A Pictorial History of the Confederacy Book

I have a (qualified) compliment. I appreciated that Intonations attempts to lift the analysis out of Angolanidade beyond that one of nation/nationalism and add a romanticized lilt into how music became an integral component of Angolanidade as a cultural practice and outlook. Moorman displayed an intimacy with the musseques that ran explicitly counter to the pathologizing of the social scientists whose metanarratives she sought to unravel. In contrast, Moorman takes the musseques as they are, even going so far as to reconstruct (in the second person) the times and places from which this music emerged. These scenes were, for me, the most memorable of the book. I wonder if they are not also problematic in their idealization. Is to valorize necessarily better than to pathologize?

I was confused by the lack of the rural (or the non-musseques, in general). This was especially apparent at the end of Ch. 4 when she says technological innovations “would take semba from its origins as a musseque novelty to cities and towns throughout the territory and back again” (p. 139). The argument here seems based upon an assumption of radio’s power of disseminate and bring people together. In terms of her on-the-ground work, she seems to stay in Luanda. Where does she discuss how semba interacts with, and is brought “back again” from, the rural?

One question you could have upon reading this work is how Moorman seemingly undermines interviewee opinions that their music wasn't (explicitly) political. But perhaps this is because Moorman’s concept of intonation is partly based on the investment of Angolans of “being hip, hot, or cool” (p. 8). With this understanding of the stakes, Moorman's point would still stand; the mere acts of making music and dancing to it articulates a cultural outlook counter that of the Portuguese social scientists' claims of lusotropicalism.

I began with a compliment and end with a critique. I wonder if this book would have benefitted from attending more to performance of culture. What I mean here is that for a book about music, its function within a larger concept of culture seemed to get reduced to that which was anti-colonial or a declaration of gender prerogatives. Both of these ideas were treated well (if a bit repetitively) by Moorman, but I think music has still other performative effects that went unexplored in this social history. How did music function inter-generationally? How was it performed as a cosmopolitan act of urbanites (recalling James Ferguson’s distinctions of cosmopolitanism as a distinction from the local)? How did the performance of music produce new subjectivities that understood not only Angolan, but themselves as different from before (i.e., what does it mean to be hip, cool, hot)? Given that Angolanidade was an unintentional byproduct in a quest to be cool, I’m a bit confused why the study of “cool,” itself did not occupy a more central place in this study.