Race and Performance in Brazil

Catalog description

This course explores Brazilian afro diasporic performative practices (music, dance, festivals, artistic production). Students will have an opportunity to engage with Brazilian artists, musicians, and activists to learn about samba, candomblé and capoeira. Students will be asked to connect questions of culture with politics, race, nationalism, gender and class. This culturally immersive study abroad course will build understanding of how cultural performances have been at different times celebrated, marginalized or criminalized over the course of Brazil’s history. From protest movements to popular music and performance, students will explore how affective and intimate bodies are made political as repositories of national heritage or transgressive communities of dissent.