Batida and the politics of sonic agency in Afro-Lisboa

ABSTRACT

This article examines the politics of sonic agency in batida, the most successful recent electronic musical style emerging from Lisbon’s outskirts in Portugal. The genealogies of batida are closely linked to the emergence of a young generation of Djs do Gueto [Ghetto Djs] who unabashedly claim their right of belonging as major players within the Portuguese acoustic and cultural fields. We analyse batida as a space for agency and affirmative mobilisation of Afro-Portuguese populations. Two elements are of special interest: the digital recombination to celebrate the irreducibility of Afro-Portuguese experience, and the way in which racial exclusion, urban segregation, and racism are problematised through the act of inscribing the neighbouring sounds of peripheral neighbourhoods in their music. Through the examination of these two elements, we aim to position sonic agency as a central space in the configuration of racial politics and processes of nation building in the Portuguese case.

KEYWORDS:

• Afro-Portuguese youth
• Ghetto
• electronic music
• Portugal
• racism
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Interviews

Dj Nervoso is a 39-year-old man from São Tomé and Príncipe. He lives in Lisbon, although he does not have Portuguese citizenship. He moved to Portugal alongside his sister at the age of twelve, when both joined their family home in Quinta do Mocho. He still lives in the neighbourhood, where he works as a metalworker and Dj Nervoso was interviewed by Otávio Raposo in Quinta do Mocho on the 1st of November 2020.

Dj Marfox is a 35-year-old man born in Portugal from a São Tomean family. Originally based at the Quinta da Vitória neighbourhood, Marfox moved to Quinta do Mocho about eight years ago. He was interviewed by Otávio Raposo in Quinta do Mocho on the 9st of September 2016.

Notes

1 Our use of the concept Afro-Portuguese throughout this essay is intentional, and attempts to acknowledge the importance of collective identification and the socio-political agency of a complex and diverse community that embraces blackness and that strategically uses the idea of Afroportugalidade [Afro-Portugueseness] as a symbol of identification and belonging. This community includes racialised citizens of African origin based in Portugal (Portuguese, Angolans, Cape Verdeans, Sao Tomeans, Mozambicans and Guineans, but also racialised Brazilians, individuals of other African backgrounds, multinational and stateless individuals). Our preference for the term Afro-Portuguese does not imply homogeneity. It does not attempt to characterise a uniform, conflict-free group; rather, it acknowledges and celebrates an active process of civic and political participation that transcends clear-cut national and cultural divisions and puts Africa at the centre of collective identification and subject formation. The “Afro” in Afro-Portuguese does not refer to any essentialist value; on the contrary, it makes emphasis on positive identification and the ways in which racialised individuals of diverse nationality are challenging the idea of whiteness the constitutive element of Portugueseness. The “Portuguese” in Afro-Portuguese does not just refer to a country, a nation-state or a language; rather, it points at the existence of correlations and fractures within the pluri-continental territories that were colonised by Portugal. The use of the term Afro-Portuguese in the Portuguese context (in academia, but also in public life) highlights the importance of coming to terms with the coloniality of the contemporary Portuguese society.

2 Under the slogan “Quem nasce em Portugal é português, ponto final” (Who is born in Portugal is Portuguese, full stop), this campaign fostering public debate within Portuguese society about the historic injustice that many citizens face of being considered immigrants in the very country they were born in. Even if it did not manage to change the nationality law from the principle of jus sanguinis to jus soli, this campaign was successful in pressuring parliament to reduce from 5 years to 1 year the minimum period of residency which one parent must have in order for their children to be granted Portuguese nationality at time of birth. See: https://www.pgdlisboa.pt/leis/lei_mostra_articulado.php?nid=614&tabela=leis

3 This is how one understands the continued denial of the collection of ethno-racial data in official censuses in Portugal, as well as the perpetuation of an “imperial imagination” in schoolbooks (Araújo and Maeso 2010, 259).

4 Despite the fact that the first author of this article has developed ethnographic work in Quinta do Mocho since 2016, it is only after 2020 that he started focusing on batida from an ethnography research perspective and regularly interviewing Djs.

5 In the same way that Afro-Portuguese is both a critical concept and a strategic site of cultural and political mobilisation, the use of Afro-Iberia throughout this article refers to a critical interest in mapping and making visible African memories produced within the Iberian Space (see Aixelà-Cabré and Rizo 2023) Far from homogeneous, these memories should be seen as a complex and diverse kaleidoscope. We argue that Afro-Portuguese cultural manifestations (such as batida) occupy a special and distinctive place within the Afro-Iberian constellation. At the same time, the concept Afro-Portuguese refers to the mobile nature of these memories (and Afrodiasporic), which cannot be confined within the Portuguese or Iberian space.

6 Almost half a century after the end of the Portuguese colonial empire in 1974, Lusotropicalism continues to be a powerful ideological apparatus for spreading ideas of Portugal as a tolerant, inclusive and non-racist nation (Castelo 1998; Vale de Almeida 2000).

7 During the 1990s, for example, Portuguese hip-hop brought these issues to the fore at a time when cultural and sociopolitical discussions on postcolonial Portugal rarely addressed systemic and economic marginalisation (Contador and Ferreira 1997; Raposo et al. 2021).

8 Since the 1980s, the migratory fluxes from African territories colonised by Portugal into the former metropolitan space experienced a significant increase. A second stage took place in the following decades, when these fluxes became more diverse and several communities, such as Brazilians, became more numerous.

9 Batida Djs also benefited from the work of cultural ambassadors developed by bands such as Buraka Som Sistema, the most well-known and successful music project in contemporary Portugal and the group responsible for popularising the mixture of electronic and Afro-Portuguese music globally.

10 A good example is the videoclip Lendário by Studio Bros, whose imagery values Quinta do Mocho as a cool neighbourhood.

Additional information

Funding

This article was produced in the context of the project “Peripheral Creativities: youth, arts and public policies in segregated territories (PERICREATIVITY)” (2022.08993.PTDC), funded by the Portuguese Government, through the FCT and the IRC Laureate Consolidator Project “Assessing the Contemporary Art Novel in Spanish and Portuguese: Cultural Labour, Personal Identification and the Materialisation of Alternative Art Worlds (ARTFICTIONS)” (IRCLA/2022/3890) funded by the Irish Research Council.