Paper Short Abstract:

How do the musical practices of newly arrived African musicians remake the city of São Paulo? This ‘creative diaspora’ soundtracks a politics of assumed but complicated affect between Brazil’s historic and new africanities, bringing together an Afrobrazilian present and an Afropolitan future.

Paper Abstract:

This paper presents some reflections on what we call the African creative diaspora, such as we’ve observed in the last 8 years of ethnographic research and collaborative filmmaking with musicians and artists coming from different countries in Africa to Brazil in the last 10 years. In São Palco – An Afropolitan City, the 4th film made by the authors in this thematic project, we present the city of São Paulo as a kind of meta-stage occupied by artists from Togo, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, among other African nations, in dialogue with the Brazilian population and all of its openings, contradictions and tensions. What do African artists who arrive in Brazil bring with them on their journey? How do Brazil's African diasporas interact - the new creative diaspora and the historic one that turned the Atlantic into a cemetery? What stages are sought out, occupied or constructed, and then filled with the performances of artists who cross the ocean? Ancestral identities are updated in performances that construct an Afropolitan present in a metropolis where it is necessary to be bold, to colour the grey. The paper discusses ethnographic aspects as well as collaborative filmmaking as a method and a politics for anthropology.