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Abstracts and Bios

Milton Nascimento’s Missa Dos Quilombos: Musical Invocation, Race, and Liberation

Niyi Afolabi, University Of Massachusetts-Amherst

In Brazilian popular discourse, Milton Nascimento occupies a special place among Afro-Brazilian musical exponents especially as the voice of Minas Gerais, one of the historical Brazilian cities that capture colonial mineral exploitation of Brazil by the Portuguese. Despite Nascimento’s international fame that ranks alongside with that of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, among others, the maestro remains marginalized and uncelebrated. While the Brazilian Quilombos (Maroon communities) have been popularized by a number of narratives and visual expressions such as the Carlos Diegues’s film, Quilombo, they are yet to be celebrated as part of a larger diasporic imagination of resistance, necessary migration, militancy, spirituality, and communal self-defense. In Missa dos Quilombos, a musical spectacle orchestrated as a “Church Mass of the Maroons” as the title appropriately suggests, Nascimento invokes and provokes the ancestral spirits of the Maroons who were not only constantly persecuted and attacked by the Portuguese colonizers in the seventeenth century but also subjected to psychological agony as they weigh their options in “running away” to their death or to their freedom. In addition to a critical exploration of this classic musical along the paradigmatic triad of innovation, race, and liberation ideology, this study situates Missa dos Quilombos within the larger diasporic frame of African spirituality and renewal for Afro-Brazilians, while engaging the social and political consciousness of Milton Nascimento himself.