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