Explores the neighborhood-based samba practices of working class Afro-Brazilians during the festas juninas (June festivals) in Bahia, Brazil. In contrast to Bahia's famous Carnival, a recognized site for activism, the festas juninas appear apolitical, seeming to lack overt resistance to color-based inequities that persist in Brazil despite national discourses of mestiçagem (mixing) and racial democracy. In recent years, however, June samba has (re-)emerged as a means for marginalized people to assert belonging in June events and festival narratives from which they have been excluded. Their activism draws on tactics used by Bahia's Afrocentric activist carnival organizations, but with important differences. Most notably, rather than placing Africa at the center of their interventions, June samba participants express new notions of Black Bahian subjectivity through the critically informed embrace of local Afro-diasporic traditions—especially a recently recognized UNESCO masterpiece known as samba de roda—and more cosmopolitan musical sensibilities.
A benefit-cost analysis was performed on varying levels of standard buildings codes for Haiti and Puerto Rico. It was found that in the two areas studied, the expected loss of life was reduced the most by use of high seismic building code levels, but lower levels of seismic building code were more cost-effective when considering only building damages and the costs for code implementation.
Analyzes how identity construction and ethnic representation processes take place in a folkloric festival framed by the multicultural policies of the Colombian state. Accounts for how institutions and base Afrocolombian communities use bullerengue—a local musical tradition that is now strong in the Uraba zone—as a tool in this construction process.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
16 p, This report provides background information on current political and economic conditions in the Dominican Republic, as well as an overview of some of the key issues in US-Dominican relations.
Crossroads populate religious and folkloric beliefs all around the world. Stories of an intersection of dimensions, as well as of roads where a guardian-trickster deity awaits to carry human desires to the gods, are widely encountered in European, Caribbean, and West African lore (as well as the legends formed around blues and rock stars). The symbolism of the crossroads speaks directly to one's innate recognition of a charged metaphorical space; a space that is liminal, betwixt-and-between. This notion of the crossroads serves as inspiration for examining the relationship between U2's music and listeners' progressive political awareness—the marriage of critical consciousness and action for social justice and change. To this end, an in-depth study is carried out of six listeners' experiences at the potent crossroads of their developing progressive awareness and their encounters with U2's music.
