamba, patologia bonita do samba,” Revista ComparArte 1 no. 1 (January–June 2017). 6 Sueli Carneiro, “A construção do outro como não-ser como fundamento do ser,” PhD thesis (Universidade de São Paulo, 2005), 324 [my translation]. 7 Marcelo Carneiro de Lima, “What was Left from Experimentation? A Discussion on the Current Role of Electroacoustic Music for the New Generation of Sonic Artists in Brazil,” Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference, Florence, Italy, June 20–23, 2018. 8 Bernardo Oliveira, Estudando o samba: Tom Zé (Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2014), 49; and Lima, “What was Left from Experimentation?,” 17. 9 Between 2011 and 2015, Brazil had more deaths, as a result of murder, than the Syrian War (one death every nine minutes). The 2017 Atlas of Violence reveals that, out of every 100 people murdered in Brazil, 71 are black. “Young and black males continue to be murdered each year as if they were in a war situation,” states the research. See http://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/images/170602_atlas_da_violencia_2017.pdf. 10 Bernardo Oliveira, “Música e ruído no Brasil: Explorando fronteiras em tempos sombrios,” O Cafezinho, May 11, 2016, https://www.ocafezinho.com/2016/05/11/ musica-e-ruido-no-brasil-explorando-fronteiras-sonoras-em-tempos-sombrios. 11 Ibid. 12 In his words: “To be or not to be musical? I label myself with the term ‘anti-music’ because my aim is another. I do not consider myself an artist or musician. I have ‘rehearsals’ before playing live, and I have spent a lot of time building and creating

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a record. But I do not live, and I do not want to make a living off of music, I do not want to make a commercial, I do not have to please, I do not want much blah, blah, blah. I want to make noise.” In GG Albuquerque, “Entrevista God Pussy: O noise é para ser destruídor,” O Volume Morto, April 11, 2016, http://volumemorto.com.br/ entrevista-god-pussy-o-noise-e-para-ser-destruidor. 13 GG Albuquerque, “Entrevista: Negro Leo mergulha no pop em Água Batizada,” JC Online, October 16, 2016, https://jconline.ne10.uol.com.br/canal/cultura/ musica/noticia/2016/10/16/entrevista-negro-leo-mergulha-no-pop-em-agua- batizada-256866.php. 14 Cited in John Elderfield, “Old Art Terms #5: Making Visible,” https://www.artsy.net/ article/johnelderfield-old-art-terms-number-5-making-visible. 15 An excellent example of both a visionary and retrospective afrofuturistic writing style is Lonnie Holley’s song “I Snuck Off the Slave Ships,” from the album Myth (2018). Holley makes a mental projection of his body onto the slave ships of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 16 Rasheeda Phillips, “Afrofuturism: Black Presence in Sci-Fi Worlds of Technology, Magic, Fantasy,” Atlanta Black Star, August 12, 2014, https://blerds.atlantablackstar. com/2014/08/12/afrofuturism-black-presence-in-sci-fi-worlds-of-technology-magic- fantasy. 17 Nei Lopes, Bantos, Malês e identidade negra, 3rd edn. (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2011). 18 Renato Noguera, “Denegrindo a filosofia: O pensamento como coreografia de conceitos afroperspectivistas,” Griot—Revista de Filosofia 4, no. 2 (December 2011): 10. 19 See https://quintavant.bandcamp.com/album/qtv-013-anganga. 20 GG Albuquerque, “Cantos que atravessam o tempo,” O Volume Morto, December 27, 2015, http://volumemorto.com.br/anganga-entrevista-jucara-marcal-cadu-tenorio. 21 It became popular in the Iberian Peninsula during the period of the Moorish invasion and was probably brought to Brazil at the time of Portuguese colonization. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the first violins were built and made with more precise techniques and tools, resulting in a more refined design with cleaner tones. The instrument caught the attention of the nobility but, since that time, the rabeca lost the nobility’s interest; however, it continued to be made by the poorer population through artisanal processes. It was with this connotation that the rabeca came to Brazil, mainly in the northeast of the country. Mário de Andrade, in his Brazilian Musical Dictionary, says that the “rabeca is how they call the violin of the men of the people of Brazil.” See Virgínia Barbosa, “Rabeca,” Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, September 19, 2013, http://basilio.fundaj.gov.br/pesquisaescolar/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=986:rabeca&catid=52:letra-r&Itemid=1. 22 One can hear these procedures on several albums, including Encarnado, by Juçara Marçal, and Forceps, by Cadu Tenório. 23 Tiago Mesquita, text included in the CD booklet (2018). 24 Orixás are deities of African origin worshipped in Afro-diasporic religions in Brazil. 25 GG Albuquerque, “Crítica: Samba de Gira do Bongar e a tradição viva que se renova,” JC Online, September 11, 2016, https://jconline.ne10.uol.com.br/canal/cultura/ musica/noticia/2016/09/11/critica-samba-de-gira-do-bongar-e-a-tradicao-viva-que- se-renova-252430.php. 26 “The floor of my terreiro is the navel of the world / where everything begins.” Terreiro is the name of the venue used for rituals in Afro-Brazilian religions.

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27 GG Albuquerque, “Bongar celebra a ancestralidade da Jurema em Samba de Gira,” JC Online, September 11, 2016, https://jconline.ne10.uol.com.br/canal/cultura/musica/ noticia/2016/09/11/bongar-celebra-a-ancestralidade-da-jurema-em-samba-de- gira-252213.php. 28 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Produção de presença: O que o sentido não consegue transmitir, ed. PUC-Rio (Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2010), 21. 29 Muniz Sodré, Pensar nagô (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2017), 8. 30 This colonial desire appears in the writings of several famous intellectuals. David Hume (1711–1776), for example, wrote: “I suspect that blacks, and all other species of man in general (for there are four or five different types), are naturally inferior to whites.” Moreover, he added: “There has never been a civilized nation of any other complexion but the white, nor any eminent individual in action or speculation.” Kant continued Hume’s argument, emphasizing that the difference between blacks and whites “seems to be as great in mental capacity as in color,” before concluding in the text of his course in physical geography: “Mankind has attained its greater perfection in the race of whites.” Voltaire (1694–1778), in addition to having invested money in the slave trade, in his essay on universal history (1756), stated that if the intelligence of Africans “is of no other kind than ours, it is much inferior.” Cf. Dag Herbjornsrud, “Os africanos que propuseram ideias iluministas antes de Locke e Kant,” Folha de São Paulo, December 24, 2017, http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ ilustrissima/2017/12/1945398-os-africanos-que-propuseram-ideias-do-iluminismo- antes-de-locke-e-kant.shtml. 31 Sodrê, Pensar nagô, 9–10. 32 Sodrê provokes in affirming that “the refusal of feeling is the ‘first article’ of Western philosophy.” Ibid., 16. 33 Noguera, “Denegrindo a filosofia,” 6. 34 Alain Badiou, “A dança como metáfora do pensamento,” in Pequeno manual da inestética (São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2002). 35 Alain Badiou, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London and New York: Verso, 2001). 36 Achille Mbembe, Crítica da razão negra (Lisbon: Antígona Editores Refractários, 2014), 26. 37 Kyra Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 59. 38 Isto é Fundo de Quintal [Film], directed by Karla Sabah (Brazil, 2004), https://youtu. be/29zHOd4UNCo. 39 Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quarter Books, 1998), 70. 40 Ibid. 41 Particularly the timbres and the imaginary surrounding the electronic dance music (EDM) culture from bands like Rave do Vapour Vapo na Onda da Balinha (DJs Jeffinho de SG and Ricardinho de SG), Treme Esse Bumbum (MC Chefinho and DJ Polyvox), and Extreme Rave Baile do Jaca (DJs Pedro Ribeiro and RK de Mangaratiba). Other tracks, such as “Cala Boca e Me Fode,” sung by Tati Quebra Barraco and produced by Iasmin Turbininha, return to the Afro-Brazilian percussive influence and present a type of hi-tech macumba. 42 DJ Polyvox explains how he created the “Tambor Coca-Cola” in a video available on YouTube. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpO1JdopvU.

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43 Paul Gilroy describes this: “[the] model of national development has a unique appeal to the bickering peoples of the black Atlantic diaspora. It is an integral component of their responses to modem racism and directly inspired their efforts to construct nation states on African soil and elsewhere. The idea of nationality occupies a central if shifting place in the work of Alexander Crummell, Edward Biyden, Martin Delany, and Frederick Douglass. This important group of post-Enlightenment men, whose lives and political sensibilities can ironically be defined through the persistent crisscrossing of national boundaries, often seem to share the decidedly Hegelian belief that the combination of Christianity and a nation-state represents the overcoming of all antinomies.” Cited in Paul Gilroy, O atlântico negro, 2nd edn. (São Paulo: Editora 34; Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Cândido Mendes, Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 2012), 91–92. 44 Brazil leads the world ranking for transgender murders, according to Transgender Europe reports: https://transrespect.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/TvT-PS- Vol14-2016.pdf. 45 “The division will happen / The division of worlds / World divided / It is on fire / It is on fire / Thousand degrees Celsius.” 46 Alexandre Matias, “O drama de 2019,” Trabalho Sujo, January 31, 2019, http:// trabalhosujo.com.br/o-drama-de-2019.

Bibliography

Badiou, Alain. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London and New York: Verso, 2001. Badiou, Alain. “A dança como metáfora do pensamento.” In Pequeno manual da inestética, edited by Estação Liberdade, 79–96. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2002. Barbosa, Virgínia. “Rabeca.” Fundação Joaquim Nabuco. September 19, 2013. Accessed February 11, 2019. http://basilio.fundaj.gov.br/pesquisaescolar/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=986:rabeca&catid=52:letra-r&Itemid=1. Carneiro, Sueli. “A construção do outro como não-ser como fundamento do ser.” PhD thesis. Universidade de São Paulo, 2005. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quarter Books, 1998. Franceschi, Humberto. Samba de sambar do Estácio: 1928–1931. (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2010). Gaunt, Kyra. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip- Hop. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Gilroy, Paul. O atlântico negro. 2nd edn. São Paulo: Editora 34; Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Cândido Mendes, Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 2012. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Produção de presença: O que o sentido não consegue transmitir, edited by PUC-Rio. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2010. Herbjornsrud, Dag. “Os africanos que propuseram ideias iluministas antes de Locke e Kant.” Folha de São Paulo. December 24, 2017. Accessed February 11, 2019. http:// www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrissima/2017/12/1945398-os-africanos-que-propuseram- ideias-do-iluminismo-antes-de-locke-e-kant.shtml. Isto é Fundo de Quintal [Film]. Directed by Karla Sabah. Brazil, 2004. Accessed February 11, 2019. https://youtu.be/29zHOd4UNCo.

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Lima, Marcelo Carneiro de. “What was Left from Experimentation? A Discussion on the Current Role of Electroacoustic Music for the New Generation of Sonic Artists in Brazil.” Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference, Florence, Italy, June 20–23, 2018. Lopes, Nei. Bantos, Malês e identidade negra. 3rd edn. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2011. Matias, Alexandre. “O drama de 2019.” Trabalho Sujo. January 31, 2019. Accessed February 11, 2019. http://trabalhosujo.com.br/o-drama-de-2019. Mbembe, Achille. Crítica da razão negra. Lisbon: Antígona Editores Refractários, 2014. Noguera, Renato. “Denegrindo a filosofia: O pensamento como coreografia de conceitos afroperspectivistas.” Griot—Revista de Filosofia 4, no. 2 (December 2011): 1–19. Oliveira, Bernardo. Estudando o samba: Tom Zé. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2014. Oliveira, Bernardo. “Música e ruído no Brasil: Explorando fronteiras em tempos sombrios.” O Cafezinho. May 11, 2016. Accessed February 11, 2019. https://www. ocafezinho.com/2016/05/11/musica-e-ruido-no-brasil-explorando-fronteiras-sonoras- em-tempos-sombrios. Oliveira, Bernardo. “Batucada de bamba, patologia bonita do samba.” Revista ComparArte 1, no. 1 (January–June 2017): 44–54. Paranhos, Adalberto. “Entre sambas e bambas: Vozes destoantes no ‘Estado Novo.’” Locus, Revista de História 13, no. 2 (2007): 179–182. Phillips, Rasheeda. “Afrofuturism: Black Presence in Sci-Fi Worlds of Technology, Magic, Fantasy.” Atlanta Black Star. August 12, 2014. Accessed February 11, 2019. https:// blerds.atlantablackstar.com/2014/08/12/afrofuturism-black-presence-in-sci-fi-worlds- of-technology-magic-fantasy. Sodré, Muniz. Pensar nagô. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2017.

9781501344435_txt_prf.indd 227 05-08-2019 20:43:42 9781501344435_txt_prf.indd 228 05-08-2019 20:43:42 What’s the relationship between black photographers and black figures in pop culture, like Beyoncé, or Rihanna, or Taraji P. Henson or Tessa Thompson? You write in your essay that New Black Vanguard photographers blur conventional boundaries between art and fashion photography. She has said she is interested in making sure the school’s curriculum is contemporary, and in recruiting new faculty members. Rashad’s sister Debbie Allen, an actress, choreographer, director and producer, also attended Howard, and is a 1971 graduate with a degree in classical Greek literature, speech and theater. The vanguard is brought back with striking vividness after 50 years. When was the last time a state legislature infringed on the right guaranteeing a citizen's right to openly carrying a gun? Well, Stanley Nelson's excellent documentary The Black Panthers answers that question. Stokley Carmichael had called for Black Power in the heart of Mississippi. And James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time, according to the Negro Spiritual, promised a conflagration as the wide range of injustices morphed into a call for political action. Furthermore, the BPP saw itself in the vanguard of sweeping change. To exploit the fever of heated times, it harnessed revolutionary gestures and emotions. So, six young men began organizing activists to confront the local police with guns. In Brazil, this led to the idea of “racial democracyâ€.​ Since 1995, the Brazilian government questions this ideology, and recognises the presence of racism in their country. But still, a lot of Brazilians continu to have faith in the Brazilian racial democracy. In addition, as the case of black organizing in Brazil demonstrates, identity-based Latin American social movements are much older than the ... Toward the end of Book V of the Republic, when Socrates 3 is asked to explain the possibility of his ideally good state, which is characterized by a kind of communism of the warrior class, he expresses his thought of philosopher-kings as follows: Unless the philosophers rule as kings or those now called kings and chiefs genuinely and adequately philosophize, and political. Is the Black Bourgeoisie the Leader of the Black Liberation Movement? / Harry Haywood with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. 7. The American Revolution / James Boggs. How black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in the history of the United States, at once a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and social development. Easily the most dramatic episode in American history was the sudden move to free four million black slaves in an effort to stop a great civil war, to end forty years of bitter controversy, and to appease the moral sense of civilization. Vanguard offers a plethora of ETFs to obtain core exposure to bonds both domestically and internationally. Getting international exposure offers bond investors diversification from debt markets abroad. For bond exposure in the U.S., there's the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund ETF Shares (BND) . BND seeks the performance of Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Float Adjusted Index. The Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Aggregate Float Adjusted Index represents a wide spectrum of public, investment-grade, taxable, fixed income securities in the United States, including government, corporate, and intern