Afro-Latin American and Caribbean music and religiosity

This seminar provides an introductory overview of the musical and religious presence of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean and proposes a reflection on theoretical and methodological issues raised by the studies of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean music and religious practices, taking into account the ethnic and racial dimensions that permeate them.

Various topics will be addressed: the practices of musical poiesis and the production of meanings in the music and religious practices of the African diaspora; the formations of national alterity and the ethnic/racialized dimension of these music and religious practices and of the social relations in which they develop; the concept of the Black Atlantic and its debate for the South; the performativity/aurality/orality of musical practices; the processes of incorporation and mixture with elements and grammars from Afro-American cultures and their circulation in Atlantic flows through the cultural industry and migrations.

Case studies of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean popular music. Africanisms, Africanisms, Africanities refer to concepts and notions developed throughout the 20th century for the cultural and political analysis of phenomena such as the music of descendants of Africans in the Americas and the Caribbean resulting from the period of the slave trade and the Atlantic and diasporic circulations of cultural flows and migrations.

It is worth noting that musical and dance practices, linked to religious, festive, and secular spaces, are among the processes of organizing the ethnicity of people of African descent in the Americas and the Caribbean. Attention to the spaces produced and defined by the performative effects of these practices reveals racialized cultural and social alterities, configured in the interstices and margins of nation-states where social stigmas are situationally transformed into emblems, inverting their meaning. Religious practices, genres, and styles of musical performance have been characterized as stereophonic, syncretic, creolized, hybridized, or mulatto formations between European, African, and Amerindian traditions. Their meanings, reinventions, and losses are defined in processes of struggle in the symbolic field with the dominant sectors, but a perspective of antagonism and resistance does not exhaust the meaning of these subaltern practices and representations, insofar as they elaborate emancipatory visions and alternative world values ​​such as those of maroon communities.

The seminar will foster reflection on these theoretical and methodological issues, as well as those arising from musical practice itself. It will examine the conceptualization of structuring elements in popular music of African American origin, the phenomena of micro-time, microsocial organization, and self-regulation of collective energy, as well as the structures of feeling and sensibility involved. Topics will include case studies based on ethnographic and comparative research on African American music, theoretical and methodological perspectives from the anthropology of music, and coloniality studies.

GENERAL PURPOSE

• To introduce the main perspectives, contributions, and debates in the study of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean music and religious practices

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

That the students:

• Identify basic references for the development of studies on Afro-Latin American and Caribbean music and religious practices

• Recognize the spaces in which musical practices of African origin were reproduced, mixed, and developed in Latin America and the Caribbean

• Characterize the main historical stages of gestation and transformation of the musical cultures of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean: from African legacies to the cells of slavery and suffering in the national formations of otherness

• Understand the interweaving of religious beliefs in musical practices and of musical beliefs in religious practices

• Understand the concept of the Black Atlantic as a way of understanding the music of the diaspora and its characteristics in terms of its history, performativity and orality of these musical cultures.

• Become familiar with basic references that guide your listening in the multiplicity of popular music practices marked ethnically/racially as “Afro”, “Black”, “Mulatto”, “Mestizo”, as well as when they have been demarked ethnically/racially as “national” or “regional”

• Identify and characterize aspects of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean musicalities in processes of mixture and hybridization, transnational circulation of symbolic elements in regional and Atlantic flows.

• They can conceptualize principles of cultural organization - cultural logics, knowledge and skills - and identify expressive structures - topics - as elements of musical rhetoric intertwined with the meaning of practices and their performativity.

• Introduction to the study of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean musicalities.
• The spaces of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean music.
• The Diaspora and the Black Atlantic.
• The Afro-Latin American and Caribbean festive space: Son, Rumba, Salsa.
• The Afro-Latin American festive space: Samba and Carnival.
• Music in the Afro-Latin American and Caribbean religious space.
• The deep bass of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean music.
• The notions of immanence and corporeality in the religions of West Africa.
• Contributions of Afro-descendant religious traditions to the discourse on gender and sexualities. Other epistemologies, other meanings, other interpretations.
• The saint's feast day: the shortening of the distance between the divine and the human.