Rites, Rights and Rhythms. A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia's Black Pacific

- Brings a scholarly focus on Colombia, which has the largest black population in the Spanish-speaking world and has been understudied until recently
- The first book-length study of currulao music, an cultural expression of the black Americas, and an important figure through which black Colombians have been described by the nation
- Uses both historical and ethnographic methods to trace the history of currulao music
- Offers a sense of the possibilities of and methodologies for historical ethnomusicology

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.

CONTENIDO:

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