Theoretical Perspectives on Music as Black History in Latin America
Theoretical Perspectives on Music as Black History in Latin America
- Michael IyanagaMichael IyanagaMusic and Latin American Studies, William & Mary
- , and Michael Birenbaum QuinteroMichael Birenbaum QuinteroMusic, Musicology & Ethnomusicology, Boston University
Summary
The making and interpreting of music has always been an important means by which people of African descent in Latin America create and encode knowledge. As such, aspects of the rich knowledge, history, and experience of blackness are present in a wide range of musical genres and practices in Latin America. In fact, the presence in music of alternative understandings of identity and types of sociality and cosmology suggests that music-making itself might be a theory, an approach, and an enactment of decoloniality. Indeed, a decolonial perspective reveals alternative definitions of “music” and geospatial, cultural, and demographic notions of both “Latin America” and the history and politics of blackness there.
Subjects
- Afro-Latin History
- Cultural History
