African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
241 p, In Blackness in the White Nation, George Reid Andrews offers a comprehensive history of Afro-Uruguayans from the colonial period to the present. Showing how social and political mobilization is intertwined with candombe, he traces the development of Afro-Uruguayan racial discourse and argues that candombe's evolution as a central part of the nation's culture has not fundamentally helped the cause of racial equality. Incorporating lively descriptions of his own experiences as a member of a candombe drumming and performance group, Andrews consistently connects the struggles of Afro-Uruguayans to the broader issues of race, culture, gender, and politics throughout Latin America and the African diaspora generally.
El artículo estudia el proceso histórico mediante el cual la música y la danza provenientes de África y Europa se mezclaron en los llamados "ritmos nacionales", configurando las identidades nacionales en América Latina. Este proceso implicó en cada país complejas negociaciones en asuntos de raza, etnicidad, género y clase social. A manera de ejemplo, el autor profundiza en el ritmo nacional conocido como el candombe uruguayo, pieza central del Carnaval anual de Montevideo desde mediados de 1800. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
Chabela Ramírez, the black singer and activist born in Montevideo in 1958, is a singular personality of candombe, the only multi-form Afro-Uruguayan musical genre. Retracing her trajectory leads us through the history of Uruguay's black community (10% of the total population) and candombe, with particular attention on how this musical expression went from devalued practice to national heritage in a country deeply marked by a Eurocentric ideology. Ramírez founded and gave voice, with Afrogama, the choir and dance group that she leads, to a unique aesthetic thought that brought meaning to candombe via the field of Afro-religions (Umbanda and Batuque).
