Listening to Salsa

by Aparicio, Frances R.

• ISBN13: 9780819563088
• ISBN10: 0819563080
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-11-01
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

For Anglos, the pulsing beats of salsa, merengue, and bolero are a compelling expression of Latino/a culture, but few outsiders comprehend the music's implications in larger social terms. Frances R. Aparicio places this music in context by combining the approaches of musicology and sociology with literary, cultural, Latino, and women's studies. She offers a detailed genealogy of Afro-Caribbean music in Puerto Rico, comparing it to selected Puerto Rican literary texts, then looks both at how Latinos/as in the US have used salsa to reaffirm their cultural identities and how Anglos have eroticized and depoliticized it in their adaptations. Aparicio's detailed examination of lyrics shows how these songs articulate issues of gender, desire, and conflict, and her interviews with Latinas/os reveal how they listen to salsa and the meanings they find in it. What results is a comprehensive view "that deploys both musical and literary texts as equally significant cultural voices in exploring larger questions about the power of discourse, gender relations, intercultural desire, race, ethnicity, and class."

Author Biography

Frances R. Aparicio is Associate Professor of Spanish and American Culture at the University of Michigan, author of Versiones, interpretaciones, creaciones (1991), coeditor of Tropicalizations, and editor of Latino Voices (1994).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
The Danza and the Plena: Racializing Women, Feminizing Music	p. 1
A Literary Prelude	p. 3
A White Lady Called the Danza	p. 8
A Sensual Mulatta Called the Plena	p. 27
Desiring the Racial Other: Rosario Ferre's Feminist Reconstruction of Danza and Plena	p. 45
The Plural Sites of Salsa	p. 63
A Postmodern Preface	p. 65
Situating Salsa	p. 69
Ideological Negotiations: Between Hegemony and Resistance	p. 83
Cultural (Mis)Translations and Crossover Nightmares	p. 104
Dissonant Melodies: Singing Gender, Desire, and Conflict	p. 119
Theoretical Pretexts: Listening (as) Woman	p. 121
Woman as Absence: Hetero(homo)sexual Desire in the Bolero	p. 125
Patriarchal Synecdoches: Of Women's Butts and Feminist Rebuttals	p. 142
Singing the Gender Wars	p. 154
Singing Female Subjectivities	p. 172
Asi Somos, Asi Son, Rewriting Salsa	p. 185
Listening to the Listeners: An Introduction	p. 187
Asi Son: Constructing Woman	p. 191
Asi Somos: Rewriting Patriarchy	p. 219
Afterword	p. 239
Notes	p. 247
Index of Songs and Recordings	p. 281
General Index	p. 283
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