Perrone and Dunn's high-quality edited volume, Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization, is far more comprehensive than an excellent collection of essays addressing the rich fabric of popular music in Brazil as both political expression and creative innovation. The diversity and wide variety of the essays included in the volume as well as the divergent backgrounds of their authors reflects the eclecticism and plethora of styles of Brazilian music in today's international market. The volume transcends classification as ethnomusicology, entering solidly into the domains of race relations, regional adaptations and/or rejections of mainstream musical forms, and even music that thematically addresses and is produced by exiled Brazilian communities contemplating brasilidade from afar. One of the most interesting aspects of the collection is that its sixteen essays, while somewhat uneven in terms of length and quality and, at times, rather repetitive (for example, there is a significant amount of thematic overlap between Essays 15 and 16 and very little differentiation between the two, resulting in quite a bit of repetition of ideas and topics), feature a democratic mix of contributions by academics, research associates, graduate students, and last but certainly not least, the musicians themselves.

While it is difficult to summarize succinctly the multitude of topics rigorously treated in these pages, the book essentially revolves around three major issues, which, in conjunction, serve as a unifying force between and among the essays. The first and perhaps most central aim is to place contemporary Brazilian music within the context of markets and marketability, tracing the impact of recent Brazilian "world music" on a global scale, on a regional level (with special attention devoted to musical styles and forms in northeastern Brazil compared to musical innovations coming from Rio de Janeiro), and on a linguistic plane, with abundant discussion devoted to questions of Lusofonia and the give and take of promoting musical expression in the Portuguese language when such a language is still marginalized in and by the modern world. Many essays intersect on the political question of whether or not to market music from Brazil at the expense of allowing too much foreign influence to dominate the Brazilian musical scene. The opening essay, "Chiclete com Banana: Internationalization in Brazilian Popular Music" begins to take up this issue, questioning to what extent MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) may or should be classified as "world music," how cultural authenticity is negotiated within local, national, and international arenas, and the socioeconomic and cultural dynamics of appropriation of musical styles from abroad. Ultimately, the introductory article and indeed the entire volume serve to problematize notions of marketing in a global context. For example, we must ask ourselves about the implications of the editors' statement that "Carmen Miranda would record 'O samba e o tango', an early example of Latin American fraternity sung in a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish," and when they point out that Caetano Veloso's wildly successful Fina estampa en vivo was "a project built around Hispanic content" (11). In other words, do the above examples truly reflect legitimate "globalization," as far as mutual cultural exchange is concerned, or do they merely demonstrate a marketing strategy that uses Spanish in an attempt to transcend the isolation or invisibility of musical expression in the Portuguese language (i.e., increase sales)? The question of whether this process may be deemed "cultural interdependence" in a sort of pan-Latin American fashion or merely a case of "linguistic sellout" is very politically charged and could have been addressed more extensively in this volume. In fact, the following statement made by Caetano Veloso during the 1997 Fina estampa tour serves as the epigraph opening Liv Sovik's essay, summarizing the debate very well: "I sing in Spanish to feel what it's like to be in someone else's skin. Or, as my manager says, to expand market share" (96). Unfortunately, Sovik's essay itself does not contemplate this controversy to the extent and with the attention it deserves.

The issues raised above are, of course, intimately tied to notions of cultural anthropophagy (or literary cannibalism) which emerged in Brazilian modernism in the late 1920s and was translated into music by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil in their subversive and controversial movement of "Tropicália" as the 1960s drew to a close. Oswaldian cultural anthropophagy, to be terribly brief, essentially evolved throughout the twentieth century as a post-colonial strategy of overcoming imperialism. The graphic images of swallowing, digesting, and expelling were employed to critically question and synthesize elements introduced to Brazil from external sources (most notably, Portugal during the colonial era; France during the 18th and 19th centuries; and the United States in contemporary times). These cultural "tidbits" would be selectively enjoyed by an anthropophagic consumer whose ultimate goal was to re-appropriate, combine, disrupt, and/or eliminate such information, treat it with a generous dose of Brazilian reality, thereby releasing a uniquely Brazilian product as the end result of such a process.

A third and equally interesting concern raised in the majority of essays in this volume revolves around questions of racial identities and the utilization of musical lyrics as a tool to confront racism and continue to dispel the myth of "racial democracy" well into the new millennium. For example, Piers Armstrong's contribution on "Songs of Olodum: Ethnicity, Activism, and Art in a Globalized Carnival Community," traces the appropriation and use of the term "negro" within the cultural constructs established by one of Bahia's most important bands that emerged during the "Black Pride" movement in the early 1980s. As Armstrong points out, in the politically-charged and socially-conscious "Olodum," the term "negro" has multivalent denotations and connotations, encompassing simultaneously black pride and beauty, racist stigmas, diaspora, Mother Africa, and fraternity with international black consciousness movements (186). Also fascinating from both an anthropological and a political perspective is Ari Lima's essay titled "Black or Brau: Music and Black Subjectivity in a Global Context." The following quotation echoes the cultural anthropophagy alluded to earlier, for terms are appropriated from the English language but then undergo subversion, adopting reconfigured meanings unique to a Brazilian context: "In Brazil, the English words 'black' and 'brown' (i.e., 'brau') have been appropriated to express specific cultural affinities. In general, 'black' connotes a more politicized racial identity, while 'brau' refers to the consumer of African-American soul culture in Bahia" (227).

Despite the occasional typographical error and the lack of what would have been a very useful glossary of musical styles and forms at the end of the text to help the reader navigate through various types of music (for example, Dunn's article alludes to approximately seventeen different musical forms, some of which are highly or exclusively regional), the editors do a remarkable job in creating a sense of intertextuality within the project itself, treating the reader to fascinating interactions among and between authors of the various chapters. This kind of internal dialogue is quite rare in an extensive edited collection, and its use here significantly strengthens the quality of the volume as a whole. Still, the inconsistency in extent and quality of documentation from one essay to another is somewhat problematic. Ideally, one would like to see each of the individual essays annotated with a discography and an appendix of lyrics accompanied with high-quality translations into English. Such is a feature evident in Perrone's own brilliant essay on "Myth, Melopeia, and Mimesis" but scarcely present in any other essay.

Of course, in any extensive volume containing sixteen essays, there is always room for improvement in terms of both uniformity and thematic organization of the contributions. Nevertheless, this edited collection on one of the world's most eclectic and dynamic musical repertoires is a significant and invaluable addition to the ever-growing field of Luso-Brazilian cultural studies.