Race, Region, Representativity, and the Folklore Paradigm
Chapter 4 examines the assimilation of Pacific musical practices into the paradigm of folklore at the mid-twentieth century, marking a new relationship between cultural practices and the epistemologies and socialities that undergird them. Folklore was part of a broader process defining the figure of the people and resignifying their role, including racial imaginaries, in the Colombian nation. The discussion traces the structure of the invisibility of blackness from conceptualizations of the nation’s cultural foundations, and shows how innovative practitioners were able to parlay much-circulated discourse about the Colombian regions into recognitions of the Pacific as a culturally salient region, and of blackness as among the nation’s cultural wellsprings. Paradoxically, it was through the same, often disempowering, practice of reification that the affirmation and representation of the local became possible, even as the circumscription of the folkloric object made it possible for a number of different meanings to be injected into it.