DEFIANCE AND IDENTIFY IN THE URBAN CONTEXT

BLACK MUSIC SETS THE TONE AND CONQUERS SPACE IN THE QUARTEIRÃO DO SOUL IN BELO HORIZONTE

Abstract

Urban growth, associated with technologic development, assigns new meanings to cities; new influences are delineated and create different parameters of sociability. Such parameters, many times constitute themselves from the flow of media products. Therefore, in Belo Horizonte, we see new spaces being formed or the same old locations transforming themselves thorough the appropriation of groups formed by the common taste for specific cultural products. This work intends to investigate, based on the manifestations connected with media products, how different identities establish themselves in the urban space and how they influence the appropriation and new uses ascribed to the space. Our approach has as an empirical object the manifestations linked with black music, most specifically to the Quarteirão do Soul, an event that takes place on saturday afternoons in the central region of Belo Horizonte. The Quarteirão do Soul was born as a form of reconnecting with friends that frequented the so called black parties in the center of the city in the 70s, and that, with the years were obliterated to the suburbs. This manifestation constitutes a form of resistance, because its participants appropriate themselves of the place without the clearance from the mayor’s office and it characterizes itself by the affirmation of the identity of its attendees, which mirror themselves in the discourse of equality preached by the soul movement represented primarily by the figure of the singer James Brown.