Samba: Resistance in Motion (Arts and Politics of the Everyday)

This is a fascinating look at movement in Brazil and the relationships between different types and styles of movement. This is a good place to start an exploration of this subject. It is a subjective account, although the historical information seems to be adequately researched. The value is more in the vivid snapshot the author creates of a period in the development of music and movement in the country, rather than as a comprehensive historical depiction. The author sometimes moves back and forth in ways that may seem unrelated until later in the book, so readers should be patient.

A very disappointing book. While factually dense, Browning's critical approach relies on a quite reductive view of dance as text - while Browning pays lip service to deconstructing the textual fetish of dance scholarship, she continues to seek to "read" dance not as performance but as text in motion. While purporting to be an ethnography, Brown quotes almost no actual individuals whom she interacted with (no exaggeration: I remember only two interlocutors being cited). The quality of her prose is quite poor, and her argumentation is often interrupted by strange and unwarranted sidebars (such as a rather insensitive story about a Brazilian man whom she thought "looked like Gandhi" touching her bottom while at a Carnival festivity). Also, only half the book is about samba (the other half covers candomble and capoeira), which is not well-advertised.

Excellent analysis of dance as a form of resistance from the point of view of a scholar on the one hand and of someone deeply involved in the dancing itself.

I really don't like this person's writing, I find it this side of unreadable; the subject matter gets me through.