Music and antiracism in Brazil explores the contribution of Brazilian music-making to the antiracist cause between the mid-1960s and the early 2000s. Offering fresh, critical readings of the most representative compositions, performances and initiatives from the period, it comprehensively assesses how, during the 1964-85 Dictatorship and the democratic reconstruction that followed, musicians contributed to the development of an antiracist politics in their creative approaches, repertoires and interventions.

While often claiming music as evidence of the country’s mixed, racially ‘democratic’ character, the authoritarian state and its mestiço nationalist ideology actively sought to deny the selfhood of Black Brazilians as autonomous agents of their own history. But as David Treece shows, the musician-activists of the antiracist movement succeeded in giving voice to an insubordinate, insurgent Black subject while transcending the fantasies of ‘race’ and nation through class-based and cosmopolitan forms of solidarity.