Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse: Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil by Daniel B. Sharp (review)

Anyone who has spent time in northeastern Brazil knows it as a region of contrasts. Lush coastlines give way to vast swathes of sugarcane plantation, which themselves fade into the sweltering moonscape of the arid sertão. The region’s colonial history, encompassing five centuries of conquest, slavery, revolt, and frequently uneven encounters between diverse cultures and peoples, is the backdrop for some of South America’s most innovative technological and artistic expressions. And widespread racialized inequality, both social and economic, is a hallmark of the entire vast region, which covers roughly 600,000 square miles. But unlike the high-rise/favela (urban shantytown) dichotomy familiar to non-Brazilians from international news, films, and popular music from the southeastern hub of Rio de Janeiro, this northeastern heritage of inequality is deeply imbricated with nostalgic ideas about the cultural roots of the nation as a whole—complicating northeastern artists’ efforts to draw on their local traditions in order to both explore their regional identity and participate in a national conversation about modern Brazil.

This challenge is at the heart of Daniel Sharp’s excellent ethnography of music making in the town of Arcoverde in the interior of the state of Pernambuco. Fittingly, Sharp’s account begins with his own journey from the urban coastal capitol of Recife to Arcoverde, and details his first full day of a year’s worth of fieldwork in the town—over the course of which he is treated to the practiced hospitality of a prominent local family of musicians at their famed bar-cum-rehearsal space, gets a glimpse of contentious neighborhood politics, and takes in a polished folkloric music and dance performance at a lavish, publicly-funded cultural center. Sharp’s description of his first day not only firmly situates Arcoverde’s local music scene in the regional tourist industry, in which affluent, primarily white-identified urbanites visit places like Arcoverde in search of an authentic (i.e., underdeveloped, “simple,” and racially mixed) Northeast. It also explicitly points to his own position in a long line of several generations of both researchers and recreational visitors interested in the region because of its purported preservation of cultural practices explicitly tied to a nostalgic vision of Afro-Brazilian heritage, in contrast to the predominant white and mestiço (indigenous and European mixture) cowboy culture of most of the Pernambuco countryside. This close attention to the ideological and logistical spaces of fieldwork is one of the great strengths of Sharp’s book. While he meticulously details his own encounters with local musicians and provides the reader with insightful and respectful analysis of his interlocutors’ attempts to balance commercial success with respect for their heritage, he remains always aware of his own position as a privileged foreigner whose presence simultaneously brings local status to the musicians with whom he works, contributes to tensions between artists competing for recognition beyond the confines of Arcoverde, and—since he sticks around for much longer than the typical tourist’s long weekend—challenges his friends and hosts to make sense of him in their daily lives as musicians and businesspeople.

Sharp focuses on the two groups of musicians who have gained the most recognition and commercial success outside of Arcoverde, albeit for significantly different reasons. The first is the family band Coco Raízes de Arcoverde, which specializes in a local form of roots samba with explicit links to Afro-Brazilian traditions of drumming, percussive dance, and call-and-response singing, and which traces its artistic and genealogical lineage back to the improvising poets of the deep sertão or arid badlands. Sharp details Coco Raízes’s struggle to balance their overriding interest in maintaining their traditional music and dance practices as an integral part of their individual identities and family bonds with their efforts to...