Undesired Presences: Samba, Improvisation, and Afro-politics in 1970s Brazil

This article explores the role of the samba subgenre partido alto as a mode of resistance to modernization and the Brazilian military regime’s disfiguration of samba music in the 1970s. This resistance ultimately led a handful of samba musicians to create the Grêmio Recreativo de Arte Negra Escola de Samba Quilombo in 1975. While it is true that Quilombo nurtured Afro-Brazilian music and culture, the author demonstrates that its leader and cofounder, Antônio Candeia Filho, acted as a samba preservationist and a pioneer, referencing music of the African diaspora, but also as someone who drew the line when it came to espousing Pan-Africanism. The aversion to Pan-Africanism in Rio de Janeiro’s samba community heightened in the late 1970s, as Black Soul, among other foreign sounds and cultural presences, was perceived as a threat to the primacy of samba.