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Hispanic American Historical Review 81.2 (2001) 423-424



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Book Review

Rhythms of Resistance:
African Musical Heritage in Brazil.


Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil. By PETER FRYER. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000. Illustrations. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Discography. Index. xiv, 267 pp. Cloth, $55.00. Paper, $24.94.

Merely by cracking open Peters Fryer's new book and glancing at the index, the reader cannot help but immediately notice how wide is its focus and how generous its contribution to those interested in the African diaspora, Brazilian history, and Afro-Brazilian culture. Delving into the text itself, this first impression is wholeheartedly confirmed, as one quickly recognizes that the author's research was not only extensive but also very profound. In this very detailed work, Peter Fryer describes the development of African rhythms during four hundred years of Brazilian history, based on research that was particularly guided by the fascinating statements of European and North American visitors to Brazil from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

As Fryer has demonstrated in previous works, the presence of black people in Europe began much earlier than is usually recognized. African slaves were transported to Portugal from 1441 onwards. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Lisbon's black community accounted for approximately ten percent of the city's population. These people influenced not only local culture, but also the interchange of different rhythms with the other two points of the Atlantic trade triangle: African ports and Brazilian cities.

Brazil was "discovered" by the Portuguese in 1500. Since the 1560s African slave labor, mainly originated from West Africa, especially Angola, Benin, and Nigeria, started to be exploited in the sugarcane plantations. During 350 years of slavery, different ethnicities, such as Hausas, Geges, and Bantus, among others, were distributed in various parts of Brazil, mixing in many ways. However, as Fryer [End Page 423] points out, what really matters when it comes to discussing African cultural heritage in Brazil is the distinction between the Nigeria-Benin and the Congo-Angola cultural areas and their influence over Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions.

According to Fryer, what can today be called African Brazilian rhythms arose by an "acculturation process that worked both ways," that is, by black musicians "creolising" European music, and by the Portuguese influence over African rhythms. The decisive step in the emergence of Brazilian popular music was, in Fryer's opinion, the enthusiastic adoption, first by poor whites, and then by the urban middle class, of African rhythms and dances. This logic of acculturation permeates the entire book, leading Fryer to search for African reminiscences in Brazil, and to deal with questionable issues such as "authenticity," "pureness," and the "preservation of African traditions," which make culture seem static, fixed, and only capable of change when in contact with "external cultures".

This shortcoming, however, does not threaten the importance of the work in Fryer's analysis of what he defines as "neo-African" rhythms in Brazil, such as the music of candomblé and other African Brazilian religions, and that of capoeira, a combination dance/fighting game invented by African slaves in Brazil. Other rhythms also have a special position in Fryer's book: the vendors' street cries; the work songs that helped the slaves facing tiredness and that synchronized their work in groups; and the music that accompanies dramatic dances (for example, congo and bumba-meu-boi). The emergence of Brazilian popular music and dances, such as maxixe and modern samba, and the importance of musical instruments of African origin are also analyzed.

The political use of African Brazilian rhythms by the dominant sectors of Brazilian society, however, remains an unmentioned issue in this book. Throughout the last decades, many expressions of African Brazilian culture have been manipulated by elite, media, and tourism industries to represent what is supposed to be the Brazilian nation. Observing this process leads one to question how far a commodified culture is able to transform the relations of power, and therefore continue to reproduce itself as culture of resistance.

PATRICIA PINHO, Universidade...

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