Juan Diego Díaz, an assistant professor of music and an ethnomusicologist, reexamines long-held ideas about music of Africa and the African diaspora in Africanness in Action (Oxford University Press, March 2021). Using the perspectives of musicians in Bahia, Brazil, he shows how they promote social change and critique racial inequality by creatively engaging tropes about African music and culture.

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. He is also a long-term Capoeira Angola practitioner and has led capoeira, berimbau, and samba ensembles. Africanness in Action focuses on how musicians from Bahia, Brazil understand and negotiate essentialist notions about African music and culture. 

View the book at Oxford University Press