Description: When many people think of African music, the first ideas that come to mind are often of rhythm, drums, and dancing. These perceptions are rooted in emblematic African and African-derived genres such as West African drumming, funk, salsa, or samba and, more importantly, essentialized notions about Africa which have been fueled over centuries of contact between the "West," Africa, and the African diaspora. These notions, of course, tend to reduce and often portray Africa and the diaspora as primitive, exotic, and monolithic.
In Africanness in Action, author Juan Diego Díaz explores this dynamic through the perspectives of Black musicians in Bahia, Brazil, a site imagined by many as a diasporic epicenter of African survivals and purity. Black musicians from Bahia, Díaz argues, assert Afro-Brazilian identities, promote social change, and critique racial inequality by creatively engaging essentialized tropes about African music and culture. Instead of reproducing these notions, musicians demonstrate agency by strategically emphasizing or downplaying them.Review Quotes: "Di´&az (ethnomusicology, Univ. of California, Davis) is to be commended for this thought-provoking contribution to literature on Brazil. The author raises a pertinent question about the term "Africanness," commonly used by scholars when discussing the remnant or extension of African influence in the cultural fabric of Brazil" -- K.W. Mukuna, CHOICE Connect, Vol. 59 No. 8
"Juan Diego Díaz's Africanness in Action is a stunning example of one of the most exciting directions for twenty-first-century ethnomusicology. By taking seriously musical analysis and the discourse of composers and performers, while also relying on deep ethnography and a broad understanding of the entangled flows of expressive culture around the Black Atlantic, Díaz shows precisely how central ethnomusicological tools can be in deciphering the complex--and often contradictory--ways in which rhythmic, organological, religious, historical, and sartorial symbols can be put into action by people living in the African Diaspora in Bahia." -- Michael Iyanaga, Assistant Professor of Music and Latin American Studies, William and Mary"At once broad in its conceptual reach and ethnographically focused on the practices of selected performing ensembles, Juan Diego Díaz's Africanness in Action illuminates varieties and degrees of sedimentation of an essentialized 'Africa' in Afro-Bahian music. Combining attention to discourse and rhetoric with detailed musical analysis, the author unveils the multiple truths of influence, invention, self-definition and aspiration. This important and timely book will appeal to all who are interested in the practical reception of 'African music' by creators who possess the rights of heritage to extend its purview." -- Kofi Agawu, The Graduate Center, City University of New York"Africanness in Action presents a story of creativity and agency. In it, musical essentialism is something that musicians do rather than embody or believe and something that allows them to navigate their concerns connecting artistic creation and racial justice. Diaz's understanding of tropes as something "put into action" allows him to find scholarly meaning in Africa-inspired musical creation beyond the pursuit of a 'truth' about (or the impossibility of) African survivalism. Africa here operates not as an objective source of musical elements but as a symbolic referent allowing black musicians to convey their agendas in a racialized context." -- Rodrigo Chocano, Latin American Perspectives