Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the SEM 2026 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 29th Aug 2026, 08:47:00pm EDT
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Daily Overview |
| Session | |
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04I: Sonic Citizenship in South America: Music, Gender, and the Politics of Belonging Location: Persimmon | |
| Presentation 1 | |
Black Women’s Songs of Migration: Reinforcing the Collective Authority of Cantadoras in Cali, Colombia Boston University In this presentation, I investigate how affective music performance and community organizing structure the work of the cantadora Elena Hinestroza in the black migrant communities of Cali, Colombia. Cantadoras are traditional singers of Afro-Colombian music who are the matriarchs of rural Colombian Pacific communities. Hinestroza operates La Azotea de la Abuela in eastern Cali, a cultural performance and meeting space located in the rooftop of her home that hosts Pacific Music workshops for local youth and traditional nightlong musical ceremonies called arrullos, in addition to community and government meetings. I posit that La Azotea is a location where Pacific Music performance (re)produces a politics of black cultural preservation, and that the affective resonances of Afro-Colombian music performance are vital to sustaining the symbolic capital through which Hinestroza performs community advocacy, and furthermore, that La Azotea is a political space where cantadoras reassert their authority to regulate intercommunal and intra-communal relationships. Hinestroza and her collaborators also adapt traditional Afro-Colombian voice pedagogies to compose a contemporary urban song repertoire informed by their experiences of internal displacement. I argue that these songs establish a shared meaning of place for black migrants and their descendants by speaking to their collective memories of the rural Colombian Pacific and current struggles against racial segregation Cali. This presentation is in dialogue with recent sociological and Black Feminist scholarship on black Pacific cultural expression in Cali, and contributes ethnomusicological analysis of performance genealogies and the affective voice. | |
