"From the Pages..." featuring Bryce Henson's Emergent Quilombos

Join us on March 25, 2024 for ASWAD's first book talk of the year as we discuss Bryce Henson's new book, Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip Hop in Brazil, moderated by James Cantres. 

Based on years of ethnographic research, Emergent Quilombos illuminates how Black hip-hop artists and their circles contest structures of anti-Black racism by creating safe havens and alternative social, cultural, and political systems that serve Black people. These artists valorize and empower marginalized Black peoples through song, aesthetics, media, visual art, and community action that emphasize diasporic connections, ancestrality, and Black identifications in opposition to the anti-Black Brazilian nation. In the process, Henson argues, the Salvador hip-hop scene has reinvigorated and reterritorialized a critical legacy of Black politicocultural resistance: the quilombo, maroon communities of Black fugitives who refused slavery as a way of life, gathered away from the spaces of their oppression, protected their communities, and nurtured Black life in all its possibilities.

"Bryce Henson has produced a historically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, and eminently readable account of Bahian hip-hop. With lyrical prose that reads like a love letter to the diaspora, Henson’s imagining of Bahian hip-hop as “emergent quilombo,” or maroon community, provides readers with soul-filling ways to reimagine Blackness outside of staid paradigms of inclusion and exclusion." ~Ralina L. Joseph, University of Washington, author of Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity

YouTube: https://youtu.be/jOXO-CBZztE