Musics of Latin America

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course considers select musical practices stemming from Latin America and its diasporic communities. Focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries, but tracing longer historical threads, we will study musics that go from the “folkloric” to the “popular,” the local to the transnational, and from south to north of the American continent. We will address these practices at the intersection of the “musical” and “cultural.” We will delve into historical and site-specific issues of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, migration, media capitalism, and power. We will query the role music has played in processes of identity formation and un/belonging in the context of Latin America and the communities this loaded signifier includes/excludes.