On Site, In Sound: Performance Geographies in América Latina by Kirstie A. Dorr (review)

Kirstie Dorr’s study of South American music, focusing on post-1970s Peru, employs an analytical concept she calls “performance geography,” an effort to replace traditional ethnomusicology’s “music in place” model with a “music in transit” approach that stresses sonic movement, dynamism, and recontextualization over rootedness, continuity, and authenticity.

This angle is consonant with the transnational turn in area and ethnic studies as well as with various recent developments in cultural studies that favor mobility over fixed identity. It gives Dorr an effective framework for carrying out four case studies of South American cultural production: 1) the tracking of various folkloristic appropriations of the traditional Peruvian ballad “El Condor Pasa” from early twentieth-century criollo modernism to late twentieth-century US folk and rock; 2) an analysis of the post 1960s Andean music industry within the context of global neoliberalism; 3) a spotlighting of Afro-Peruvian women’s music and cultural activism at the intersection of the Peruvian Black Arts revival, the US civil rights movement, African anticolonialism, and Latin American internationalism; and 4) a granular close-up of a grassroots, working-class, multi-arts peña in San Francisco’s Mission District that is set against the backdrop of US anti-immigrant politics and urban gentrification economics.

Each of these case studies is presented in a densely layered discourse informed by the methods and vocabularies of Latin American and Latino/a studies, feminist and queer studies, critical race studies, sound studies, and cultural geography. In each chapter, Dorr is concerned not just with the siting and staging of musical performances, but with how these performances constitute “geographies of struggle against colonial, racist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal designs” (17). This is especially true of her powerful focus on the efforts of South American musicians to secure places to perform in U.S. urban public spaces (subway stations, street corners, outdoor plazas such as Union Square in San Francisco) at a time when neoliberal municipal policies were aimed squarely at the “urban cleansing” of immigrant street artists.

At the core of Dorr’s book is a critical but dialectical stance toward the “world music” industry, best represented by the US record label Putumayo, whose compilations of music from the global South are familiar to anyone who has patronized Starbucks. While chafing at the narratives of loss, discovery, and rescue inherent in the very premise of world music, Dorr makes the point that the missionary conceit behind Putumayo (and other productions such as Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru, curated by Talking Heads front man David Byrne) is not limited to either late capitalism or the United States, and does not go unanswered by the South American musicians themselves. For example, Dorr tracks “El Condor Pasa” from the Andean highlands to early twentieth-century Lima, where composer Daniel Alomía Robles adapted the “ancient Inca melody” into an orchestral score, hyping the project as an act of modernist reclamation of vanishing folklore. From Lima, it goes to Paris in the 1960s, where US folk singer Paul Simon hears the ballad performed by the South American group Los Inkas, adds English lyrics to the instrumental arrangement, and garners a huge international hit with “El Condor Pasa (If I Could).” Finally, it arrives in Hollywood in 1970, where expatriate Peruvian singer Yma Sumac, billed as an Incan princess, records a groovy psychedelic rock version of the ballad that pointedly eschews the folklorism of both Simon and Alomía Robles.

Dorr aims to make critical interventions into a number of cutting-edge academic discussions regarding race, gender, sexuality, nation, and diaspora. She does so with a remarkable cogency that demands and rewards multiple re-readings. But this very intellectual ambitiousness works against the book’s stated intention to provide “an experience with rather than an account of South American musical transits” (15). An experiential immersion requires more attention...