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Slavery and Syncretic Performance in the Noite do Tambores Silenciosos: Or How Batuque and the Calunga Dance around with the Memory of Slavery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2015

MARCUS WOOD
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Abstract

How does slavery's memory work its way out in Afro-Brazilian syncretic culture (and particularly carnival) today? How does this African interculturation react with white Brazilian culture? I shall begin an answer to these questions by paying methodological homage to Raymond Williams and by turning to the contemplation of some “key words” which I believe provide “a vocabulary of [Afro Brazilian syncretic] culture and society.” Batuque and calunga are at the heart of the ceremony performed by Recife's Afro-Brazilian afoxés during the Noite do Tambores Silenciosos (“Night of the Silent Drums”). They are key words which encapsulate music and ritual focussed upon a remarkably charged engagement with Brazil's African inheritance, and its positive cultural manifestations both within and beyond slavery. They are also conceptually multivalent terms that finally emphasize their resistance to, and untranslatability within, the modes of white Euro-American academic thought.

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Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 383 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

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28 Fred Astaire, Holiday Inn, 1942; A Damsel in Distress, 1937; Royal Wedding, 1951; See “Fred Astaire Dances with Props” video compilation, at www.youtube.com.

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33 The Old Plantation, Abby Aldrich Folk Art Centre, Williamsburg, VA.

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