Bio: Dr. Rosa is a native of Brazil who migrated to the US in 1996. Her research interests include the intersection of embodiment, knowledge production, and processes of identification. In her recently published book Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Rosa examines how aesthetic principles cultivated across the black Atlantic contributed to the construction of Brazil as an imagined community. She has also been published in the edited collection Performing Brazil (2015) and Cultures in Process: Encounter and Experience (2009), and journals such as TDR and e-misférica. Rosa is currently a full-time Lecturer at Tufts University’s Department of Drama and Dance. She has previously taught in the US at Reed College, the University of California, Riverside, the Florida State University, and the California Institute of the Arts. She has also served as a research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin’s International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” (Germany, 2012-13). She earned her PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Inside Panel 1 [1:30-2:45pm]: “Black Dancing Rome: Four Decades Choreographing Revelry and Revolt on the Streets of Bahia, Brazil (1974-2014)”
Abstract: Salvador, the colonial capital of Brazil, has the largest population of Blacks outside Africa. Today Afro-Brazilian culture and religion continue play a central role in the life of that vibrant city, nicknamed “the Black Rome” and “the Mecca of Blackness.” This presentation discusses a number of cultural manifestations that emerged in the last decades in Salvador, from the Afro-Brazilian carnival krewe known as Blocos Afro and Afoxés to the rebirth of Capoeira Angola and the creation of the musical genre Samba-Reggae. More importantly, it seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the black communities in that city have appropriated the public (festive) space to protest against racial violence and discrimination as well as to shed pride towards their aesthetic knowledge, their cultural memory, and their system of beliefs. Briefly, these cultural manifestations built on Salvador’s long history of combining revelry and revolt to address socio-political issues. Subsequently, they have been equally supported by political organizations connected to racial matters such as the Movimento Negro Organizado, literally the Organized Black Movement, and social organizations connected to the carnival circuit (similar to New Orleans’s social aid and pleasure societies).
Black Bodies in Motion 