Styling Blackness in Chile: Music and Dance in the African Diaspora by Juan Eduardo Wolf (review)

In Styling Blackness in Chile, Juan Eduardo Wolf presents a snapshot of an emerging and continually transformative process of racial and ethnic identification and representation through music and dance among people of African descent in Arica, Chile. Wolf, a Chilean American musician and ethnomusicologist, explores this process through an ethnography that delicately situates his observations and experiences in Arica between 2002 and 2016 in relation to participant interviews, ethnographic vignettes, and historical contextualization. What he finds is a complex and often contradictory account of the origins, historical trajectories, and ways in which Black and non-Black Chileans in Arica identify with the music and dance traditions discussed, including the tumbe carnaval, vals criollo, morenada, and caporales, among others. Through discourse analysis and various academic theories relating to music and identity, Wolf does an excellent job of painting a broad portrait of a process in continual dialogue and transformation. While doing so, he substantially documents the origins and development of specific genres like tumbe carnaval and the role that Afrodescendant cultural organizations and individuals like Oro Negro and Gustavo del Canto played in reviving certain Afro-descendant musical traditions and in styling Blackness through music and dance in Arica. Overall, it is a welcome and much needed addition to the growing academic literature on the part of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists on music, dance, and identity in Afro-Latin America and the greater African diaspora.

The overall focus of Wolf's research is the music-dance genre known as tumbe carnaval. A tradition once practiced in Arica among the region's Black community in the early part of the twentieth century, Wolf documents how this genre was revived and reinterpreted by Black and non-Black community leaders and Afro-descendant cultural organizations in the early 2000s, specifically Oro Negro, Lumbanga, Arica Negro, Sabor Moreno, as well as the Salgado family in Arica, and Santiago native and journalist Gustavo del Canto, to name a few. This conscious revival was based on the memory of Black elders who recalled watching and listening to their own grandparents perform and dance what was then known as tumba during Carnival season. Fragments of rhythm, melody, lyrics, dance moves, and instrumentation recalled of the earlier tumba were used as the basis for the modern day tumbe carnaval. The process of developing the reinterpreted tumbe carnaval over the span of the fourteen years detailed by Wolf placed the genre in dialogue with other music-dance genres, musical instruments, and rhythms heard and performed throughout the African diaspora, including Afro-Peruvian, Afro-Uruguayan, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-Caribbean music-dance genres and rhythms.

As Wolf illustrates, this dialogue references an emerging national and transnational discourse on Blackness in Chile and greater Latin America and the African diaspora. This discourse is linked to issues of social and racial equity, land rights, and politics in Chile as elsewhere. Wolf notes how the formation of Oro Negro and the desire to revive tumba were conscious decisions among members of the cultural organization inspired by transnational discussions of racial equity linked to a sense of Blackness within the African diaspora. At the same time, it was also clear, as Wolf details, that this decision was intended to strengthen and foment a sense of local Black identity expressed through music and dance for the purposes of engaging in a broader national discussion on national identity conceived in terms of multiculturalism. Doing so would help to bolster awareness of Black Chilean history, culture, and issues and would also contribute to challenging racism and meeting the social and political needs and agendas of Chile's Black population. Wolf is careful to note the limits of this present discourse and project, however, for challenging and overcoming racial stereotypes as they relate to music and dance.

Complicating the question of Black identity in relation to national...