Afrodescendant religious music in the Caribbean and Latin America typically foregrounds drumming and centuries-old songs of praise to spirit deities. In recent years, a new form of worship, known as a violín or toque de violín, which features the violin alongside the guitar, electronic piano, and/or other instruments commonly associated with popular music, has gained popularity in Cuba. Violines can be understood as loosely defined spaces for performance that developed in a context of cult...

Scholars of the African Americas are sometimes segregated from one another by region or period, by language, or by discipline. Bringing together essays on fashion, the visual arts, film, literature, and history, this volume shows how our understanding of the African diaspora in the Americas can be enriched by crossing disciplinary boundaries to recontextualize images, words, and thoughts as part of a much greater whole.Diaspora describes dispersion, but also the seeding, sowing, or...

Critiques and calls for reform have existed for decades within music education, but few publications have offered concrete suggestions as to how things might be done differently. Motivated by a desire to do just that, College Music Curricula for a New Century considers what a more inclusive, dynamic, and socially engaged curriculum of musical study might look like in universities. Editor Robin Moore creates a dialogue among faculty, administrators, and students about what the futu...

Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil’s Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018 is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Antônio Gonçalves Dias’s “Canção do exílio.” Written in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1843 by a homesick student longing for Brazil, “Song of Exile” has inspired thousands of parodies and pastiches, and new variations continue to appear to this day. Every generation of Brazilian writers has adapted the poem’s Romantic verses to glorify the wonders of the nation ...

This is one of those books, that might be taken as essential for an understanding of the development of El Casino, the most favorite and important international cuban dance nowadays. As the music scientist Lino Arturo Neira Betancourt puts it: "The text deepens on the outstanding history of this dance and on the analysis, several evidence of its relation to contemporary Cuban popular music are revealed, as well as the protagonist role played by its best exponents through its development fo...

Rebel Dance, Renegade Stanceshows how community music-makers and dancers take in all that is around them socially and globally, and publicly and bodily unfold their memories, sentiments, and raw responses within open spaces designated or commandeered for local popular dance. Umi Vaughan, an African American anthropologist, musician, dancer, and photographer "plantao" in Cuba—planted, living like a Cuban—reveals a rarely discussed perspective on contemporary Cuban society during th...

The Maya of the Yucatán have long been drawn into the Mexican state's attempt to create modern Mexican citizens (mestizos). At the same time, they have contended with globalization pressures, first with hemp production and more recently with increased tourism and the fast-growing influence of American-based evangelical Protestantism. Despite these pressures to turn Maya into mestizo, the citizens of the small town of Maxcanú have used subtle forms of resistance—humor, satire, and language—...

How many happenstances were needed so that Omara, Ibrahim, Compay, Eliades, Rubén, Cachaito and Juan de Marcos, among others, would come together in Amsterdam's Carré Theater and Carnegie Hall in NewYork? How much musical genius and how much of chance was needed to make the Buena Vista Social Club the most successful international Cuban phenomenon? How could such an occurrence make El Cuarto de Tula resonate in the walls of the White House? By design or by chance, is this is a unique event...

The language of the body is central to the study of flamenco. From the records of the Inquisition, to 16th century literature, to European travel diaries, the Spanish dancer beguiles and fascinates. The word flamenco evokes the image of a sensuous and rebellious woman--the bailaora --whose movements seduce the audience, only to reject their attention with a stomp of defiance. The dancer's body is an agent of ideological resistance, conveying a conflicting desire for subj...

In the 1920s, the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo (1875-1965) developed a microtonal system called El Sonido 13 (The 13th Sound). Although his pioneering role as one of the first proponents of microtonality within the Western art music tradition elevated Carrillo to iconic status among European avant-garde circles in the 1960s and 1970s, his music and legacy have remained largely overlooked by music scholars, critics, and performers. Confronting this paucity of scholarship on Car...

Among the long string of historical albums he created, África Brasil, from 1976, is a milestone in Jorge Ben's career. It is the record in which he definitely swaps the acoustic for the electric guitar. Narrating Jorge Ben's journey, album by album, to África Brasil, the 14th studio LP of his career, the journalist Kamille Viola interviews musicians, producers, researchers and even soccer stars like Zico (honored in the track "Camisa 10 da Gávea" to review the artist's life story and the b...

Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia presents the lives and critical works of over 170 women writers in Latin America between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. This features thematic entries as well as biographies of female writers whose works were originally published in Spanish or Portuguese, and who have had an impact on literary, political, and social studies.Focusing on drama, poetry, and fiction, this work includes authors who have published at least th...