Emergent Quilombos

Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil

By Bryce Henson

University of Texas Press

2024 Roberto Reis Book Prize, First Book category, Brazilian Studies Association

How disenfranchised Black Brazilians use hip-hop to reinvigorate the Black radical tradition.

Known as Black Rome, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, is a predominantly Black city. The local art, food, and dance are closely linked to the population’s African roots. Yet many Black Brazilian residents are politically and economically disenfranchised. Bryce Henson details a culture of resistance and activism that has emerged in response, expressed through hip-hop and the social relations surrounding it.

Based on years of ethnographic research, Emergent Quilombos illuminates how Black hip-hop artists and their circles contest structures of anti-Black racism by creating safe havens and alternative social, cultural, and political systems that serve Black people. These artists valorize and empower marginalized Black peoples through song, aesthetics, media, visual art, and community action that emphasize diasporic connections, ancestrality, and Black identifications in opposition to the anti-Black Brazilian nation. In the process, Henson argues, the Salvador hip-hop scene has reinvigorated and reterritorialized a critical legacy of Black politicocultural resistance: quilombos, maroon communities of Black fugitives who refused slavery as a way of life, gathered away from the spaces of their oppression, protected their communities, and nurtured Black life in all its possibilities.

[Emergent Quilombos] contains food for thought that requires collective reflexive assessment. Henson is to be commended for bringing this age-old issue back into sharp focus. . . . this book is excellent for readers of all levels interested in the historical struggle for racial equality across time and space. CHOICE

A real game changer...offering a comprehensive ethnographic account of the hip-hop movement in Salvador...with a very sophisticated theoretical framework that builds upon previously established scholarly traditions, but which also offers its own innovative spins and perspectives...Henson's book offers a journey that is filled with respect, intimacy and tenderness towards the cultural actors portrayed in his ethnographic work without compromising an inch of academic rigor. A Contracorriente

Emergent Quilombos is a rich and provocative book that introduces the reader to the world of Bahian hip-hop and its cultural and political significance. In this moment in Brazilian history, Henson's work is an incredible contribution to the literature on the politics of Blackness in Brazil. Christen A. Smith, University of Texas at Austin, author of Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil

Bryce Henson has produced a historically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, and eminently readable account of Bahian hip-hop. With lyrical prose that reads like a love letter to the diaspora, Henson’s imagining of Bahian hip-hop as ‘emergent quilombo,’ or maroon community, provides readers with soul-filling ways to reimagine Blackness outside of staid paradigms of inclusion and exclusion. Ralina L. Joseph, University of Washington, author of Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity

Bryce Henson is an assistant professor of media, culture, and identity in the Department of Communication and Journalism and associate faculty in the Africana Studies Program at Texas A&M University.