Blacks; Women; Brazil; South America; Book reviews; PERRY, Keisha-Kkan Y; BLACK Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (Book)
Analyzes current urban governance policies and the spatial politics of resistance embraced by communities under siege in Brazil. Space matters not only in terms of defining one's access to the polis, but also as a deadly tool through which police killings, economic marginalization, and mass incarceration produce the very geographies (here referred to as 'the black necropolis') that the state aims to counteract in its war against the black urban poor.
Combines ethnomusicology and symbolic boundary theory to explain musical boundary-work: the creation, interpretation, and use of music to reinforce, bridge, or reshape symbolic boundaries for social, political, spiritual, or other purposes. The multi-faith and multi-ethnic Afrogaucho religious community of metropolitan Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, serves as the case study, because practitioners use musical liturgy to combine and segregate the Batuque, Umbanda, and Quimbanda religions and their denominations. This essay introduces the community, highlighting ethnoracial identity politics, and describes processes of musical boundary-work within the community, focusing on local concepts of crossing and purity.
