Events

Colloquia INET-md | CESEM | Music in Context

Carnival Brass Bands in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro: Disinheritance, Alternative Whiteness, and Musical Eclecticism

Andrew Snyder (University of California, Berkeley)

June 7th, 2018 | 18:00 | Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas | Auditorium 2 | Tower B

Abstract

Alongside the official krewe parades in the carnival of New Orleans and the samba schools of the carnival of Rio de Janeiro, a wide diversity of international genres circulates through the carnival brass band scenes in both cities, including Balkan music, Afrobeat, and cumbia. As carnival is often enacted as a performance of local tradition, heritage, and ritual, these musically eclectic additions to the festivity constitute a rebuke of carnival's aesthetic limitations. While heritage studies has illuminated "heritagization" as a mode of production that selects certain expressive practices as cultural heritage, this talk explores "disinheritance," or the distancing of people from dominant heritage repertoires. Drawing on a tradition of thinking about Atlantic world carnivals cross­culturally, in this talk I aim to illuminate the mechanisms of racial formation that link "alternative whiteness" to disinheritance and musical eclecticism, as they play out in the brass band scenes of the world­famous carnivals of New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro.

Organization