Cuerpo y cultura. Las músicas "mulatas" y la subversión del baile (review)

In 1997, Jane Desmond indicated that dance studies remained "undervalued", "undertheorized", and "marginalized within the academy" (33). Since then, both the increasing interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of moving, rhythmic bodies as well as the sophisticated nature of these scholarly perspectives have transformed this incipient field of study, moving it from the margins to a central place in cultural studies. In the Caribbean, as Priscilla Renta writes, the historical fact that the dancing of slaves in colonial times was censored by the government has cemented dominant ideologies that have prevented the dancing body of color to be considered an appropriate object of academic attention. Thus, the scholarly interventions of Cindy García, Alejandro Madrid, Alma Concepción, Marta Savigliano, Ramón Rivera Servera, Priscilla Renta, Melissa Blanco-Borelli, Horacio Roque Ramirez, Sheenagh Pietrobruno, and Marisol Berrios-Miranda, among others, have reclaimed dancing to Latin(o) music in the diaspora as a principal site for understanding the shifting, power dynamics of culture, and the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality in this increasingly globalized world.

Angel Quintero Rivera's last book, Cuerpo y cultura. Las músicas "mulatas" y la subversión del baile, promises in its very (sub)title an analysis of dancing in Caribbean communities. Yet most of the book focuses on the "músicas mulatas," a concept that encompasses all the syncopated, Afro-Caribbean traditions, from the son to reggaetón. There is very little in the book dedicated to the dancing bodies themselves. Instead, Quintero Rivera's scholarship represents a rich (albeit traditional) structural and historical analysis of Afro-Caribbean musical forms, of their hybridities and syncretisms, with some sociological data and quantitative analysis about the globalization of salsa. Its multiple methodologies—quantitative, archival, discursive and musical analysis—address a variety of components of music, society, and identity.

The Puerto Rican sociologist frames his work as an instance of "humanismo ecológico" (11-12) which tries to correct and integrate the body/ mind split of European Descartian thought. This legacy is responsible for the undermining and silencing of dancing as a site and practice of cultural significance. Throughout the book, Quintero Rivera repeatedly refers to the "modernismo occidental" (51) in opposition to the Afro-Caribbean traditions of decentered glissandos, syncopated rhythms, and polycentered moving bodies (85). While the Europeans engaged in passive reception of the music (100), Afro-Caribbeans or the practitioners of músicas mulatas engaged in call and response structures and in dialogic interactions between the dancers and the musicians. Quintero Rivera proposes the body as a major site of analysis (13) but unfortunately this goal is not achieved.

The author historicizes his reference to dancing as "subversion." The rhythmic syncopation of the músicas mulatas triggers dancing, polycentered movements that defy the European philosophy of the body/mind split. While Europeans have danced with a "straight torso" (56), the Afro dancing movements challenge the hegemony of Europe. These syncopated musics and sound traditions also inform the utopian value of popular dancing in the Caribbean: the author offers readers not only an examination of the debates about the origins of these dances and musics, but also "algunas herramientas para que el baile sea . . . motivo también de reflexión . . . y de esperanzas por un mundo mejor" [some tools so that dance can also be a motive for reflection and of hope for a better world] (11). Quintero-Rivera inserts his scholarship into this long discursive history and thus misses the irony behind the ways in which the global market has appropriated this social construction of dancing as a utopian space. Contemporary drumming in urban salsa dancing remits us to the early alternative practices by slaves of communicating through drumming and of rebelling and subverting against the existing colonial regimes through rhythms rather than through words. In contrast to this early history of opposition, contemporary dancing, at least in the diaspora, and...