Styling Blackness in Chile

Styling Blackness in Chile
Author: Juan Eduardo Wolf
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253041155

Chile had long forgotten about the existence of the country's Black population when, in 2003, the music and dance called the tumbe carnaval appeared on the streets of the city of Arica. Featuring turbaned dancers accompanied by a lively rhythm played on hide-head drums, the tumbe resonated with cosmopolitan images of what the African Diaspora looks like, and so helped bring attention to a community seeking legal recognition from the Chilean government which denied its existence. Tumbe carnaval, however, was not the only type of music and dance that Afro-Chileans have participated in and identified with over the years. In Styling Blackness in Chile, Juan Eduardo Wolf explores the multiple ways that Black individuals in Arica have performed music and dance to frame their Blackness in relationship to other groups of performers—a process he calls styling. Combining ethnography and semiotic analysis, Wolf illustrates how styling Blackness as Criollo, Moreno, and Indígena through genres like the baile de tierra, morenos de paso, and caporales simultaneously offered individuals alternative ways of identifying and contributed to the invisibility of Afro-descendants in Chilean society. While the styling of the tumbe as Afro-descendant helped make Chile's Black community visible once again, Wolf also notes that its success raises issues of representation as more people begin to perform the genre in ways that resonate less with local cultural memory and Afro-Chilean activists' goals. At a moment when Chile's government continues to discuss whether to recognize the Afro-Chilean population and Chilean society struggles to come to terms with an increase in Latin American Afro-descendant immigrants, Wolf's book raises awareness of Blackness in Chile and the variety of Black music-dance throughout the African Diaspora, while also providing tools that ethnomusicologists and other scholars of expressive culture can use to study the role of music-dance in other cultural contexts.

Struggles of Voice

Struggles of Voice
Author: José Antonio Lucero
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2008-10-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0822973456

Over the last two decades, indigenous populations in Latin America have achieved a remarkable level of visibility and political effectiveness, particularly in Ecuador and Bolivia. In Struggles of Voice, Jose Antonio Lucero examines these two outstanding examples in order to understand their different patterns of indigenous mobilization and to reformulate the theoretical model by which we link political representation to social change. Building on extensive fieldwork, Lucero considers Ecuador's united indigenous movement and compares it to the more fragmented situation in Bolivia. He analyzes the mechanisms at work in political and social structures to explain the different outcomes in each case. Lucero assesses the intricacies of the many indigenous organizations and the influence of various NGOs to uncover how the conflicts within social movements, the shifting nature of indigenous identities, and the politics of transnationalism all contribute to the success or failure of political mobilization.Blending philosophical inquiry with empirical analysis, Struggles of Voice is an informed and incisive comparative history of indigenous movements in these two Andean countries. It helps to redefine our understanding of the complex intersections of social movements and political representation.