Conference Agenda

This lecture is an invitation to relisten to el Marc’s outstanding dance song and popular hit, “Vivir mi vida,” released in 2013 after a long hiatus from musical productions. The song allows me to insert myself within scholarly discussions around the concept of “love” and, most specifically, the debates about salsa romántica and its assumed political neutrality, which I contest here. If Marc Anthony has been associated with a formulaic salsa romántica, a critical inquiry into “Vivir mi vida” unearths a transatlantic web that connects Marc Anthony with the Algerian/French singer, Cheb Khaled, and his song, “C’est la vie,” which serves as subtext to Marc Anthony’s “Vivir mi vida.” This intertextuality proposes a musical genealogy that frames “Vivir mi vida” not only as a popular dance hit, a song of celebration and community, but also as sonic labor whose grounded significations and meanings suggest a “Global South Brownness” within the longer history of the Arab and Latino “double brown threat” after 9/11. Acknowledging selected sites for theorizing the Arab/Boricua couplings –Franz Fanon and the Algerian Independence Movement in 1970s Puerto Rican New York, Christopher Rivera’s concept of the “brown threat”, Victor Hernández Cruz and his Moroccan life and poetry, informed by Marisel Moreno’s scholarly analysis of Cruz, and my personal reclaiming of the North African ancestry in my family—allows me to suggest emerging political meanings in the song and to recognize the mutual interactions and collaborations between Arab and Boricua/Latinx musicians and artists. My discussion of el Marc’s photo using a veil to cover his face, a reading of both sound and image, unfolds a problematic history of intercultural tensions between Western Europe and North Africa, mediated by women’s use of the hijab. By proposing this “Global South brownness” through which el Marc articulates a politics of solidarity with his North African and Algerian diasporic singers and communities, the song “Vivir mi vida” exemplifies not only the “sonic palimpsests” that allow multiply-located sounds to coexist, but also what Sara Ahmed defines as “affectionate solidarity” in her analysis of the politics of “love.” I conclude with a discussion of Ahmed’s proposals as an alternative discourse from which to understand the power of el Marc’s songs and love ballads on his local, hemispheric and global audiences. Indeed, el Marc’s powerful sonic decolonial labor is what my research aims to acknowledge as I propose to understand Marc Anthony not just as a singer, but as a listener of the musical genealogies that have informed his repertoire.