Critical Reviews on Latin American Research - CROLAR

Lawrenz, Nina

Global Beauty, Local Bodies by Afshan Jafar & Erynn Masi de Casanova

Saramago, Victoria

Palavra cantada: estudos transdisciplinares de Cláudia Neiva de Matos et al. (eds.) (2014)

Marini, Candela

Kripper, Denise

Critical Reviews on Latin American Research | 4
EDITORIAL CROLAR 4(2)
Sound and Dissonance: Music in Latin American Culture 
Candela Marini & Denise Kripper  
Duke University & Georgetown University 
This new issue of CROLAR is dedicated 
to music in Latin America, its “Sound and 
Dissonance.” From salsa in the Caribbean, 
carnaval in Brazil, or tango in Argentina, 
to mention a few examples, music has 
always been inherent to what it means to 
be “Latin American,” sometimes creating 
stereotypes that can be very hard to 
overcome. But what does music really 
mean to Latin America? How can music 
express a national identity and at the 
same time connect us to other realities? 
These were some of the initial questions 
when putting together this issue, and the 
submitted reviews help us further the 
debate. How does the continent’s music 
history relate to its aural present? How is 
Latin America’s music tradition updated 
in the 21st century? And what are the 
challenges that the study of its sounds 
presents?
In the recent publications being reviewed 
here, three trends on sound studies become 
clear. The Focus section is thus divided into 
three subsections, following those trends: 
an interdisciplinary approach, a national 
approach, and a transnational approach. 
Firstly, the development of Sound Studies 
shows an interdisciplinary trajectory that 
most of the publications underscore—
with a more flexible approach than 
that of traditional musicology. This 
interdisciplinary approach is evident, for 
example, in visual artist Ana María Estrada 
Zuñiga and sociologist Felipe Lagos Rojas’ 
book, in which they trace a genealogy 
of Chilean aural art focused on the 
productive and creative relation between 
art and technology. Meanwhile, Cintia 
Cristiá goes after the tracks of elusive 
artist Xul Solar, and proposes a musical 
reading of his work, a suggesting exercise 
to reconsider the relation between these 
different artistic expressions. Another text 
based upon a musical imaginary is the 
one by Argentine writer Marcelo Cohen. 
In an intimate and personal book of 
essays, he narrates his experiences with 
translation. The translator is described 
as a musician performing his score. The 
books edited by Silvina Luz Mansilla 
and Frederick Luis Aldama focus on the 
relation between sound and music, and 
press and media. Mansilla’s book fills a 
void in the criticism of Argentina’s cultural 
market, with an impressive archival work 
on publications and magazines interested 
Vol. 4(2) (2015): Sound and Dissonance: Music in Latin American Culture | 5
region. Meanwhile, Cláudia Neiva de 
Matos, Fernanda Teixeira de Medeiros, 
and Leonardo Davino de Oliveira offer a 
collective effort to reflect upon different 
music modes that can be found mainly 
in Brazil. From indigenous genres of the 
colonial period to the contemporary 
urban rhythms of Rio de Janeiro and Sao 
Paulo, this volume (born out of a series of 
conferences) is an all-encompassing effort 
to portray Brazil’s sung word history in 
an interdisciplinary way. Finally, making 
our way towards the Southern Cone, 
Vania Markarian studies the emergence 
of a political youth force in Uruguay at 
the end of the 1960’s. Its title shouldn’t 
be taken literally though. Music, in 
Markarian’s analysis, appears as part of an 
emerging cultural production scene that 
can be read as a youth entry point to the 
political sphere. The question about the 
sound of those demonstrations and the 
revolutionary potential of music sparks 
an interest that emphasizes the need for 
future projects that explore politics from 
an aural perspective. Juan Pablo González 
Rodríguez’s book also has a political 
background—postcolonial this time. It 
takes Chile as a case study to rethink the 
ways in which music is analyzed in Latin 
America and suggest new theoretical 
approaches. 
Lastly, a third approach revolves 
around music’s ability to cross borders 
and to create transnational bonds. 
The reviews that make up this section 
seek to underscore the dialectical and 
heterogenous nature that characterizes 
music, especially nowadays. For example, 
in music. Aldama’s is devoted to the study 
of the Latino involvement in US media 
and show business. Through fifteen 
articles with topics ranging from films 
to video games, the text contributes to 
the understanding of the Latin American 
role and representation in Media Theory. 
Finally, sound engineer Carlos Abbate 
offers a short but rich text that explores 
the technical vicissitudes of working with 
audio for film in Latin America.
 
A second group of works deals with 
the topic from a national or geographic 
perspective, approaching it according to 
specific regions or countries. This is the 
case of Ana María Ochoa’s book. Analyzing 
aural perceptions in post-independence 
Colombia, her book challenges hegemonic 
categories of thought. With an exhaustive 
research that includes the acoustic 
exploration of travel journals, novels, texts 
in indigenous languages, and philosophical 
compilations, it is an innovative and pivotal 
contribution to both Sound and Latin 
American and Caribbean Studies. Also 
centered around Colombia, Carmen Millan 
de Benavides and Alejandra Quintana 
Martínez’s research presents a gender 
approach through the recuperation of 
forgotten figures and the reflection upon 
the different roles that Colombian women 
have had in the music scene. Around the 
Equator, Fernando Palacios Mateos takes 
us through his own exploration of the 
andarele, particularly its social context and 
historical development. His work on this 
Afro-Esmeraldean music genre includes a 
DVD with photographs, music, videos, and 
maps, to help us study this Ecuadorian 
Critical Reviews on Latin American Research | 6
with the Jach’a laquitas genre, which has 
been excluded from the Trans-Andean 
music canon, as a result of class and 
state policies that have tended to style 
homogenization and westernization. A 
second intervention is offered by Gabriel 
Villarroel, who proposes a reading of 
Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández’s 
sound universe in his autobiographical 
text “Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling” 
(1942). Noises and sounds from his 
childhood and youth dictate the rhythm 
and flow of his memory. The order 
and memory of his past is involuntarily 
destabilized—and finally directed—by the 
sounds of the locomotive or the laughter 
noises of the three sisters he used to visit.
The Special Section features an interview 
with Peter Schulze, professor at the 
Bremen University, who is currently 
researching the history of tango, ranchera, 
and samba; styles that have been adopted 
as national symbols in Argentina, Mexico, 
and Brazil, respectively. Here, he talks 
about the importance of technology 
and media—especially cinema—in the 
development of these music genres. 
Underscoring national politics and their 
relation to cultural industries, Schulze dips 
into global and translational dynamics in a 
-as he calls it- work of “glocalization.”  
In the Classics Revisited section, Daniel 
Villegas revisits French philosopher 
Jacques Rancière to rethink his theories 
from an aural point of view. Offering a re-
reading of “Aesthetics and Its Discontents,” 
Villegas warns us against the challenging 
traps of the bond between art and politics, 
the volume edited by Coriún Aharonián 
is the result of a conference that brought 
together African and American specialists 
in Uruguay. The book offers a multiplicity 
of voices and visions that reveal that 
theoretical and ideological differences are 
not foreign to the music field. Here, as well 
as in other reviewed works, the need for 
new concepts and approaches to music 
and sound studies is made evident. In the 
next reviews, music is understood as a 
revitalizing tool, in this case for Migration 
Studies. César Augusto Monteiro’s work 
delves into the music community that 
Cape Verdean immigrants have built in 
the Cova da Moura neighborhood of 
Lisbon. As “visibility flags,” music for these 
marginalized groups is a fundamental tool 
to face deterritorialization, identity, and 
exclusion problems. Through the example 
of Cape Verdean immigration in Portugal, 
Monteiro offers an entry point to a very 
current phenomenon. Another work that 
attempts a similar approach is the one by 
Íñigo Sánchez Fuarros. His text explores 
identity changes in the Cuban community 
in Barcelona, tracing different generational 
codes and dynamics that stand out in their 
musical experience. 
 
This number also features three of 
CROLAR’s recurrent special sections. 
In the first one, Interventions, Daniel 
Castelblanco tells us of the music by 
the Wayramanta, a metropolitan sikuris 
group based in Buenos Aires. With field 
recordings and reinterpretations, the 
album is both a musical creation and an 
ethnographic exploration. Castelblanco 
also highlights the importance of working 
Vol. 4(2) (2015): Sound and Dissonance: Music in Latin American Culture | 7
difficulty is the relocalization of knowledge, 
with a lot of authors still unable to expand 
the theoretical dialogue outside of the 
Western canon, and hence reinforcing 
its logocentric paradigm. In light of the 
reviewers’ theoretical concerns, it is worth 
highlighting Ochoa’s book as a project that 
not only questions, but also offers new 
ways of thinking sounds and their studies.
In summary, a lot of authors call for the 
need of an even more interdisciplinary 
approach to music, where gender or 
national borders serve as research tools, 
and not as the only way through which 
to understand something by nature so 
heterogeneous like music. There are 
many possibilities to approach and reflect 
about music in Latin America. As the cover 
picture shows, though, we hope the play 
on foci helps us in rethinking the already 
accepted, highlighting other perceptions, 
and dialoguing with other fronts. Enjoy 
this atonal number --that we hope gets 
heard.
  
the regimes that define the sensorium, 
and the difficulties of true political dissent. 
In short, he cautions us against the 
sometimes too quick celebration of art’s 
disrupting possibilities.
 
Finally, the Current Debates section 
presents two contributions that move 
beyond the musical approach and 
explore other senses. With “Caribbean 
Food Cultures. Culinary Practices and 
Consumption in the Caribbean and Its 
Diasporas” we move from listening to 
tasting. This collection of essays aims 
at exploring the wide array of images, 
activities, and values associated to the 
Caribbean culinary world through an 
interdisciplinary lens. On the other hand, 
Claudia Rauhut’s book takes us to the 
spiritual field, analyzing the global and 
transnational aspects of Cuba’s santeria, 
and the repercussions those have in its 
practice and discourse. 
 
The multiplicity of disciplines that focus 
on the aural demonstrates the opening 
of a field that is no longer limited to 
anthropology or ethnomusicology. The 
challenge of encompassing such a varied 
universe resulted in a final selection of 
works that is highly heterogeneous and 
by no means exhaustive. Nevertheless, 
a common observation in the reviews 
that comprise this number relates to the 
problematics of dealing with works and 
research with few local interlocutors. A 
lot of the reviewers have highlighted the 
contribution of these publications in an 
area that has had little promotion in Latin 
America until now. Another common 


Spanish

Editorial CROLAR 4(2)

Wolf, Sonja

Lirio Gutiérrez Rivera (2013): Territories of Violence: State, Marginal Youth, and Public Security in Honduras

Ramos Zincke, Claudio

Centers and Peripheries in Knowledge Production by Leandro Rodríguez Medina (2014)

García Peter, Sabina

Suárez Estrada, Marcela

Complete Edition Crolar Vol.3(2)

Núñez, Daniel

John P. Hawkins, James H. McDonald and Walter Randolph Adams (eds.) (2013): Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala: Indigenous Responses to a Failing State

El historiador Stephen Rabe repasa la relación entre Estados Unidos y lationamerica durante el periodo de Guerra Fría

Pérez Ricart, Carlos

Stephen G. Rabe (2012): The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America

Barandiaran, Javiera

The Politics of Academic Autonomy in Latin America by Fernanda Beigel (ed.) (2013)

Sito, Luanda

Usted ya en la universidad y no saber escribir. Escritura y poder en la universidad by Sandra Soler Castillo (2013)

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