Juan Diego Díaz, assistant professor of music, will discuss his book Africanness in Action: Essentialism and Musical Imaginations of Africa in Brazil as part of the series Conversations with Latin American Authors. The event will be livestreamed on Nov. 11 at 3:30 p.m.

The series is co-sponsored by Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies, UC Davis’ Hemispheric Institute on the Americas and San Jose State University’s Department of World Languages and Literatures. 

In Africanness in Action, Díaz illuminates varieties and degrees of sedimentation of an essentialized ‘Africa’ in Afro-Bahian music and explores this dynamic through the perspectives of Black musicians in Bahia, Brazil, a site imagined by many as a diasporic epicenter of African survivals and purity.