From Nashville… To Rio!
The National Museum of African American Music recently welcomed Carlos Alberto Medeiros and Ira Moseley from Brazilian television channel, Cultne.tv, to visit the galleries and begin an inter-continental partnership. Cultne.tv is the largest digital archive of Black culture in Latin America, documenting Brazil’s Black music and arts scene via interviews, shows, and social movement coverage since the 1980s. It was the first Brazilian television channel dedicated entirely to Black culture.
The channel’s coverage of NMAAM showcases the major story told by the galleries: how American music evolved alongside the historical events that shaped the broader culture. From work songs, to gospel, to blues… all the way up to present-day rap and hip-hop, music has always reflected the circumstances of its makers. It has also inspired cultural shifts throughout time. Cultne.tv’s Cultural Media Strategist, Ira Moseley, noted how afro-americanos and afro-brasilieros have collectively “created a unique sound about resistance, about culture, and appreciation of self.“
NMAAM’s Executive Director, William Jeffries, had the pleasure of meeting with Cultne.tv’s media representatives to discuss how the two institutions of Black culture could work together to share information, technology, and music, to tell a more robust story of how African-American and Afro-Brazilian sounds evolved alongside each other and in communion with each other. According to Cultne.tv journalist, Carlos Alberto Medeiros, “The idea of this partnership is that we can establish a place in a special area of Rio de Janeiro– a Paquena África –where we can then take this Afro-American music, the history of the Americans, and also put it in contact with the music and history produced by the Afro-Brazilians.”
Paquena África (or ‘Little Africa’) is an area in Rio de Janeiro that has historically been home to a strong Afro-Brazilian community, ever since the abolition of slavery in the 1800s. There are increasing efforts in the region to recognize this rich, but often-overlooked culture and history. A partnership with NMAAM, bringing some of the museum’s brand-defining interactive technology to the area, could be a key step in highlighting the contributions of Afro-Brazilian artists to the musical landscape and broader Latin-American culture. It could additionally be an educational thread that links the music that developed in that region with that which developed in North America, celebrating how the two have influenced each other over the years.
