The music of the peoples of South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean has never received a comprehensive treatment in English until this multi-volume work. Taking a sociocultural and human-centered approach, Music in Latin America and the Caribbean gathers the best scholarship from writers all over the world to cover in depth the musical legacies of indigenous peoples, creoles, African descendants, Iberian colonizers, and other immigrant groups that met and mixed in the New World. Within a history marked by cultural encounters and dislocations, music emerges as the powerful tool that negotiates identities, enacts resistance, performs beliefs, and challenges received aesthetics. This work, more than two decades in the making, was conceived as part of "The Universe of Music: A History" project, initiated by and developed in cooperation with the International Music Council, with the goals of highlighting cultural representation from the perspectives of Latin Americans and Caribbeans and emphasizing the role that music plays in human life. The four volumes that constitute this work are structured as parts of a single conception and gather 150 contributions by more than 100 distinguished scholars representing 36 countries.
Volume 2, Performing the Caribbean Experience, focuses on the reconfiguration of this complex soundscape after the Conquest and the strategies through which groups from distant worlds reconstructed traditions, assigning new meanings to fragments of memory and welding a fascinating variety of unique Creole cultures. Shaped by an enduring African presence and the experience of slavery and colonization by the Spanish, French, British, and Dutch, peoples of the Caribbean islands and circum-Caribbean territories resorted to the power of music to mirror their history, assert identity, gain freedom, and transcend their experience with lasting musical messages. Essays on pan-Caribbean themes, surveys of traditions in 23 islands and continental territories, and riveting personal accounts capture the essence of pluralistic and spiritualized brands of creativity through the voices of an unprecedented number of Caribbean authors, including a representative contingent of distinguished Cuban scholars whose work is being published in English translation for the first time in this work. Two CDs with over 40 recorded examples illustrate the contributions to this rich volume.
