Bryce Henson talk “Hip Hop Quilombos: Diasporic Media and Black Politics in Salvador da Bahia”

This event is part of the RTF Media Studies Colloquium and the Global Media Industries Speaker Series, co-sponsored by the Department of Radio-Television-Film and the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries.Dr. Bryce Henson is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism and a faculty associate in the Africana Studies Program at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD from the Institute of Communications Research with graduate certificates in cultural studies and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a co-editor of the book Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (2020). He is also an executive board member for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).

Titled Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Diasporic Cultures in Bahia (under contract with University of Texas Press), Dr. Henson’s book analyzes how Black Brazilian youth operationalize diasporic media & popular culture within the Black radical tradition. It traces how Black hip-hop artists re-create quilombos (maroon communities) through Black diasporic identifications, critiques of structural racism, aesthetic politics, and non-normative socialities in their everyday lives and cultural representations. As a result, these artists build spaces of refuge for and with their marginalized Black communities; carrying on a centuries-long legacy of Black cultural and political resistance in the contemporary conjuncture.

Held both in Person (DMC 5.208) and over Zoom.