Overview

Institutions in Recife, Brazil, have restructured subsidies in favor of encouraging musicians to become more entrepreneurial. Falina Enriquez explores how contemporary and traditional musicians in the fabled musical city have negotiated these intensified neoliberal cultural policies and economic uncertainties. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Enriquez shows how forcing artists to adopt “neutral” market solutions reinforces, and generates, overlapping racial and class-based inequalities. Lacking the social and financial resources of their middle-class peers, working-class musicians find it difficult to uphold institutional goals of connecting the city’s cultural roots to global markets and consumers. Enriquez also links the artists’ situation to that of cultural and creative workers around the world. As she shows, musical sponsorship in Recife and the contemporary gig economy elsewhere employ processes that, far from being neutral, uphold governmental and corporate ideologies that produce social stratification. Rich and vibrant, The Costs of the Gig Economy offers a rare English-language portrait of the changing musical culture in Recife.

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9780252086687

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"""The Costs of the Gig Economy is a welcome English-language contribution about Recife's contemporary music scene, which receives less attention compared to those in São Paulo, Rio de Janerio, and Salvador. . . . In a clear and engaging writing style, Enriquez zooms in and out of various scales—from local to global—and weaves her theoretical framework of 'rooted cosmopolitanism' into the interconnected issues musicians, cultural promoters, and bureaucrats encounter. Her case studies are refreshingly inclusive of both popular and traditional musicians navigating this environment."" --Notes"

Author Information

Falina Enriquez is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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