Beschreibung
Popular music from Brazil and the Caribbean belongs to those
cultural practices that are considered, both inside and
outside of their countries of origin, to bear the indelible
marks of ethnicity. On the basis of a corpus made up of over
one thousand songs recorded between 1920 and 1960 in Brazil,
Cuba, Martinique, and Trinidad and Tobago, “Record
it, and let it be known” offers an exemplary textual
analysis of the ways in which these countries’ main musical
genres staged the encounters of the identity categories of
ethnicity and gender in song lyrics during the decades
preceding the emergence of more ideologically conscious
musical currents. Special attention is paid to the following
topics: the relations between ethnicity and national
identity; the presence of Africa and slavery; the
presentation of the gendered and ethnically marked body; and, finally, the description of cultural blackness.
Christopher F. Laferl is Professor of Spanish
and Portuguese Literature in the Department of Romance
Languages and Literatures at the University of Salzburg.
