Music, Culture, and Identity in Latin America – serie

Music, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America is a collection of essays that analyze different manifestations of Argentine music and dance taking advantage of the exciting new theoretical developments advanced by the current affective turn. Contributors deal with the relationship between music, dance, affects, feelings, and emotions in different scenarios and show how the embodiment of music shape the experiential in ways that may impact upon but nevertheless many times evade conscious knowing. This book is one of the first academic attempts (regardless of region or country of scope) to try to solve some of the most important problems the affective turn has identified regarding how music and dance have been researched so far, such as the tendency, in representational accounts of music, to ignore the sensory and sonic registers to the detriment of the embodied and lived registers of experience and feeling that unfold in the process of making or listening to music.

Music, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America is a collection of essays that analyze different manifestations of Argentine music and dance taking advantage of the exciting new theoretical developments advanced by the current affective turn. Contributors deal with the relationship between music, dance, affects, feelings, and emotions in different scenarios and show how the embodiment of music shape the experiential in ways that may impact upon but nevertheless many times evade conscious knowing. This book is one of the first academic attempts (regardless of region or country of scope) to try to solve some of the most important problems the affective turn has identified regarding how music and dance have been researched so far, such as the tendency, in representational accounts of music, to ignore the sensory and sonic registers to the detriment of the embodied and lived registers of experience and feeling that unfold in the process of making or listening to music.

Argentine Queer Tango: Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires investigates changes in tango dancing in Buenos Aires during the first decade of the twenty-first century and its relationship to contemporary social and cultural transformations. Mercedes Liska focuses on one of the proposed alternatives to conventional tango, queer tango, which proposes to rethink one of the alleged icons of a national culture from a feminist conception and to imagine social transformation processes from bodily experiences. Specifically, this book analyzes the value of bodily experiences, the redefinition of the mind-body relationship, and the transformation in the dynamics of the dance from the heteronormative movements of tango. In doing so, Liska addresses the ways in which bodily techniques and gender theories are involved in the denaturing and corporeality decoding of tango and its historical senses as well as the connections between different tango dance practices spread throughout the world.

Argentine Queer Tango: Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires investigates changes in tango dancing in Buenos Aires during the first decade of the twenty-first century and its relationship to contemporary social and cultural transformations. Mercedes Liska focuses on one of the proposed alternatives to conventional tango, queer tango, which proposes to rethink one of the alleged icons of a national culture from a feminist conception and to imagine social transformation processes from bodily experiences. Specifically, this book analyzes the value of bodily experiences, the redefinition of the mind-body relationship, and the transformation in the dynamics of the dance from the heteronormative movements of tango. In doing so, Liska addresses the ways in which bodily techniques and gender theories are involved in the denaturing and corporeality decoding of tango and its historical senses as well as the connections between different tango dance practices spread throughout the world.

Sound, Image, and National Imaginary in the Construction of Latin/o American Identities addresses a gap in the many narratives discussing the cultural histories of Latin American nations, particularly in terms of the birth, configuration, and perpetuation of national identities. It argues that these processes were not as gradual or constrained as traditionally conceived. The actual circumstances dictating the adoption of particular technologies for the representation of national ideas shifted and varied according to many factors including local circumstances, political singularities, economic disparities, and highly individualized cultural transitions. This book proposes a model of chronology that is valid not only for nations that underwent strong processes of nationalism during the early or mid-twentieth century, but also for those that experienced highly idiosyncratic cultural, economic, and political development into the early twenty-first century.

Tracing musicology in Latin American during the twentieth century, this book presents case studies to illustrate how Latin American music has interacted with social and global processes. The book addresses such topics as popular music, post-colonialism, women in Latin American music, tradition and modernity, musical counterculture, globalization, and identity construction through music. It contributes to the development of paradigms of cultural analysis that originated outside of Latin America by testing them in the Latin American musical context, while also exploring how specifically Latin American models can contribute to broader cultural analysis.

The Latin American Songbook in the Twentieth Century: From Folklore to Militancy takes an unprecedented comparative analysis approach to the complex relationship between popular music and culture, society, and politics in Latin America as it relates to representations of national identity. Tânia da Costa Garcia analyzes archival research in Chile, Brazil and Argentina, which have very similar cultural and political processes. This book is divided into two different parts: the first focuses on how the folk studies movement was legitimized in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina; while the second emphasizes the rich history of how the militant song movement in Spanish America was received, transformed, and transmitted to Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century. This book will be especially useful to scholars of Latin American studies, music studies, cultural studies, and history.

winner of the 2021 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume PrizeDecentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization considers how neoliberal capitalism has upset the symbolic economy of “Mexican” cultural discourse, and how this phenomenon touches on a broader crisis of representation affecting the nation-state in globalization. This book argues that, while mexicanidad emerged in the early twentieth century as a cultural trope about national origins, culture, and history, it was, nonetheless a trope steeped in ‘otherization’ and used by nation-states (Mexico and the United States) to legitimize narratives of cultural and socioeconomic development stemming out of nationalist political projects that are now under strain. Using music as a phenomenological platform of inquiry, contributors to this book focus on a critique of mexicanidad in terms of the cultural processes through which people contest ideas about race, gender, and sexuality; reframe ideas of memory, history, and belonging; and negotiate the experiences of dislocation that affect them. The volume urges readers to find points of resonance in its chapters, and thus, interrogate the asymmetrical ways in which power traverses their own historical experience. In light of the crisis in representation that currently affects the nation-state as a political unit in globalization, such resonance is critical to make culture an arena of social collusion, where alliances can restore the fiber of civil society and contest the pressures that have made disenfranchisement one of the most alarming features characterizing the complex relationships between the state and the neoliberal corporate system that seeks to regulate it. Scholars of history, international relations, cultural anthropology, Latin American studies, queer and gender studies, music, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

winner of the 2021 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume PrizeDecentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization considers how neoliberal capitalism has upset the symbolic economy of “Mexican” cultural discourse, and how this phenomenon touches on a broader crisis of representation affecting the nation-state in globalization. This book argues that, while mexicanidad emerged in the early twentieth century as a cultural trope about national origins, culture, and history, it was, nonetheless a trope steeped in ‘otherization’ and used by nation-states (Mexico and the United States) to legitimize narratives of cultural and socioeconomic development stemming out of nationalist political projects that are now under strain. Using music as a phenomenological platform of inquiry, contributors to this book focus on a critique of mexicanidad in terms of the cultural processes through which people contest ideas about race, gender, and sexuality; reframe ideas of memory, history, and belonging; and negotiate the experiences of dislocation that affect them. The volume urges readers to find points of resonance in its chapters, and thus, interrogate the asymmetrical ways in which power traverses their own historical experience. In light of the crisis in representation that currently affects the nation-state as a political unit in globalization, such resonance is critical to make culture an arena of social collusion, where alliances can restore the fiber of civil society and contest the pressures that have made disenfranchisement one of the most alarming features characterizing the complex relationships between the state and the neoliberal corporate system that seeks to regulate it. Scholars of history, international relations, cultural anthropology, Latin American studies, queer and gender studies, music, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

This book is a historical and discursive study of rock poetry produced in Argentina, during the “transition to democracy,” in the 1980s. Lucas R. Berone analyzes the lyrics and albums of a heterogeneous group of Argentine rock artists and bands, who began their careers at that time, to demonstrate the emergence and functioning of a new grammar of discursive production, he terms the “grammar of the incognitus (or hidden) subject.” This grammar is a very specific and distinct way of elaborating the enunciative relationship between the artist and his audience when compared to the traditional countercultural rock discourse. The author asserts that the new discursive grammar, focused on the singularity of the present and the “self,” will produce the last important revolution in the tradition of the so-called “rock nacional,” motivating critical responses in the leaders of the movement.

Rock Aesthetics in Colombian Literature and Culture: Writing the Noise explores the presence of a rock aesthetic in the Colombian literary field and how its pivotal role in creating alternative creative expressions that challenge the dominance of tropicality as the prevailing artistic reference. More than a musical genre or a cultural industry, rock is also an aesthetic: a significant social practice that allows one to understand what people consider beautiful or authentic. Since its birth in the mid-1950s, rock as an aesthetic has expanded worldwide, transforming and establishing dialogues with artistic practices such as literature. Through an analysis of a series of novels, poems, and manifestos written from the 1950s to the early years of the twenty-first century, David Marti´nez Houghton embarks on a literary, musical, and historical journey. On the way, he explores complex phenomena such as urban violence, the formation of youth identities, the penetration of pop culture, national identity discourses, and even the social and physical transformation of Colombian cities.

The Indigenous musicians from the surrounding pueblos de indios took on a leading role in urban musical activity. Musical Practices and Mobility in Asunción: Indigenous Musicians in Colonial Paraguay sheds light on dynamics that go beyond the studies centered on the doing of Jesuits in missionary contexts and provides a more thorough comprehension of the urban musical models that were imposed and adapted. Indigenous musicians were transferred to the city from the Jesuit reductions and the pueblos under the care of secular and Franciscan priests for festivals and celebrations. Without them, and without the mobilities that placed them in both contexts, Laura Fahrenkrog Cianelli argues the urban institutional-musical model would not have been possible to maintain in that distant corner of the empire. By transcending the city limits imposed by urban approaches, this book enables a novel reading of musical practices in a city connected with its hinterland, revealing the different musical physiognomies of the empire in distant contexts.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a great number of TV shows and music acts blossomed in Colombia, all of which resorted to regional identity as the narrative core for a renewed idea of national identity. Among them was “Clasicos de la provincial,” an album by Colombian singer Carlos Vives and his band La Provincia (1993), which marked the beginning of a successful career that has spanned nearly three decades. Vives´s work not only earned much deserved recognition in the musical industry from the beginning, but most importantly, has come to be renowned as a landmark in the cultural history of Colombia. This book is the first in-depth analysis focused on the creation and production process of Vives´s work, its main musical and literary features, and its influence on other musicians and in the construction of a narrative about national identity that is still relevant today. More than fifty interviews with Vives and members of the band, musicians, journalists, radio programmers, musical producers, and other key players of the process, together with an extensive review of hundreds of documents, are the sources for this book, which earned its authors a national award in Colombia (2015).

Focusing on the cultural debate within the left during the Popular Unity government in Chile (1970-73), Chilean New Song and the Question of Culture in the Allende Government situates the discourses and artistic production linked to the Chilean New Song movement, in order to demonstrate that the musicians were part of the committed intelligentsia. Thus, they actively participated in the discussion and proposal of ways to integrate culture in the revolutionary process, playing an important political and cultural role. The analysis is mainly based on the government-friendly press and on records released between 1970 and 1973, verifying how the main trends observed in the cultural debate were expressed in the movement; the extent to which the positions defended by the musicians have been in tune with governmental purposes; and if they have in fact influenced the cultural policies debated and pursued by Popular Unity.

Between Norteño and Tejano Conjunto analyzes the origin, evolution, and dissemination of the norteño and tejano conjunto. This group represents a marginalized local identity that was transformed primarily into an identity of the northeast. It then gave way to the whole of northern México and the American Southwest, and was later assimilated internationally as a mainstream genre. This book provides a long-term historic vision of conjunto and the various musical forms it uses, such as polka, corrido, or canción (song), and, more recently, bolero and cumbia, as well as its transformations and contributions to other musical cultures.

Between Norteño and Tejano Conjunto analyzes the origin, evolution, and dissemination of the norteño and tejano conjunto. This group represents a marginalized local identity that was transformed primarily into an identity of the northeast. It then gave way to the whole of northern México and the American Southwest, and was later assimilated internationally as a mainstream genre. This book provides a long-term historic vision of conjunto and the various musical forms it uses, such as polka, corrido, or canción (song), and, more recently, bolero and cumbia, as well as its transformations and contributions to other musical cultures.