St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
252 p., Traces the construction of diverse masculinities in the fictional representations of post-colonial Anglophone Caribbean literature focusing on Afro-, Indo-, and Eurocentric ethnicities and subjectivities.
Examines how Connecticut-born reggaetón artist Notch incorporates oratorical, visual, and musical cues in his music video, Qué te pica (What's itching you?), to establish connections between Latino and Caribbean communities in the U.S. These communities have typically been disavowed by hegemonic racial categories that distinguish between them. While Notch’s music disrupts these particular racial hierarchies, he also maintains hetero-normative patriarchal relations in his video. An analytic, Afro-Latino space is proposed to account for the ways that reggaetón as a musical genre, and Notch more specifically, unsettle certain distinctions between blackness and Latinidad, while simultaneously relying on stereotypes of black hypermasculinity.
