Overview
This talk examines the local, emotional and spiritual significance of the roda de samba (samba circle) in Rio de Janeiro’s northern suburbs through the life, music, and funeral of the celebrated sambista Arlindo Cruz. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Rio, it situates Cruz as a paradigmatic figure whose oeuvre speaks to the aesthetics, values, and lived experiences of the subúrbio. Central to the discussion is the public all-night celebratory vigil (gurufim) held at the Império Serrano samba school in Madureira following Cruz’s death in August 2025. Here, as his body lay in state, a roda de samba played for hours in celebration of his life and to ease his passing into the next realm. I will discuss how one of the songs played throughout the night, Cruz’s composition O Meu Lugar (‘My Place’), articulates themes of place and local community, Afro-Brazilian religious practices and saudade (bittersweet sadness or longing).
Read through Afro-Brazilian religious cosmologies and situated within broader Afro-Atlantic commemorative rituals, the gurufim, the roda, and the collective singing of Cruz’s repertoire position his death as a transition through which he becomes an ancestral sambista: one who can be invoked through song and whose canonical musical presence is sustained as part of samba’s evolving, living heritage. Finally, I seek to contribute to broader debates on affect, positionality, and the role of emotion in ethnographic knowledge production by briefly reflecting on my own affective response to Cruz’s gurufim, arguing that emotional resonance and personal grief are not incidental but central to understanding the roda as a therapeutic, embodied, and relational practice.
Speaker
Dr Gabrielle Messeder is a Fitzjames Early Career Researcher in Music at Merton College, University of Oxford. Gabrielle completed her doctoral research on Brazilian music and dance in Lebanon at City in 2023, supervised by Professor Laudan Nooshin. Her new research project at Merton examines the social, economic, and creative importance of rodas de samba in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Previously, Gabrielle was visiting lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths and City, University of London, and was a Research Fellow at the University of Greenwich on the AHRC-funded project ‘Exploring cultural diversity in experimental sound’ (2021-23).
Details
This event is open to all and free to attend with no need to book.
This is a hybrid event, which will take place in-person in the Gatsby Room (Chancellor's Centre) and also on Zoom.
If you would like to attend online, please register for the Zoom link.
Refreshments will be available for the in-person audience.
Access
This event will take place in the Gatsby Room on the first floor of the Chancellor's Centre. It has step-free access with a lift and there is an accessible toilet located each floor of the building.
Contact
If you have any questions, please contact our events team - events@wolfson.cam.ac.uk
Wolfson Humanities Society
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