Barbara Browning combines a lyrical, personal narrative with incisive theoretical accounts of Brazilian dance cultures. While she brings ethnographic, historiographic, and musicological scholarship to bear on her subject, Browning writes as a dancer, fully engaged in the dance cultures of Brazil and of Brazilian exile communities in the U.S.

Barbara Browning follows the trail of infectious rhythm from the ecstatic percussion of a Brazilian carnival group to the eerily silent video image of the LAPD beating a man like a drum. Throughout, she identifies the metaphoric strain of contagion which both celebrates the diasporic spread of African culture, and serves as the justification for its brutal repression.
The essays in this book examine both the vital and violent ways in which recent associations have been made between the AIDS pandemic and African diasporic cultural practices, including religious worship, music, dance,...

Barbara Browning follows the trail of "infectious rhythm" from the ecstatic percussion of a Brazilian carnival group to the eerily silent video image of the LAPD beating a man like a drum. Throughout, she identifies the metaphoric strain of contagion which both celebrates the diasporic spread of African culture, and serves as the justification for its brutal repression.
The essays in this book examine both the vital and violent ways in which recent associations have been made between the AIDS pandemic and African diasporic cultural practices, including religious worship, music, dance,...