My research focuses primarily on how traditional and experimental music is intertwined in the Americas, with a specific interest in post-plantation areas with heritage tourism economies (Northeast Brazil; New Orleans). I have developed a multidisciplinary approach involving fine-grained ethnographic research, oral histories, and narrative-centered writing that weaves cultural theory together with the everyday details of musicians’ lives.

My first book Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse: Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil is a close-to-the-ground account of musicians and dancers from Arcoverde, Pernambuco—a small city in the northeastern Brazilian backlands. The book’s focus on samba de coco families, marked as bearers of tradition, and the band Cordel do Fogo Encantado, marketed as pop iconoclasts, offers a portrait of performers engaged in new forms of cultural preservation during a post-dictatorship period of democratization and neoliberal reform. In it, I explore how festivals, museums, television, and tourism steep musicians’ performances in national-cultural nostalgia, which both provides musicians and dancers with opportunities for cultural entrepreneurship and hinders their efforts to be recognized as part of the Brazilian here-and-now. The book charts how Afro-Brazilian samba de coco became an unlikely emblem in an interior where European and indigenous mixture predominates. It also chronicles how Cordel do Fogo Encantado—drawing upon the sounds of samba de coco, ecstatic Afro-Brazilian religious music, and heavy metal—sought to make folklore feel dangerous by embodying an apocalyptic register and exposing the foundational violence that underlies stories of Brazilian regional and national origins. Publication of this book was supported by AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

My second book revolves around Afro-Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos’s 1980 album Saudades. My goal is to situate his reimagining of percussion and voice in the context of his itinerant life in New York, Europe and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. Of all the recordings in his extensive catalog, Naná was most proud of Saudades, which showcases his evocative, cinematic soundscapes on the berimbau and other percussion, working in tandem with his vocalizations, which he used as another musical instrument in the stereo mix. Naná’s longtime collaborator and roommate Arto Lindsay praised Naná’s impeccable time this way: “Naná has this kind of crystal clear time—it illuminates everything around it. It’s the time itself that is just glorious. It breathes, but never lets you down.”

The book’s focus on the Saudades record allows for an exploration of Naná’s trajectory from 1969 up until 1979, a pivotal time for him artistically, as well as in the arc of his life. During this decade prior to the recording, Naná began in Brazil, moved to New York City, then to Paris, and then back to Manhattan, touring extensively throughout Europe all the while. The record Saudades—a word for bittersweet longing deeply associated with the migratory Brazilian experience—captures the mixed emotions of the Brazilian far from home, while showcasing the vocabulary of techniques that he had been accumulating during this period. Based on numerous oral history interviews with his collaborators, the book’s themes include the relationship between popular music and cinema; the emergence of the category of world music in the 1970s and its relationship to free jazz and jazz-fusion; the relationship of Naná’s worldless vocalizations and body percussion to his work with neurodivergent children in a Paris hospital; and the ways in which Naná’s work was refiguring notions of the primitive in 1970s NYC and Paris.

In addition to my Brazil-centered work, I am also working on a New Orleans-centered project that explores many of the same themes of experimentalism, traditionalism and cultural tourism. For this project, Musical Architecture: Community Arts and Experimentalism in New Orleans, I am documenting an ambitious artistic collaboration called the Music Box Village. The Music Box Village is a project that brings together many visual artists, architects, musical instrument makers, and musicians in the service of the theme of “musical architecture.” It is an interactive visual and sound art installation by day, and a one-of-a-kind concert venue by night. Musicians experiment with sound and timbre on ingenious musical instruments embedded into the walls, ceilings and floors of small houses arranged throughout the outdoor space. The installation has been covered in glowing terms by Smithsonian Magazine, NPR and the New York Times. I am interested in questions surrounding both the creation of the art and the curation of the project. I am researching the unique musical instruments embedded in the buildings, and also the process of the project‘€™s funding and production. I interpret the Music Box Village, with its focus on sound, community and collaboration, as a nuanced response to the art of post-industrial ruins that places urban decay within a mournful tragic narrative. The project represents a convergence between approaches to avant-garde experimental music and art that are restless to break free from the confines of the museum and the concert hall, and the social aims of a non-profit community organization in a post-disaster zone. It is in the friction between these worlds that this work centers.

Currently a first-year MA student at the Stone Center, Allison Scribe graduated cum laude with a BA in Latin American Studies and Communication from Tulane University in 2017. She studied abroad in Brazil and Cuba as an undergraduate and has lived and worked in Guatemala. Allison worked in media as a content creator and manager before receiving a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Brazil in 2020. She is interested in the production and consumption of Latin American cultural products on digital platforms. Her research focuses primarily on user-generated content and her favorite topic is memes. When COVID-19 is over, she hopes to return to Brazil and conduct fieldwork.

Jamie Giunta is a graduate of the Latin American Studies MA program. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Georgia with a BA in Romance Languages (Portuguese and Spanish). She spent one year in Brazil with the Portuguese Flagship Program studying at the Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei and working at a multinational company in São Paulo. Her research interests include Portuguese and Brazilian literature, postcolonial studies, and Japanese immigration in Brazil. After completing her master's degree, Jamie plans to apply to the Fulbright program and then continue her education in a Latin American Studies or Spanish and Portuguese Ph.D. program.

Currently a local presence in the New Orleans music scene, award-winning composer and educator Geovane Paiva Santos, is a native Brazilian from the city of Belo Horizonte. Santos holds a B.M. in Music Performance from the Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais (UEMG), majoring in both Classical Guitar and Music Education (2011). While still associated with UEMG, Santos received a fellowship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to conduct musicological archival research and restoration work of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Minas Gerais’ mestizo classical music, a.k.a Barroco Mineiro (2010-2014).

Aligning his academic pursuits with a rising professional music career in jazz and Brazilian popular music in the U.S., Santos went on to receive an M.A. in Jazz Studies from the University of New Orleans (2018). His masters’ thesis entitled “Bossa Nova is not snapped on 2 and 4” was a study of music through a language accent framework where he analyzed and compared celebrated versions of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s composition Chega de Saudade (U.S. and Brazilian charts and recordings) highlighting the ways in which U.S. musicians mistranscribed, mistranslated and erased the Brazilian “accent” through Americanization/jazzification/cultural appropriation as they proliferated Jobim’s work around the world.

At Tulane University, beyond his enrolment as a Ph.D. student in the Latin American Studies program, Santos is also a community-engaged scholar and a Mellon Foundation fellow. His community-engaged scholarship focuses on developing a project to transcribe New Orleans native, master percussionist, and U.S. Afro-Brazilian cultural ambassador Curtis Pierre’s empirical knowledge into method books to create popular education tools. Santos’ doctoral research aims to expand and further explore his work in music mistranslations through interdisciplinarity, in other words, he is working out methodologies in which song titles, lyrical content, sheet music, and recorded performances can become gateways for critical analysis of symbolic aspects of music that surpass music theory. This way he uses bossa nova songs, and 1950-1960s developmentalist rhetoric as primary sources to discuss race, class, history, imperialism, and cultural appropriation, discussing how Brazil’s marketing and branding bossa nova as a white Brazilian music genre negatively affected how the non-Brazilian world still hears and plays bossa nova today.