Candeia, the Quilombo project and anti-racist activism in the 1970s

Abstract

As it took part in the resurgence of anti-racist activism in the mid 1970s, the Quilombo Recreational Guild of Black Art and Samba School, founded by singer-songwriter  Antônio Candeia Filho, took its inspiration from the great historical example of black resistance, the rebel slave communities or quilombos. This paper will reassess the  Quilombo project’s perspectives on the politics of anti-racism and black identity, showing how, at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship, it proposed a progressive,  democratic vision of resistance as a creative collective project – typified culturally by the grassroots escola de samba and by the collaborative improvisational practice of  samba de partido-alto – which placed black aesthetic and philosophical traditions at its core while inclusively cutting across racial colour lines.