Between Legibility and Alterity

Chapter 5 discusses how, in the past three decades, black southern Pacific traditional music has been recast as a touchstone for cultural difference through its mobilization by black artists, activists, and intellectuals and the Colombian state. Positing black identity in Colombia depended on what might be called a politics of resemblance, the couching of local black cultural practices in such a way as to be recognizable as legitimate bearers of credible difference. Once adopted by the state in the 1991 multicultural Constitution, the music of the Pacific has been taken up in a context of neoliberal multiculturalism, as a resource for a variety of divergent and even contradictory agendas, including economic development, social amelioration, governance, and local activism.

Modernities and Nonmodernities in Black Pacific Music

This chapter focuses on how ideas about modernity influenced musical ideologies in the Pacific during the period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The discussion maps three black positions on the project of modernity in the region, as well as the integral role of musical practice in both their construction and their maintenance: namely, traditional sociality, aspirational respectability, and cosmopolitan blackness. In addition, it describes the musical practices that each entails, including traditional, urban, cosmopolitan, and hybrid forms. The chapter describes these stances and repertoires as existing in relation with one another as part of a repertoire of responses to modernity.

Conclusion

As discussed so far, race, place, and music cannot be taken for granted. What they can be taken for arises from processes that happen along two axes. Along the first axis, the figures of blackness, the Pacific, and música del Pacifico are bounded, and bound together, to give them unity of form and stability of meaning. We have seen this process—we might call it stabilization—in the narrowing racial ascription of Pacific sounded practices in the colonial-era process that resulted both in the creative world-making from which black life in the Pacific arose and the heuristics of black atavism that marked the Pacific as unfit for modernity. The second axis both is occluded by stabilization and works to undo it. This is the axis of transformation, of history, by which stabilized reifications bifurcate into new forms as they are instrumentalized under changing political conditions or as they bleed into, feed back from, or abrade against one another and against the trails of associations and the latent traces of older reifications that recur much later. This is also apparent in the transformation of regional folklore into Afro-Colombian culture. The axes of stabilization and transformation produce the commonsensical forms into which meaning solidifies. While making meaning is always a power play, neither the axis of stabilization nor that of transformation is reserved for either the powerful or the abject. Out of the stabilizing and transformational power plays unfurls the story of black Pacific sounded practice traced in this book.

Introduction

The introduction to this book begins by covering the multiplicity of meanings of currulao, the traditional music of the black inhabitants of Colombia’s southern Pacific coast. It submits that the aim of this tome is to trace the emergence, development, maintenance, and in some cases abandonment of the systems of meaning that frame people’s different experiences of local currulao music—as ritual, folklore, popular music, identity-marker, and political resource. It contextualizes the region and introduces the discussion’s conceptual frames: musical meaning, the black Pacific, genealogy, racial formations, cultural politics, and reification. It also describes the historical and ethnographic methods used.

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.

Music in the Mines

This chapter examines the range of cultural and musical alternatives available to the black inhabitants of the southern Pacific coast during colonial mine slavery. It describes them as cosmopolitan participants in multiple and overlapping cultural, economic, social, and political ecumenes, even as their blackness consigned them to abjectness, most obviously as enslaved chattel. Examining the historical record and extrapolating from present-day musical practice and organology, the discussion imagines musical practices in the colonial Pacific, with particular attention to the ways in which present-day socioracial formations and the musical forms commonly associated with them were still incipient in the eighteenth century.

The Sounded Poetics of the Black Southern Pacific

Chapter 1 examines how the poetics of sound construct, mediate, and enact the black southern Pacific world. The palpable proximity of the divine and the supernatural is a central organizing principle of this world, as well as the role of music-making within it. By the same token, deeply felt epistemologies, affectivities, and forms of sociality that characterize this world structure the ways that sound is understood and used. The discussion presents an introduction to how the black communities that live on the riverbanks of Colombia’s southern Pacific coast use musical practice to mediate and model this complex soundworld. These sonic structures of feeling are a constant reference, and a lived reality, in the periods covered by the other chapters in this book as well.