"This book tells readers: tracing the classical music networks that Cuban composers cultivated between 1940 and 1991 through examining compositions, ensembles, and cultural institutions with a microhistorical approach. It sets the foundation for investigating how aesthetics and politics intersected in the case studies explored throughout the book: individual points of view largely determined the degree to which composers engaged in various local and international artistic networks; and these networks were constantly being nurtured and shaped by their actors, who also had to contend with national and global political and economic circumstances. This chapter provides readers with working definitions of key concepts: modernism, avant-garde, experimentalism, and vanguardia. Key figures Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier and their contributions to the intellectual milieu that Cuban composers inhabited -especially the concepts of transculturation and lo real maravilloso, respectively-are also discussed. It contextualizes the book within existing scholarship on 20th-century classical music of the Americas, Eastern Europe, and the Cold War, as well as those dealing with Cuban music and Cuban studies more broadly"--

While Fernando Ortiz's contribution to our understanding of Cuba and Latin America more generally has been widely recognized since the 1940s, recently there has been renewed interest in this scholar and activist who made lasting contributions to a staggering array of fields. This book is the first work in English to reassess Ortiz's vast intellectual universe. Essays in this volume analyze and celebrate his contribution to scholarship in Cuban history, the social sciences--notably anthropology--and law, religion and national identity, literature, and music. Presenting Ortiz's seminal thinking, including his profoundly influential concept of 'transculturation', Cuban Counterpoints explores the bold new perspectives that he brought to bear on Cuban society. Much of his most challenging and provocative thinking--which embraced simultaneity, conflict, inherent contradiction and hybridity--has remarkable relevance for current debates about Latin America's complex and evolving societies.

Cuban Music Counterpoints traces the continuities and ruptures in the Cuban classical music scene between 1940 and 1991. The book focuses on specific events, objects, and compositions that reveal how composers forged connections with local and foreign composers, visual artists, writers, dancers, and film makers by placing them within emergent global, social, political, and cultural contexts.

In Music and Cosmopolitanism, Cristina Magaldi examines music making in a past globalized world. This volume focuses on one city, Rio de Janeiro, and how it became part of a larger world through music and performance. Magaldi describes a process of creating connections beyond national borders, one that is familiar to contemporary city residents, but which was already dominant at the turn of the 20th century, as new technological developments led to alternative ways of making and experiencing music.

Origins of Cuban Music and Dance: Changüí is the first in-depth study of changüí, a style of music and dance in Guantánamo, Cuba. Changüí is analogous to blues in the United States and is a crucible of Cuban Creole culture. Benjamin Lapidus describes changüí and its relationship to the roots of son, Cuba's national genre and the style of music that contributed to the development of salsa, in Eastern Cuba. He also highlights the connections between Afro-Haitian music and Cuban popular music through changüí, connections with the Caribbean that have been largely overlooked in the past. After an initial historical discussion about the region of Guantánamo and the inter-connectedness of its various musical styles with a focus on changüí, Lapidus discusses the technical aspects of the genre as practiced within the region and beyond. He considers the socio-historical importance of its lyrics, presenting numerous musical transcriptions that explain how the music is structured, as well as providing background stories to songs. In a chapter unique to this book and a first in Cuban musicology and ethnography, Lapidus describes years of festivals and musical competitions to show how local musical identity takes shape, particularly when encountering national narratives of music history. The volume concludes with a comparison between changüí and son, as well as a bibliography, discography, and videography.

"In the middle decades of the twentieth century, transnational networks sparked a range of cultural projects focused on collecting Indigenous music and folklore in the Americas. Indigenous Audibilities follows the social relations that created these collections in four interconnected case studies linking the U.S., Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile. Indigenous collections were embedded in political projects that negotiated issues of cultural diplomacy, national canons, and heritage. The case studies recuperate the traces of marginalized voices in archives, paying special attention to female researchers and Indigenous collaborators. Despite the dominant agendas of national and international institutions, the diverse actors and the multi-directional influences often created unexpected outcomes. The book brings together theories of collection, voice, media, writing, and recording to challenge the transparency of archives as a historical source. Indigenous Audibilities presents a social-historical method of listening, reading, and thinking beyond the referentiality of archived texts, and in the process uncovers neglected genealogies of cultural music research in the Americas"--

Tobacco and sugar have made the history, the character, and the economy of Cuba. In this entertaining book, packed with fascinating lore, scholarship in its most humane form, and the flavor of Fernando Ortiz’s exceedingly civilized and humorous personality, the two important crops are seen from many points of view. Their economic aspects form the base, but they are examined, too, for their effects on folklore, art, science, industry, and daily human living. Out of personal experience, memory, and a lifetime of reading in all the western European languages, Dr. Ortiz has condensed exactly what is most telling, interesting, and significant about the leafy plant and the cane that together have made the story of his native land. The present translation, by Harriet de Onís, was made from a text specially prepared in Spanish by the author. It has an admiring introduction by the late Bronislaw Malinowski and a prologue by Herminio Portell Vilá, noted Cuban historian and sociologist.

First published in 1940 and long out of print, Fernando Ortiz’s classic work, Cuban Counterpoint is recognized as one of the most important books of Latin American and Caribbean intellectual history. Ortiz’s examination of the impact of sugar and tobacco on Cuban society is unquestionably the cornerstone of Cuban studies and a key source for work on Caribbean culture generally. Ortiz presents his understanding of Cuban history in two complementary sections written in contrasting styles: a playful allegorical tale narrated as a counterpoint between tobacco and sugar and a historical analysis of their development as the central agricultural products of the Cuban economy. His work shows how transculturation, a critical category Ortiz developed to grasp the complex transformation of cultures brought together in the crucible of colonial and imperial histories, can be used to illuminate not only the history of Cuba, but, more generally, that of America as well. This new edition includes an introductory essay by Fernando Coronil that provides a contrapuntal reading of the relationship between Ortiz’s book and its original introduction by the renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Arguing for a distinction between theory production and canon formation, Coronil demonstrates the value of Ortiz’s book for anthropology as well as Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American studies, and shows Ortiz to be newly relevant to contemporary debates about modernity, postmodernism, and postcoloniality.

Although the questions of modernity and postmodernity are debated as frequently in the Caribbean as in other cultural zones, the Enlightenment—generally considered the origin of European modernity—is rarely discussed as such in the Caribbean context. Paul B. Miller constellates modern Caribbean writers of varying national and linguistic traditions whose common thread is their representation of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean. In a comparative reading of such writers as Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), C. L. R. James (Trinidad), Marie Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (Puerto Rico), Miller shows how these authors deploy their historical imagination in order to assess and reevaluate the elusive and often conflicted origins of their own modernity. Miller documents the conceptual and ideological shift from an earlier generation of writers to a more recent one whose narrative strategies bear a strong resemblance to postmodern cultural practices, including the use of parody in targeting their discursive predecessors, the questioning of Enlightenment assumptions, and a suspicion regarding the dialectical unfolding of history as their precursors understood it. By positing the Cuban Revolution as a dividing line between the earlier generation and their postmodern successors, Miller confers a Caribbean specificity upon the commonplace notion of postmodernity. The dual advantage of Elusive Origins's thematic specificity coupled with its inclusiveness allows a reflection on canonical writers in conjunction with lesser-known figures. Furthermore, the inclusion of Francophone and Anglophone writers in addition to those from the Hispanic Caribbean opens up the volume geographically, linguistically, and nationally, expanding its contribution to a nonessentialist understanding of the Caribbean in a Latin American, Atlantic, and global context.

In The Fernando Coronil Reader Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil challenges us to rethink our approaches to key contemporary epistemological, political, and ethical questions. Consisting of work written between 1991 and 2011, this posthumously published collection includes Coronil's landmark essays “Beyond Occidentalism” and “The Future in Question” as well as two chapters from his unfinished book manuscript, "Crude Matters." Taken together, the essays highlight his deep concern with the Global South, Latin American state formation, theories of nature, empire, and postcolonialism, and anthrohistory as an intellectual and ethical approach. Presenting a cross section of Coronil's oeuvre, this volume cements his legacy as one of the most innovative critical social thinkers of his generation.