Event Name: Thinking About Music Lecture Series
Organizer: CCMSched@ucmail.uc.edu
Event Locator: 2025-ACQNNP
1:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 14
• The Joseph and Frances Jones Poetker Thinking About Music Lecture Series •
AN ACOUSTEMOLOGY OF THE POETICS OF PROTEST IN URBAN AFRO-CUBAN MUSIC
Pablo Herrera-Veitia, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto
What should be the format of an Afro-Cuban digital sound-based ethnography? This playlist explores the place of analysis as a muted dimension in a digital text + sound ethnographic artifact. If sound can be described, evoked and imagined but not heard in written ethnographic renditions, then to what extent could analysis be playable, narrated, objective, fictionalized or muted in field recordings? Cuba’s raceless society ideology could be traced back to the island’s late 1800s independence wars against Spain. Cuba’s 1959 socialist revolution, an heir of such tradition, achieved some horizontal unity across the racial spectrum. From the mid-1990s to the present, along with Cuba’s continued socio-economic crisis, the emergence of Afro-Cuban rap has offered the newer tones of a raced critique of Cuba’s post-socialist society, primarily through Afro-Cuban rap subgenres’ lyrical and rhythmical mutations into more dance and body-oriented expressions. Thinking through the assemblage of Lucumí Òrì?à/Ifá, Afro-Cuban rap practice and lived experience as a Havana-born-and-raised dark-skinned man, this presentation foregrounds the methodological, historical, ideological and ethical implications that hearing, listening, and sound-based ethnography have in understanding what it is like to be Afro-Cuban today. Through a playlist of fragments of selected audio that include Guillen’s original 1964 poem Tengo and Popy y La Moda’s 2019 version of the poem, the presentation draws a broad, poetic narrative with which to signify the lyrical, rhythmical, and socio-political arc of anti-racist protest in urban Afro-Cuban music over time. Arguing for using annotated sound and music as analytical indexes in Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Diasporic, and Global South anthropological practice, the playlist troubles disciplinary written textuality. It explores how digital multimodal formats could be construed as ethnographically complete.
Location: UC’s Taft Research Center
Charles Phelps Taft Research Center
Edwards 1, Suite 1110
47 Corry Boulevard
Cincinnati, OH 45221
Admission: FREE