Samba

Contextualizes issues of meaning, aesthetics, religion, and the politics of cultural resistance in Afro-Brazilian culture and the African diaspora. This work also explores the intricacies of cultural exchange and ethnographic translation.

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"Browning's ability to write ethnography, to locate the subject in terms of, and against, such African-Diaspora questions as 'continuities' and 'acculturation', and to fashion a personal and lyrical narrative, opens up many possibilities." - David H. Brown. Barbara Browning combines a lyrical, personal narrative with incisive and theoretically sophisticated accounts of a number of Brazilian dance cultures, suggesting that often the dancing body articulates a political resistance that cannot be voiced in words. She presents a social history of the development of samba, the 'Brazilian national dance'; candombl , a syncretic, danced religion; capoeira, an acrobatic martial art; and a number of the popular dances that proliferate in the carnaval of Salvador, Bahia, the Afro-Brazilian cultural nexus. Along the way, she considers the complexity of Brazilian race relations, sexual identity, and postmodern cultural (con)fusion. "Samba: The Body Articulate" presents a unique perspective on the social history and cultural complexity of Afro-Brazilian dance.
While she brings ethnographic, historiographic, and musicological scholarship to bear on her subject, Barbara Browning writes as a dancer herself, fully engaged in the living texture of the dance cultures of Brazil and of Brazilian exile communities in the United States. She is thus able to write across various communities in her project of 'writing the body' of the dancer. This absorbing work contextualizes issues of meaning, aesthetics, religion, and the politics of cultural resistance in Afro-Brazilian culture and the African diaspora; it also explores the intricacies of cultural exchange and ethnographic translation.