IAH 208-009: Music, Society, and the State in Latin America and the Caribbean: Home

Pacini Hernandez presents an analysis of the hybridity of Latino musical practices, carefully documenting the transnational musical interactions between Latinos in the United States & in their countries of origin.

A fascinating exploration of the "invention of tradition," The Mystery of Samba is an excellent introduction to Brazil's ongoing conversation on race, popular culture, and national identity.

While the rise and abolition of slavery and ongoing race relations are central themes of the history of the United States, the African diaspora actually had a far greater impact on Latin and Central America. More than ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America as the United States.

The Latin Tinge sheds new light on a rich and complex subject: the crucial contribution that Latin rhythms are making to our uniquely American idiom.

Caribbean Currents has become the definitive guide to the distinctive musics of this region of the world.

Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse is a close-to-the-ground account of musicians and dancers from Arcoverde, Pernambuco--a small city in the northeastern Brazilian backlands.

Covering more than one hundred years of history, this multidisciplinary collection of essays explores the vital connections between popular music and citizenship in Brazil. While popular music has served as an effective resource for communities to stake claims to political, social, and cultural rights in Brazil, it has also been appropriated by the state in its efforts to manage and control a socially, racially, and geographically diverse nation.

Christopher Dunn reveals how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Ze created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of Sao Paulo, Brazil's most modern and industrialized city. He shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation's idealized image as a peaceful tropical "garden" and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.

Baker considers the explosion of reggaetón in the early 2000s as a reflection of the "new materialism" that accompanied the influx of foreign consumer goods and cultural priorities into "sociocapitalist" Havana.

A collection of 40 original essays written by leading scholars in the field, dedicated to exploring the question of what 'Latino/a' is.

Brazilian popular music is widely celebrated for its inventive amalgams of styles and sounds. Cariocas, native residents of Rio de Janeiro, think of their city as particularly conducive to musical mixture, given its history as a hub of Brazilian media and culture.

Exposes the inventive cultural production and intense social transformations that emerged during the rule of an iron-fisted military regime during the sixties and seventies.

Draws on early-twentieth-century newspapers and other archival documents as well as interviews with key artistic and intellectual figures and their descendants.

Characterized by fast-paced, highly danceable rhythms, Chutney is a fusion of traditional and contemporary Indian and Caribbean influences. With its roots in the Hindi folk songs performed at birth and wedding ceremonies, Chutney has recently emerged in contemporary Indian-Caribbean life and has gone largely unrecognized in the body of scholarly literature.

Covering private and public music making, along with ritual, ceremonial, and popular uses of music, Romero studies the interaction of music and identity.

Sean Stroud examines how and why Musica Popular Brasileira (MPB) has come to have such a high status, and why the musical tradition (including MPB) within Brazil has been defended with such vigour for so long.

The Venezuelan youth orchestra program known as "El Sistema" has attracted much attention internationally, partly via its flagship orchestra, The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, headed by Gustavo Dudamel, and partly through its claims to use classical music education to rescue vulnerable children.

Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) is recognized as one of the most influential Latin American authors of the twentieth century. Although he helped establish the field of Afro-diasporic studies, his writings are still relatively unknown to the English-speaking world. These essays on Afro-Cuban expressive culture, music and dance are now available for the first time in English.

If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display.

Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. Through analysis of the competing projects of composers, producers, bureaucrats, and fans, he shows that Brazilians alternately envisioned popular music as the foundation for a unified national culture and used it as a tool to probe racial and regional divisions.

Uncovering a musical life of considerable and unexpected richness throughout the diocese of Cuzco, Baker describes a musical culture sustained by both Hispanic institutional patrons and the upper strata of indigenous society.

Offers a detailed genealogy of Afro-Caribbean music in Puerto Rico, comparing it to selected Puerto Rican literary texts, then looks both at how Latinos/as in the US have used salsa to reaffirm their cultural identities and how Anglos have eroticized and depoliticized it in their adaptations.

In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the Telephone") at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. This apparently simple act--claiming ownership of a musical composition--set in motion a series of events that would shake Brazil's cultural landscape.

Music and Revolution provides a dynamic introduction to the most prominent artists and musical styles that have emerged in Cuba since 1959 and to the policies that have shaped artistic life.

Literally referring to the poor neighborhoods nestled in the hills bordering Port of Spain, "Behind the Bridge" is also a metaphor for conditions of social disadvantage and cultural resistance that shaped the steelband movement in the various Afro-Trinidadian communities where it first took root.

Nationalizing Blackness uses the music of the 1920s and 1930s to examine Cuban society as it begins to embrace Afrocuban culture.

River of Tears is the first ethnography of Brazilian country music, one of the most popular genres in Brazil yet least-known outside it.