Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Brazilian Music and Jazz

Scholars in a broad range of disciplines are rethinking race and ethnicity in conjunction with genre, nationalism, place, cosmopolitanism, the shift towards neoliberalism since 1985, and intellectual property. In this paper I use a comparative perspective to think about the typical representations of Brazilian music and jazz as emerging from tri-ethnic and bi-ethnic heritages. I consider the assumptions and original purposes of the models and propose a new one that addresses the historical trajectories of multiple ethnicities; their socioeconomic context, specifically neoliberalism; aesthetic competence and universality; divided identities; contexts of production, appreciation, and pedagogy; intellectual property, and scientific metaphors. I’ll draw examples from my field research and from recent scholarly and pedagogical literature.