In a 2011 interview promoting her album, 4, megastar Beyoncé expressed a desire to “bring back real R&B” to pop music prominence. After taking full control of her career, Beyoncé began articulating a desire to amplify Black musical performance aesthetics in her artistic output. The “kinetic orality” in the music video for “Run the World (Girls)” was the result of Beyoncé flying two Mozambican street dancers to the U.S. to teach her dancers to do specific movements to a song whose rhythms she said, “takes you back to Africa.” She openly expressed a desire to go beyond producing “just radio songs” and from there, expanded her creative arc into realms of multi-media works that included two visual albums, a 2019 soundtrack for Disney’s The Lion King, and her own all-Black adaptation of its story for Black Is King. Over a ten-year period, the presence of Black artists from Africa and the diaspora increased in projects that unapologetically centralized issues concerning Black women, Black people and affirming Black queer identities. Beyoncé appears to be creating an era in her catalog that reifies Gilroy’s concept of “the African World,” while engaging in processes described by Bebey, Agawu, and Gaunt to push Black musical genres outside of marginalized corners of the global music industry. This paper is based on preliminary research concerned with documenting Beyoncé’s mainstreaming of Black artists from various mediums in critically acclaimed projects steeped in themes of affirmation and various expressions of “somebodiness” that Black expressive culture exudes globally.

In 2019, I spent five months in Recife and Olinda, Pernambuco, studying coco, a music and dance tradition found principally in the northeastern Brazilian states of Alagoas, Paraiba, and Pernambuco. In this paper, I focus on the relationship between Africa and coco of the Xambá Nação, known as Coco da Xambá. This distinctive version of coco was created by Guitinho da Xambá and is performed by Grupo Bongar, “the political voice of the people of the terreiro.” Terreiro Santa Bárbara – Ilê Axé Oyá Meguê da Nação Xambá, a terreiro of the Xangô faith, is the cultural and spiritual center of the Xambá Nação, the first urban quilombo in the state of Pernambuco. The Nação has affirmed its African roots since its founding in several ways. First, the nation’s religion is Xangô (known as Candomblé in the rest of Brazil), which involves the worship of Orishas and is based on Yoruban religious practices. Second, Yoruba is the primary language used in worship services and is commonly featured in their cocos (songs of coco de roda). Third, the community traces its spiritual heritage to the Tchamba region of West Africa, near present-day Nigeria and Cameroon. Finally, since its founding, the community has drawn on its connections to Africa to resist prejudice, racism, and religious persecution. This paper highlights the interconnectedness of music and dance, religion, African heritage, and resistance in the tradition of Coco da Xambá.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are a constellation of institutions founded in the Reconstruction Era of the United States. Since the 19th century, these institutions have educated generations of Black American, Caribbean, and African students. Although scholarship has acknowledged the connections between HBCUs and African political leaders such as Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah, the connection between HBCUs, African music, and of the African diaspora remains under-explored. Yet those linkages are bountiful and just as longstanding. In this paper, I discuss three ways in which HBCUs are fertile ground for examining the intersections in African diasporic music-making. In this paper I explore the influence of two African students turned music educators on their respective campuses: Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji as a student at Morehouse College in the 1950s, and Ghanaian choral director, Dr. Paul Kwami, a Fisk University alumnus and the longtime director of its world-renowned choral ensemble, the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Collectively, these aspects of HBCU music-making demonstrate that although HBCUs are mostly located in the Southern region of the United States, they are critical sites of musical encounters that are both intra-racial and inter-cultural. These musical encounters facilitate innovative Black Atlantic musical dialogues that influence music far beyond the borders of HBCU campuses.