Book Review: Musical Essentialisms as Afro-Diasporic Agency

African essentialisms in Afro-diasporic music have had a central spot in the debates about music, identity, and racial politics in Latin America for the past two decades. The use of essentialist ideas about Africa as inspiration for musical creation has reinforced Afro-diasporic identity in musical communities and increased their recognition in national contexts while also prompting questions about authenticity. Styling Blackness in Chile: Music and Dance in the African Diaspora by Juan Eduardo Wolf and Africanness in Action: Essentialism and Musical Imaginations of Africa in Brazil by Juan Diego Díaz engage with the uses of essentialist ideas on African music by Afro-Chilean and Afro-Brazilian musicians.

The ethnomusicologist Díaz studies how Afro-Brazilian musicians in Bahia use ideations about “Africa” as foundations of their creations. He frames such ideations as based on “tropes of Africanness,” essentialist preconceptions historically used to characterize Afro-diasporic music/dance in Brazil and beyond as inherently rhythmic, percussive, embodied, spiritual, spontaneous, and collectivist. He goes on to show how musicians creatively put those tropes into action to advance their identities, aesthetic ideas, and agendas and that they do so from different standpoints informed by their positionalities, artistic training, and trajectories, their involvement with Afro-diasporic empowerment discourses, and their connections with African and other Afro-diasporic musical practices.

Following Michel Foucault’s ideas on discourse, Díaz identifies essentialist tropes of Africanness as “themes” that circulate across musical creations and discourses. Rather than passively accepting them, musicians activate them both musically and discursively and imbue them with meanings that align with their particular agendas. Informed by Paul Gilroy’s anti-antiessentialism, Díaz departs from approaches to Afro-diasporic musicality as either unconscious African survivalism or essentialist discourses in need of deconstruction. Instead, he focuses on the agency of black musicians in advancing their creative projects by repurposing tropes that other groups have historically used to discriminate against them. Rather than seeing essentialism as mainly “strategic” in the achievement of nonmusical goals, he asks how musicians find the tropes useful in conveying their ideas on musical aesthetics and Afro-diasporic identity. Citing Steven Feld’s idea of “interpretive moves,” he places the way musicians use the tropes at the core of his analysis.

This approach allows him to explore in depth, through deep ethnographic fieldwork and generous musical analysis, how Bahia artists put essentialism to work in their musical projects. Stressing the need for engaging with musical analysis in understanding the musical consequences of essentialism and avoiding superficial discursive deconstruction, he studies the use of tropes of Africanness in four musical projects: the Orkestra Rumpilezz, the Orquestra Afrosinfônica, the Nzinga Berimbau Orchestra, and the Dainho Xequerê. Taking place in Bahia, a city described as “an epicenter of African Diasporic Culture” (15), these musical projects share their fusion of emblematic Afro-Brazilian and global “erudite” genres and their commitment to Afro-diasporic local identity and black empowerment. After a first chapter engaging with the Afro-diasporic character of Bahia and a second outlining the book’s theoretical foundations, Díaz examines the different uses of the same tropes in five chapters dedicated to case studies. For example, while the Orkestra Rumpilezz focuses on rhythmic complexity as a way to challenge the low value attributed to black percussionists, the Nzinga Berimbau Orchestra tones it down in order to allow for increased group participation. This example is compelling not only in conveying the complexity of the use of these tropes but also in showing that this complexity coexists with similar ideas of racial equality and justice.

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.

In Styling Blackness in Chile, the ethnomusicologist Wolf ethnographically studies how Afro-descendant communities in northern Chile articulate local ideas of blackness via music and dance. Taking place in Arica, the study focuses on mestizo Afro-diasporic communities that struggle for recognition in a country that has historically denied blackness as part of the national identity. He argues that the musical practice of these communities reveals alternative ways of articulating blackness that he characterizes as “styling.” The communities he studied “style” blackness differently in genres such as tumbe carnaval, vals criollo, and morenada to convey different meanings of blackness in relation to specific cultural groups. Via styling, practitioners use music and dance to negotiate their identities between global Afro-diasporic referents and long-standing local understandings of blackness in Chile. This styling takes place in the context of minority representation developments in Chile emerging from the multicultural alignment in Latin American politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Pointing to developments in performance studies by Richard Bauman, Wolf defines “styling” as the intentional production and reception of a relationship between performers via performance “analogous to the way genre functions for texts” (5). In styling blackness, performers use embodied signs such as musical aesthetics, dance moves, and outfits to establish aesthetic similarities with other performers whom audiences understand as musically “black” or “African.” In some genres, such as tumbe carnaval, styling blackness connects local musical practices with Africa via stylistic similarities with established performers of the African diaspora. In other genres, such as vals criollo and morenada, it connects instead with different understandings of blackness in local contexts. In identifying styling blackness as a process that resonates with peoples’ musical and racialized experiences rather than being mainly instrumental, Wolf also departs from a “strategic essentialism” approach.

Drawing from his own experience as a Chilean musician, Wolf engages with Afro-Ariqueño musical practices as both an engaged ethnographer and a musical companion of the performers at the core of his research. He identifies Afro-Ariqueños as part of a “black periphery,” a part of the African diaspora often less closely associated with African blackness than with that of countries such as the United States, Brazil, and Cuba. Following this idea, the book is divided into two parts. The first analyzes styling blackness in relation to the idea of Africa and the way such a styling achieved local identification among and national recognition for Afro-Ariqueños. Chapter 1 provides the historical context of denial of blackness in Chile and its later acknowledgment in the context of multicultural representation politics. Chapter 2 analyzes how Afro-Ariqueño activist collectives rescued the local genre tumbe carnaval by styling it according to international Afro-diasporic performances, aesthetically aligning Arica with transnational blackness. Chapter 3 studies this process as producing a space for local identification and community formation for racialized Afro-Chileans. The second part engages with forms of styling blackness that do not refer to Africa. Chapter 4 engages with blackness and cultural intimacy in styling genres of Peruvian música criolla that are central to the memory of Ariqueño elders but also refer to their Peruvian ancestry and their racialization in Chilean society. Chapter 5 addresses the styling of blackness in the morenos de paso, a religious music and dance practice historically aimed at portraying Afro-Chileans as respectable subjects in a racist society. Chapter 6 analyzes styling blackness in Andean morenada and caporales dances as it reinserts Afro-diasporic presence and participation into Andean culture. Finally, Chapter 7 addresses some of the challenges in the popularization and Carnivalization of tumbe carnaval, including the rise of a regional identification of the dance that slowly overtakes the racial one and the gradual disappearance of its political agendas.

Styling, in this book, conveys the agency of Afro-Ariqueños in engaging with the relationship between blackness and aesthetics and doing so differently in different dimensions of their identity and expressive culture. In linking local memory with racial identities and broader referents of blackness, styling allows practitioners to engage with their African heritage in a national context that denies such association. This agency via expressive culture is, Wolf argues, particularly significant for Afro-Ariqueños because music is their main marker of cultural difference in the context of Chile’s multicultural identity politics.

In engaging with the intentional, creative, and emotional dimension of essentialisms in Afro–Latin American music, these books open a promising avenue for knowledge production in the study of black musicality in Latin America. An essential connection between Africa and black musical practices in the Americas has been at the core of both Afrocentric schools of thought and early ethnomusicological production. Similarly, the literature on Afro–Latin American music shows how practitioners have engaged with an imagined Afro-diasporic connection in their creative work. During the past two decades, ethnomusicologists (e.g., Moore, 1997; Wade, 2000; Greene, 2002; Feldman, 2006; León, 2006; Ritter, 2011; García, 2017; Birembaum Quintero, 2019) have taken a particular interest in the relationship between Afro-diasporic expressive culture and identity politics, one in which essentialisms often take center stage in the performance of connections with Africa that support racial identity claims. Grounded in this literature, Wolf and Díaz take a further step in focusing specifically on the way these essentialisms work in meaning production in racial identity politics. Aligning themselves with Gilroy’s (1993) anti-antiessentialism, both delve into the different ways in which racialized practitioners use essentialist ideas about Africa to musically engage with their own experience of blackness. Their analysis reveals that essentialism is something that people intentionally activate in relation to their circumstances and agendas and that constantly transforms both discourse and practice without one’s dominating the other.

While stemming from different theoretical traditions within ethnomusicology and exploring very different diasporic communities, Styling Blackness and Africanness in Action raise rather similar points on how to engage with musical essentialisms in the African diaspora. Africanness in Action explores musical creation in Bahia, a city that boasts of its black heritage and its cultural and historic identification with Africa. Styling Blackness engages with the musical practices of black-mestizo Afro-Chileans in a national context in which blackness and connections with Africa have historically gone unacknowledged by most of Chilean society. In both cases, practitioners repurpose racist preconceptions about black musicality to produce an expressive culture that speaks to their racialized experiences and aligns with their interests. The analysis of the two books complicates the role of Africa as a reference in black musical essentialisms, detaching the importance of such a symbolic connection from the objective inheritance, transmission, or survival of African musical practices. While Díaz’s cases demonstrate that the aesthetic imagination of Africa in Bahia does not need to match actual African musical practices, Wolf identifies musical formulations of blackness that either relate to Africa only by means of its global diaspora or fail to establish any connection with Africa at all. Both books are explicit about the grassroots importance of musical essentialisms beyond their “strategic” character. They find that African-inspired musical creation is mostly fueled by the desire of racialized practitioners to connect with their racial identity, bring together black communities, and advance their own representations of black musicality.

Beyond scholarly inquiry, acknowledging agency in black musical essentialisms is relevant in the light of the charges by nonblack music specialists that many Afro–Latin American music creators are “making things up.” These critics tend to see black essentialisms as misleading claims of African survivalism and consider Africa-inspired compositions inventions and mystifications if not outright lies. Not only does this critique fail to acknowledge the creative agency involved but also it overlooks—as Díaz suggests in his preface—that nonblack artistic elites have also historically essentialized black music and musicians. In Peru, for example, the Africa-inspired creations of of the black musician Victoria Santa Cruz, styling existing music and dances during the 1960s informed by her “ancestral memory,” continue to face charges of inauthenticity. However, the aristocratic composer Rosa Mercedes Ayarza rarely faces similar criticisms for her 1930s styling of black music tunes from Lima informed by criollo costumbrismo and its reproduction of old racial hierarchies of colonial and early republican times (see Velásquez, 2005). Styling Blackness and Africanness in Action thus extend a much-needed invitation to engage with Afro–Latin American musical essentialisms not as claims of “truth” but as creative, intentional representational choices. Under the uses that both books address, musical essentialisms can convey tropes of Africanness in a way that resonates with black communities’ identities and advances their agendas. Under other uses, essentialist tropes of Africanness can also intentionally reproduce racist stereotypes.

This understanding of musical essentialisms motivates a question that goes beyond the scope of both books but stems from their argumentation: how should we engage with racist musical stereotypes from a broad, structural perspective? As these books demonstrate, black musicians and dancers use tropes of Africanness as valuable resources for grassroots identity via black artistic creation but only as they repurpose racist musical prejudices that certainly did not emerge from Afro-diasporic communities themselves. At first glance, countering racism by reappropriating racist stereotypes certainly seems to go in the opposite direction from policies aiming to eliminate those stereotypes at large. Such reappropriations, however, indubitably constitute forms of grassroots agency that structural antiracist efforts need to consider. Africanness in Action and Styling Blackness are in that sense valuable contributions to the emerging debate on music, grassroots agency, and antiracism in Latin America.