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Colombia has the largest black population in the Spanish-speaking world, but Afro-Colombians have long remained at the nation's margins. Their recent irruption into the political, social, and cultural spheres is tied to appeals to cultural difference, dramatized by the traditional music of Colombia's majority-black Southern Pacific region, often called currulao. Yet that music remains largely unknown and unstudied despite its complexity, aesthetic appeal, and social importance.
Rites, Rights & Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia's Black Pacific is the first book-length academic study of currulao, inquiring into the numerous ways it has been used: to praise the saints, to grapple with modernization, to dramatize black politics, to perform the nation, to generate economic development and to provide social amelioration in a context of war. Author Michael Birenbaum Quintero draws on both archival and ethnographic research to trace these and other understandings of how currulao has been understood, illuminating a history of struggles over the meanings of currulao that are also struggles over the meanings of blackness in Colombia.
Moving from the eighteenth century to the present, Rites, Rights & Rhythms asks how musical meaning is made, maintained, and sometimes abandoned across historical contexts as varied as colonial slavery, twentieth-century national populism, and neoliberal multiculturalism. What emerges is both a rich portrait of one of the hemisphere's most important and understudied black cultures and a theory of history traced through the performative practice of currulao.
List of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- About the CompanionWebsite
- List of Figures
- A Note on Images
- Introduction
- 1. The Sounded Poetics of the Black Southern Pacific
- 2. Music in the Mines: Abject Cosmopolitans and Musical Practice in the Colonial Southern Pacific
- 3. Modernities and Non-Modernities in Black Pacific Music
- 4. Race, Region, Representativity, and the Folklore Paradigm
- 5. Between Legibility and Alterity : Black Music Self-Making in the Age of Ethnodiversity
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
About the author
Michael Birenbaum Quintero received his Master's and Doctoral degrees in Ethnomusicology at New York University. His research focuses on the music of the black inhabitants of Colombia's Pacific coast region, cultural politics, violence and trauma, black cosmopolitanism, and vernacular uses of technology. He is Assistant Professor of Music at Boston University.
Summary
Rites, Rights & Rhythms traces traditional Afro-Colombian currulao music from colonial slavery to today's black social movement. The book illuminates a history of struggles over the music's meanings, portraying one of the hemisphere's most important black cultures, and offering a theory of history traced through the performative practice of currulao.
Additional text
Rites, Rights, and Rhythms is a landmark study in ethnomusicology. It combines sensitive, profound ethnography with a depth of historical insight that is a model for scholars working in any area of the discipline. At the same time, it offers a perspective on the shifting philosophical and material investments in race over time in Colombia that scholars of music and modernity will need to grapple with.
