UC Berkeley

In the past two decades, music scholars have explored the relationship between the human body and sound reproduction, analyzing the ways in which sound recording technologies shape ways of listening, singing, and speaking (Sterne 2003, Ochoa Gautier 2014), how they transform the relationship of the living to the dead (Stanyek and Piekut 2010), as well as how sound reproduction fosters appropriate rules of kinship behavior (Moreno 2019, Steingo 2019) and the reproduction of racialized social relations (Waltham-Smith 2021, Williams 2021). Studies such as these comprise an emerging disciplinary turn that asks how sound recording intersects with and transforms human bodies. However, this scholarship tends to privilege either twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound recording technologies or a form of “thing power,” that is, the circulation of print, instruments or media forms and the building of institutions and monuments.

My dissertation Embodied Memory: Reconfiguring Reproducibility in Luso-Afro-Brazilian Musical Performance instead argues for the centrality of embodied musical practices in cultural transmission by centering on performance, dance, rhythm, and oral histories of the Black Atlantic. The 1808 transfer of the Portuguese court to the colonial capital of Rio de Janeiro made Brazil a productive site for the study of musical and racial knowledges because it brought about what we might call a “metropolitan reversal.” From 1808, Brazil became a unique case in modern history insofar as the governance of a European empire took place from its colony and as an imperial bourgeoisie aspiring to liberal ideals lived directly alongside the chattel slave population. This setting suggests an inseparability of the lives and practices of the white imperial population and African and Afro-Brazilian men and women, the musics that took place in festive gatherings at slave quarters and in streets as well as song and dance performances in concert halls, songs that circulated through word of mouth, embodied performance, and bourgeois song collections.

I begin by interpolating the cultural labor of Afro-Brazilian musicians into our image of the social to foreground their agency in reproducing European musical canons. The dissertation’s central chapters discuss how portrayals of interracial relations in Luso-Brazilian dance-songs congealed representations of Black male and female bodies: in repeatedly manifesting a set of social relations, nineteenth-century dance-songs could at once enable the reproduction of racial violence and offer possibilities for the subversion of racial archetypes. I proceed to examine Luso-Afro-Brazilian dance-songs as “contagious” musics with “infectious” rhythms, centuries-old metaphors marshalled by white elites to refer to alluring African diasporic musics and dances that reproduced with extreme rapidity. This section of the dissertation contributes to the dissertation’s thesis by exploring the phenomena of contagion and virality long before the advent of viral media enabled by the Internet (see Harper 2019). Lastly, I turn to a present-day performance to imagine a palimpsestual music history that pays attention to a multiplicity of recurring events and repurposed previous iterations in the service of canonization and public memory.

Embodied Memory argues for the centrality of embodied performance in processes of social and cultural reproduction–over and above privileging twentieth-century sound reproduction technologies and material culture more broadly, ultimately showing that musical practice and performance can place in question the idea that Black Atlantic culture is inseparable from forms of cultural annihilation and social death.