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Paper Short Abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Ilú Obá De Min, this paper focuses on its Afro-diasporic musicking, understanding it as a way of sharing and learning “ecologies of knowledge”, and, simultaneously, as a process of transformation and healing for the women who compose the group.

Paper Abstract:

The Ilú Obá De Min is a Brazilian street carnival group based in the city of São Paulo and formed by almost 450 women, mainly Black. The group works to preserve and to diffuse “Black cultures”, and to “empower” Black women in Brazilian society through the “Afro-diasporic performances” – rhythms, songs and dances of African Diaspora – that become ways of revindication of its African ancestry and resistance against racism, sexism and all forms of discrimination.

The group’s most important activity is the preparation of the Carnival parade, a creative process that lasts 6 months during which Ilú Obá De Min’s members collectively construct their musical performances. At the heart of this process there are the plural bodies of the group’s women that play, sing and dance, deconstructing hegemonic normative discourses and, at the same time, creating spaces of belonging.

From this point of view, Ilú Obá De Min’s main goal is not just the realization of the Carnival parade, but the very process behind it, since its musical-pedagogical practices promote, on one hand, the production, sharing and learning of “ecologies of knowledge”; on the other, the activation of collective and individual processes of self-recognition, the “transformation” of Black women’s positioning in relation to their bodies and subjectivities, and paths of “healing” for the “wounds” caused by a racist, sexist, patriarchal, heteronormative and deeply unjust and unequal society to Black and indigenous people, women and lgbtqia+ persons.