Michael Quintero received his PhD. in December 2008 from the Department of Music at New York University. He is an ethnomusicologist who wrote his thesis on The Musical Making of Race and Place in Colombia’s Black Pacific. While at NYU he received a Fulbright International Institutional Exchange Grant to Colombia, as well as several prizes for distinguished work. He has published five articles and several book reviews on topics such as “Afro-Pacific Music and Identitarian Authenticity in the Era of Ethno-diversity” as well as several studies on Afro-Colombian popular music and has delivered some twenty-five papers to national and international meetings. Because he is both an ethnographer and a musicologist, we plan to give him a joint appointment in both the Anthropology Department at the Krieger School and an appointment in the Musicology Department at Peabody, with courses cross-listed between the two departments, both of whom are eager to have him on their faculties. His thesis examines the role of the traditional music of the black inhabitants of Colombia’s rural southern Pacific coast in terms of the ways in which it contributed to the formation of racial subjects in Colombia, the country with the third largest black population in the Americas. He traces the history of black Pacific musicality as a social and ritual system and shows how a diverse cluster of musical practices were consolidated in Colombia’s 18th-century slave society and developed in the 19th-century post-emancipation world as a complex web of overlapping belief systems, social affiliations and musical forms and logics which were shaped along lines of class, race, ethnolinguistic groups and religious background. One of his more compelling claims is that Colombia’s black Pacific populations received particular juridical rights from the state as an ethnic minority by legitimating their claims to being a distinctive, and hence credible, ethnicity through musical self-representations that fashioned local black musical culture into scripts of regional folklore and indigenous being. Finally, he demonstrates ethnographically how Afro-Pacific musical practice subsequently became central to a range of new social actors, both black and non-black, shaping their regimes of affect and identitarian subjectivities in the neoliberal, multicultural world of the present. While at Hopkins Quintero will complete the revisions to his thesis, parts of which have already been awarded a number of competitive prizes, grants and fellowships and make it ready for publication as a book. In addition, he hopes to embark on a new project, for which he has already completed some fieldwork and research. This second project seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the black cultural and musical forms of Colombia have suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, become important in diplomatic relations between the US and Colombia. This has happened, he argues, because Afro-Colombian activists have sought to lobby the Black Congressional Caucus of the US Congress on questions of human rights through appeals to pan-diasporic cultural and political fraternity. These efforts have not been confined to political initiatives but are conducted in the cultural realm as well, through a Washington-based Afro-Colombian dance troupe that performs for diplomats, the city’s historically black universities, and other black Washingtonians. These forms of political activism have, in turn, been countered by the Colombian government and both sides have mobilized music as one of the central tropes of the black diaspora as a means and a medium through which to gain the attention of black cultural, political and intellectual classes in the United States. In this context, he will seek to show, music functions as a powerful instrument for claiming intra-diasporic connections, in effect extending to the United States the cultural forms earlier developed in Colombia on the basis of a generalized notion of blackness, a strategy that poses some dangers for black Colombians, who do not have at their disposal the kind of spectacular Africanisms associated with places like Brazil, Haiti or Cuba, and thus threatens to have their distinctive character absorbed into the more generalized topos of blackness. The book that he hopes to write on this topic will explore the processes entailed in the creation of this intra-diasporic connection, as well as the possibilities for mistranslations, frictions, erasures and solipsisms that it contains both on the part of Afro-Colombians and that of their black US interlocutors.
(Cross-listed)
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00-12:20
Peabody Conservatory: Rymland Room
Music has been on the move for as long as humans have been making it, accompanying the travels of warriors, merchants, and missionaries who have left in their wake hybrid forms from Indian brass bands to Mozart’s Turkish marches. The successive development of new technologies, economic systems, and networks of musical exchange, from the printing press to the .mp3 have only intensified the speed and unpredictability with which music moves. But musical movement does not just happen spontaneously; rather, it is the product of technology, economics, colonialism, labor, law, and political and cultural hierarchies. How does musical meaning change across cultural lines? What are the ethics of appropriating other musical forms? What is the attraction of exoticism? How do technologies of musical circulation shape our experiences of producing and consuming music? What do current legal and economic changes in music distribution mean for the future of music? These issues can be addressed by looking at various case studies – electronic sampling of Micronesian music, Brazilian musicians who pirate their own recordings, Renaissance Venetian music printing, West Africans adopting Afro-Cuban music to transcend ethnic sectarianism, white listeners to black radio in 1950s America, amateur music like karaoke and Victorian brass bands, and the rise and fall of Napster. This course will examine case studies of musical movement, touching on the theme of “connection” by addressing the kinds of alliances, misinterpretations, and reconfigurations to which they give rise, in order to rethink the role of music in everyday life and in the constitution of society here in the U.S. and around the world.
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