Prof. Juan Diego Díaz - Class of 1960 Music Lecture

Professor Juan Diego Díaz of University of California Davis offers a Class of 1960 Lecture. The talk is titled, Intimate Performances of Burrinha: Music, Brazilianness, and Political Repression in Togo.

For nearly two centuries, a Brazilian folk theatre genre known as burrinha has been performed in various cities along the Lomé-Lagos corridor in West Africa. Emerging through the migration of victims and victimizers of slavery from Brazil to West Africa in the early nineteenth century, burrinha has become one of the most important symbols of Brazilianness in Benin and Togo. Burrinha is a multimedia art form that encompasses music, song, dance, costumes, and acting, often performed at masquerades and carnival-like events. Following the assassination of Sylvanus Olympio, Togo’s first president and a descendant of Brazilians, in 1963, a wave of political repression targeted Brazilian descendants, nearly extinguishing burrinha in the country. This presentation explores the strategies implemented by Brésiliens (as Brazilian descendants are known in Togo) to sustain the practice of burrinha during this period of oppression. These strategies included quietly singing and clapping in households, visiting relatives and established burrinha practitioners in Benin, and arranging song medleys accompanied by guitar and minor percussion instruments. Through this exploration, we gain insight into the significance of musical practices in preserving Brazilian diasporic identities in Togo, the hierarchies of prestige and authority within Brazilian-descendant communities in West Africa, and the broader theme of cultural resilience. Ultimately, we see how the echoes of Brazil continue to resonate in West Africa, even after two centuries of struggle for integration.

Juan Diego Díaz is an ethnomusicologist with a geographic research interest in Africa and its diaspora, particularly Brazil and West Africa. He explores how African diasporic musics circulate and transform across the Atlantic and how they serve individuals and communities in identity formation. His book Africanness in Action (Oxford University Press, 2021) focuses on how musicians from Bahia, Brazil understand and negotiate essentialist notions about African music and culture. He is also a long-term Capoeira Angola practitioner and has led capoeira, berimbau, and samba ensembles.

Previous to teaching at UC Davis, Juan Diego held posts as a lecturer at the University of Ghana and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Essex, the latter funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The funded research investigates the music of the descendants of freed enslaved Africans who resettled from Brazil to Ghana, Togo, and Benin during the nineteenth century. This research has produced a book titled Tabom Voices: A History of the Ghanaian Afro-Brazilian Community in Their Own Words (2016) and the documentary film Tabom in Bahia  (co-directed with Nilton Pereira, 2017), documenting the visit of a Ghanaian master drummer to Bahia, Brazil.

His articles have appeared in journals such as Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Analytical Approaches to World Music, and Latin American Music Review.

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