Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America / Edition 1

by Celeste Fraser Delgado

Overview

The function of dance in Latin/o American culture is the focus of the essays collected in Everynight Life. The contributors interpret how Latin/o culture expresses itself through dance, approaching the material from the varying perspectives of literary, cultural, dance, performance, queer, and feminist studies. Viewing dance as privileged sites of identity formation and cultural resistance in Latin/o America, Everynight Life translates the motion of bodies into speech, and the gestures of dance into a provocative socio-political grammar.
This anthology looks at many modes of dance-including salsa, merengue, cumbia, rumba, mambo, tango, samba, and norteño-as models for the interplay of cultural memory and regional conflict. Barbara Browning's essay on capoeira, for instance, demonstrates how dance has been used as a literal form of resistance, while José Piedra explores the meanings conveyed by women of color dancing the rumba. Pieces such as Gustavo Perez Fírmat's "I Came, I Saw, I Conga'd" and Jorge Salessi's "Medics, Crooks, and Tango Queens" illustrate the lively scope of this volume's subject matter.

Contributors. Barbara Browning, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Jane C. Desmond, Mayra Santos Febres, Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, Josh Kun, Ana M. López, José Esteban Muñoz, José Piedra, Gustavo Perez Fírmat, Augusto C. Puleo, David Román, Jorge Salessi, Alberto Sandoval

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822319191
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	06/18/1997
Series:	Latin America Otherwise Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	378
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.78(d)
Lexile:	1500L (what's this?)

About the Author

Celeste Fraser Delgado is Music Editor at the weekly New Times in Miami. José Esteban Muñoz is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Table of Contents

About the Series ix

Preface: Politics in Motion / Celeste Fraser Delgado 3

Rebellions of Everynight Life / Celeste Fraser Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz 9

Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies / Jane C. Desmond 33

Headspin: Capoeira's Ironic Inversions / Barbara Browning 65

Hip Poetics / José Piedra 93

Medics, Crooks, and Tango Queens: The National Appropriation of a Gay Tango / Jorge Salessi (Translated by Celeste Fraser Delgado) 141

Salsa as Translocation / Mayra Santos Febres 175

Notes toward a Reading of Salsa / Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia (Translated by Celeste Fraser Delgado) 189

Una Verdadera crónica del Norte: Una noche con la India / Augusto C. Puleo (Translated by Celeste Fraser Delgado) 223

I Came, I Saw, I Conga'd: Contexts for a Cuban-American Culture / Gustavo Pérez Firmat 239

Caught in the Web: Latinidad, AIDS, and Allegory in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Musical / David Román and Alberto Sandoval 255

Against Easy Listening: Audiotopic Readings and Transnational Soundings / Josh Kun 288

Of Rhythms and Borders / Ana M. López 310

Bibliography 345

Index 359

Contributors 365

Editorial Reviews

"Everynight Life is a major contribution to the ongoing investigation of specific cultural practices heretofore ignored by traditional academic investigation. It will be of specific value to scholars and critics studying issues of performance and performativity as they inform practices of subject-formation in its political, cultural, and sexual dimensions."--Ricardo Ortiz, Dartmouth College

"This is an exciting and an important book, just the kind of contribution that many of us have been eager to find. It weaves politics with popular culture, national borders with rhythm. In short it's up-to-date in terms of intellectual issues, and sensitively down-to-earth in ways that make practical sense."--Doris Sommer, Harvard University

From the Publisher