Music, Race and Nation: Musica Tropical in Colombia (review)

WADE, PETER. Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, 323 pp. Appendix: List of interviewees, musical examples (descriptions and transcriptions of selected commercially available recordings), notes, references, index.

Anthropologist Peter Wade's new book on the development of música tropical seeks to reach a better understanding of how the concept of blackness, as elaborated through the music of Colombia's northern Atlantic coast, became an integral part of contemporary notions of a multicultural, tri-ethnic nation. Wade draws from a vast array of anthropological, historical, ethnomusicological, and popular music sources in order to elaborate an argument that focuses on the progressive integration of music genres from a formerly marginalized area of the country, often looked down upon for being predominantly "black," into the national and international spheres as the most popular and commercially successful Colombian musics. From the onset, the author is concerned with the over-simplification of several theoretical concepts that he will use throughout the book. Following Bhabha's writings on nationalism (1994), he identifies homogeneity and heterogeneity as two interrelated aspects that should not be conceptualized as polar opposites but as part of an irreconcilable ambivalence imbedded in nationalist discourses. Similarly, he is concerned with the rigid oppositions of tradition versus modernity, foreign versus national, racial origins versus hybrid identities, gender identity versus sexual stereotype, and so on, rather than viewing these concepts as fluid, interrelated, and open to a variety of interpretations within the context of the nation as mapped out by the space generated by the tension between homogenizing and heterogeneous processes. His definition of race, "the changing categories and concepts created primarily by Europeans as a result of their contact with, and the subordination of, non-European peoples through colonialism and imperialism" (14), is particularly important to mention as it attempts to reintroduce the concept of a process where racial identity can be changed and transformed depending on the context of a given situation. Finally, he advocates the conceptualization of music as being capable of creating social identity rather than just being a reflection of it so that processes of commercialization and massification can be seen as complex mediators between music and social position.

Aside from the introduction and concluding chapters, Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia is made up of seven chapters, arranged in a roughly chronological fashion and which deal with the development of música tropical at the local, national, and international level. Chapters 2 and 3 give some background on the musical genres of La Costa that Wade identifies as emerging during the 1930s. The former focuses on La Costa as elaborated, since the nineteenth century, by print capitalism, intellectual elites, cultural policy, economic development, racial identifications, the tension between tradition and modernity, affective associations to the area, and political power relations. The latter, seeks to identify and partially deconstruct the myths of multicultural origins by giving a brief and informative discussion on how various scholars and musicians speak about the genesis of genres like the porro, cumbia, and vallenato.

The remaining five chapters focus specifically on musical developments in terms of significant geographical and temporal frames. Chapter 4 deals with the development of música tropical in La Costa between the 1930s and 1950s. Chapter 5 expands the discussion to the reception of these coastal genres in the interior areas of the country during the 1940s and 1950s. Chapter 6 partially shifts the focus away from live music performance towards the role of the record industry and the mass media in the further popularization and commercialization of música tropical, locally, nationally, and internationally between the 1950s and the 1980s. Chapter 7 replicates many of the interests of chapter 5 during the more recent time period by focusing on the reception, rejection, and eventual adaptation of the now mass-mediated música tropical at the national level. Finally, chapter...