Juan Diego Díaz

Juan Diego Díaz is an ethnomusicologist with a geographic research interest in Africa and its diaspora, particularly Brazil and West Africa. He explores how African diasporic musics circulate and transform across the Atlantic and how they serve individuals and communities in identity formation. His book Africanness in Action (Oxford University Press, 2021) focuses on how musicians from Bahia, Brazil understand and negotiate essentialist notions about African music and culture. He is also a long-term Capoeira Angola practitioner and has led capoeira, berimbau, and samba ensembles.

Previous to teaching at UC Davis, Juan Diego held posts as a lecturer at the University of Ghana and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Essex, the latter funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The funded research investigates the music of the descendants of freed enslaved Africans who resettled from Brazil to Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This research has produced a book titled Tabom Voices: A History of the Ghanaian Afro-Brazilian Community in Their Own Words (2016) and the documentary film Tabom in Bahia (co-directed with Nilton Pereira, 2017), documenting the visit of a Ghanaian master drummer to Bahia, Brazil. His upcoming book Echoes of Brazil: The Musical Experience of Brazilian Ancestry in West Africa discusses how these returnee-descendants negotiate, celebrate, and update their ancestral connections with Brazil.