169 p., Examines entanglements of race, place, gender, and class in Puerto Rican reggaetón. Based on ethnographic and archival research in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in New York, New York, I argue that Puerto Rican youth engage with an African diasporic space via their participation in the popular music reggaetón. By African diasporic space, the author refers to the process by which local groups incorporate diasporic resources such as cultural practices or icons from other sites in the African diaspora into new expressions of blackness that respond to their localized experiences of racial exclusion. Participation in African diasporic space not only facilitates cultural exchange across different African diasporic sites, but it also exposes local communities in these sites to new understandings and expressions of blackness from other places. As one manifestation of these processes in Puerto Rico, reggaetón refutes the hegemonic construction of Puerto Rican national identity as a "racial democracy."
This essay analyzes representations and imaginaries of blackness in contemporary Puerto Rico, by focusing on the debates raised by 'Raices'/(Roots) (2001), the Banco Popular video special about traditional Afro-Puerto Rican rhythms of bomba and plena. These debates divided public opinion in Puerto Rico and included members of academia, musicologists, bomba and plena groups, and the San Anton (Ponce) community residents. They refer to the ways Puerto Ricans 'speak the unspoken,' that is, the ways Puerto Ricans talk about race and its intersectionalities on the island and in the diaspora.
321 p., Locates contemporary articulations of afrofeminismo in manifold modes of cultural production including literature, music, visual displays of the body, and digital media. Examines the development of afrofeminismo in relation to colonial sexual violence in sugar-based economies to explain how colonial dynamics inflect ideologies of blanqueamiento/embranquecimento (racial whitening) and pseudo-scientific racial determinism. In this context, the author addresses representations of the mujer negra (black woman) and the mulata (mulatto woman) in Caribbean and Brazilian cultural discourse.
221 p., Carmen (Mérimée 1845, Bizet 1875), the story about the (in)famous Gypsy dancer from Spain, is the second most adapted narrative in the history of world cinema, with over eighty global versions officially recognized to date. Despite the global reach of the Carmen phenomenon, many scholars claim that this tale has hardly been reworked in Spanish America and never in the Caribbean. Following Carmen from Spain to Spanish America, the author shows how the template of Carmen (a love story that reveals the racio-ethnic and gender stratification in Spain) has been artfully but unsuspectingly reappropriated and "creolized" in postcolonial Cuba in the controversial film María Antonia (1991) by Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral, based on the landmark play María Antonia (1964) by Afro-Cuban playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.
University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras Campus). Centro de Investigaciones Históricas. (Author)
Format:
Book, Edited
Language:
Spanish
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Río Piedras, P.R.: Departamento de Historia, Centro de Investigaciónes Históricas, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Outgrowth of a seminar held at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, in June 2006., 50 p., Contents: Presentación / Sharon Meléndez Ortiz y Rafael Díaz Díaz -- Del machete al hechizo : formas de resistencia entre los esclavos y esclavas de origen africano y afro-caribeño durante el periodo colonial / Sharon Meléndez Ortiz -- Sometiéndose para ser libres : el caso de la libertad pedida por los negros de los palenques de la Sierra de María, Cartagena, 1691 / César Augusto Salcedo Chirinos -- Mujer negra : resistir para construir : Nueva Granada siglo XVIII / Yanelba Mota Maldonado -- Las juntas como resistencia al sistema esclavista, Cartagena de Indias, siglo XVI / Frank Cosme Arroyo -- La magia negra, resistencia y seducción / Rubén Lasanta -- Los caminos a la manumisión : ley de 21 de julio de 1821 / Damaris J. Marrero Villali.
160 p., An analytical study of Burundanga or Cantata Antillana by Jack Délano (1914-1997). One of Délano's most ambitious choral-orchestral compositions, Burundanga was completed in 1989 in response to a commission from the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and is based on Luis Palés Matos's (1898-1959) extravagant and elaborate poem Canción festiva para ser llorada (A Festive Song to be Wept). Burundanga stands at the foreground of Puerto Rican art-music in the twentieth century. With its neoclassical language and integration of Caribbean folkloric material, it emerges as a unique reflection of the highly complex geographical, social, cultural and musical reality of Puerto Rico and the Antilles. Discerns particular methods by which the composer utilized and adapted Afro-Antillean idioms and combined them with art-music components to portray idiosyncratic aspects of Caribbean culture in a universalistic musical language.
