“Images, music and dance of the African diaspora in Brazil.“
Project “Organization of a database of images and texts on representations of Afro-Brazilian music and dance” CNPq (420106/2021-9)
Project contemplated by the Universal CNPq public notice 2022 – Group Corpuslab Search
Resources: R$ 56.200,00 ( bags, Material Permanente, costing)
- Team:
- Prof. Dr. Loque Arcanjo (Coordination)
- Prof. Dr. Luiz Naveda
- prof. Dr. Marília Nunes-Silva
- graduate students:
- Anna Beatriz Vieira Muniz Donatelli
- Igor Vieira and Sá Tolentino
- Emanuel Schuchter
- Methods and processes
- Iconography and iconology
- Historiography
- Machine Learning and Computational Textual Analysis
- Computer aided image annotation
- relational databases
- Data visualisation
- Expected results
- public databases
- Image bank analysis, texts and relationships
- Articles in newspapers and conferences
- new methods, teaching and extension
News:
- Project start!
Summary
We often confuse the idea of knowledge with something that is written down or that is official.. The documents that we have left to learn about the African cultural heritage in Brazil include testimonies, texts and images that show the traces of the action of black people in the past. But these remaining documents are not neutral. They often reflect an opinion of the slave-owning colonizer., one (in)ability to touch, hear, dancing and acting in relation to the other culture and a selection of what will or will not be documented.
But culture is not just text, and the whole heritage of oral traditions, musicals, choreographic remained, carried from body to body by the traditions incorporated. How to redo this journey without using the lens, the text and the body of the colonizer?
In this project we built a map of the traces of the African heritage in music and dance in Brazil from a set of texts, images and the identification of colonizer bias. In an attempt to identify undocumented relationships, a database will list not only texts, but people, your lenses, their images and their bodies, using technologies of textual analysis and image analysis to establish more prominent relationships of interlocutors during the formation of Afrodiasporic culture in Brazil. The database and new methods will be made available during the project.
The look (and the ears) of the colonizer
One of the challenges in studying how the African diaspora underpinned the richness of music and dance in the Americas is dealing with cognitive limitation., eugenics and cruelty of written documents, selected and maintained by colony agents. An account of Count Eugenio de Robiano in 1870 (Fryer, 2000), demonstrates how these documents inform about diaspora culture at the end of the Sec. XIX:
The accounts of Count Eugenio de Robiano reproduced above demonstrate the colonizer's inability to perceive the metric structure of a participatory dance (“same figure”, “follow-up of participants”), the inability to consider other musical scales (“out of tune”) and the inability to understand the ginga encoded in the fabric of musical structure (“more or less in time”) .
What do these period documents reflect??
The documents that we have left to learn about the African cultural heritage in Brazil include testimonies, texts and images that show the traces of the action of black people in the culture. But these remaining documents are not neutral. They often reflect a colonizer's opinion, one (in)ability to touch, hear, dancing and acting in relation to the other culture and a selection of what will or will not be documented. But culture is not just text, and the whole heritage of oral traditions, musicals, choreographic remained, carried from body to body by traditions.
How to redo this journey without using the lens, the text and the body of the colonizer?
In this project we built a map of the traces of the African heritage in music and dance in Brazil from a set of texts, images and the identification of the colonizer's gaze. In an attempt to identify undocumented relationships, a database will list not only texts, but people, your lenses, their images and their bodies, using textual analysis and image analysis technologies to establish more prominent relationships from the colonizing gaze. The database will be made available to other researchers at the end of the project.
Expected results
- public databases
- Image bank analysis, texts and relationships
- Articles in newspapers and conferences
- new methods, teaching and extension
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